Roy Heather: Criminal Justice Amendment Bill (No 7) — Consideration of Report of Health Committee Procedure In Committee 
Roy Heather: Criminal Justice Amendment Bill (No 7) — Consideration of Report of Health Committee Procedure In Committee 
[Volume:612;Page:9519] 
HEATHER ROY (ACT) 
: 
 I rise to speak on the Criminal Justice Amendment Bill (No 7) on behalf of the ACT party. The ACT party will be supporting this bill as will all the other members in the House. I congratulate the National Party and especially Wyatt Creech who is no longer with us on bringing this bill before the House. 
Dr Lynda Scott 
: He’s still alive though. 
HEATHER ROY 
: He is still alive and I am pleased to say that. I commend him for bringing this bill to the House. It makes a good deal of sense. I will not go over the points that the other members have made but in particular I am very pleased with the provision for compulsory treatment to run concurrently with the prison sentence. As Marc Alexander has just said people can be both treated and punished now whereas previously that was sometimes not the case. The prison sentence will now run while the person is in hospital or in secure care. If the need for treatment or care ceases the person will be transferred to a prison to complete any remaining period of the prison sentence and that is as things should be. 
However while supporting the bill I would like to ask the Minister of Justice as others have why it has taken this Government so long to get to this point and why we are sitting here at 10 minutes to 11 at night— 
Hon Phil Goff 
: You guys never vote for overtime. You vote against every motion ever passed to take urgency then you wonder why you don’t get progress. 
HEATHER ROY 
: It would be good if the Minister would stand and take a call when it is his turn. In fact I would like to say it has taken—[ 
Interruption 
] 
 I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I must say that while we are having running commentaries from both sides of the House I am finding it very difficult to speak myself. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich) 
: Members will allow you and so will I to continue in relative silence. 
HEATHER ROY 
: It is good to be able to be heard again. This Government has taken 4 years to get to this point. It is becoming something of a trend for this Government to drop long Supplementary Order Papers on the Table the day before a bill is to be heard. The one quite recently just a couple of weeks ago that I recall was the Gambling Bill. There were not 44 pages but 65 pages of Supplementary Order Paper that made significant changes to the bill. Fortunately the changes to this bill are not quite as significant as that but in a democracy this is not acceptable. Mr Goff stood up and commended the select committee for its hard work. I am not sure why he bothered commending anybody for hard work when he has introduced a new Supplementary Order Paper to replace the bill. Why did—[ 
Interruption 
] 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich) 
: Mr Goff speakers are clearly not heeding your advice. 
HEATHER ROY 
: Quite right. Anyway it is very good that even after 4 years this Government has managed to bring this bill finally before the House although changes do need to be made. People with intellectual disabilities should be separated from those with mental illnesses although this Government does not have a good record in dealing with matters of mental illness. As Dr Lynda Scott said previously the Paul Ellis inquiry the report on which was released today is a good indication of this. There are serious problems with the mental health system and it is important that we should note these when we debate matters of mental illness. What we have at the moment is a fragmented system that is failing the truly vulnerable in our society. 
This stems from two main causes but there are others that are relevant. The first is that we have a chronic shortage of staff in this country. It is quite right that those with intellectual disabilities should be housed in separate units but the difficulty is there are not enough mental health staff at the moment to staff the facilities that do exist so quite where those staff will materialise from is anybody’s guess. We train our health professionals for export at the moment. We train them and give them very good training they immediately see that their opportunities in terms of both working conditions and pay are much better overseas and off they go. The second thing is that there are not enough beds as it is and that is part of the reason that ACT welcomes this bill. There will be more beds despite the staffing difficulties but at the moment what is clogging up the system is long-term patients in acute beds. When psychiatrists in particular are faced with a patient who needs inpatient care there is nowhere to place that patient. We have a fragmented system not one that patients can enter and flow through as they should be able to. That is a serious failing and is part of the reason that there is a cycle of tragedy in this country when it comes to mental illness. 
The cycle of tragedy was pointed out to New Zealand in December 1998 by the then Opposition health spokesperson Annette King. She criticised the then National Minister of Health for what he had described as the cycle of tragedy. A tragedy happened blame was apportioned there were inquiries and reports were written that went nowhere and addressed very little. When another tragedy happened the whole cycle started again. That was a fairly accurate description of what was happening at the time. But what is happening now? There is exactly the same cycle of tragedy. The Opposition health spokesperson at the time Annette King said that this is no way to run a health system. What do we have now? There is no change—absolutely nothing is different. There is a cycle of tragedy and if anything the cycle of tragedy is worse now than it was then. 
If we move on to intellectual disability which is what this bill is mainly about—the proper and humane treatment of those with intellectual disabilities—we can talk too about community care and deinstitutionalisation. I would not go quite as far as my colleague Ron Mark from New Zealand First did. He indicated that the whole thrust of deinstitutionalisation had been a mistake. I think of it more as a pendulum. Previously there were too many people living in institutions who could have been incorporated into the community. But the problem is that deinstitutionalisation was the politically correct thing to do so the pendulum swung the other way completely. We are now at the point where there are not enough beds as I said before. There are not enough beds for the acute patients or the medium-term patients or indeed the long-term patients—the people who will be very difficult to incorporate into society. 
If we look not far up the road at the Kimberley Centre we can see that it illustrates this point beautifully. Those who have been easy to re-establish into the community have now moved into the community and are being very well catered for. By and large they get the support they need. But there is a group of people now left in that institution who are very difficult to place. The local community is in uproar of course because those patients need a great deal of care. They will be housed out of the Kimberley Centre so that it can be disestablished and they will find it extremely difficult to integrate into the community. In fact we might find that they are the very people whom this bill has been written for; people who without the adequate support that they need which in many cases is institutional care find themselves in positions where they become criminals and are in need of the very facilities that the Minister is advocating now. 
Ron Mark also pointed out that the Ministry of Health accepts no blame for anything and that nobody is to blame for anything. That is a very convenient situation for the Government is it not? Nobody is to blame for anything. I welcome some of the report’s recommendations. I was pleased to see that at least it had not blamed the mental health workers who are holding this system together—those at the coalface who are the last to see the patient. At least the report did not blame them. What it should have done is blame the system that those people have to work in; the system that is failing the patients the families of those patients and also the staff who are expected to work within that system. The cycle of tragedy will continue until the Government addresses the real problems of mental illness. 
I would like to finish by saying that we do in fact support the Criminal Justice Amendment Bill (No 7). It will bring forward some very sensible changes that should have been made long ago and my criticism is that it has taken the Minister of Justice 4 years to get to this point which is shameful.