Hague Kevin: Coroners Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Coroners Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 20 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7410. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I want to begin by saying that I was not a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee which considered this bill but it strikes me listening to the contributions in this debate that the select committee has made a good job. I pick up on Denis O’Rourke’s point about the various balances that are needed to be struck by the select committee and it does seem to me that those have mostly been struck in the right places.I want to start with a point that my colleague David Clendon made in relation to the stretched roster of coroners that we have. My experience with coroners has generally been an extremely positive one. I think they do a fantastic job and I am going to come to one or two of those points in a moment but it does strike me that we are at risk of under-resourcing this excellent network. That is obviously a problem from several perspectives. One is simply the fact that if we do not have enough coroners or if they are not properly resourced it will be difficult for them to do their work. But the particular relationship that that fact has with this bill is that one of the areas that this bill changes the principal Act in is to move us away from routine inquests routine inquiries into the causes of deaths and to bring in more discretion in those cases that have been well canvassed in this debate tonight—deaths in custody in State care and on certain aircraft or ships in the military.Where discretion is introduced into those situations I agree with my colleague David Clendon that we can rely on the professionalism and the discretion of coroners to make good judgments about that but what if it is a line call? What if it is a line call and the resources are constrained? I think it would be a situation that we really must avoid—getting into that position where because of that constraint of resources coroners will err on the side of not investigating a death when actually if resources were not a consideration it would have been investigated. So that is just a little niggle in the back of my head.I was a submitter to an inquiry that Coroner Mātenga undertook several years ago into a series of five deaths of people who had been riding bikes and who had been killed in collisions on the road. That is a really excellent initiative from Coroner Mātenga. It has led to a panel of experts being convened which again has led to some pretty great recommendations for improving road safety. Again this issue of resource constraint on coroners bothers me because if we do not fix this—and maybe this bill is an opportunity to do that in the Committee stage—then that sort of inquiry may not be held in the future.The area I have the most expertise in is this area of self-inflicted deaths or suicides. I have had to try to manage several situations of cluster suicides and so I have been deeply nervous about the calls from the media to be able to publish more details about suicides that have taken place because I am familiar with the evidence about copycat suicides. So I reluctantly accept what the select committee has done by allowing the fact of a suicide to be reported basically because I note that the media has already had created a code. Whenever we read now that there has been a “sudden death” we all read that as a suicide so in fact we do not prevent that risk of copycat suicides by having the current prohibition. I think the select committee has struck a sensible balance and I am very pleased to continue to support this bill.