Statutes Amendment Bill
Members, we come now to Part 6. Part 6 is the debate on clauses 22 and 23, “Amendment to Burial and Cremation Act 1964”. The question is that Part 6 stand part.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Well, we’re dealing with all of the quite interesting Acts in this bill, and this one is from 1964. When I—
Grant McCallum: Great year—great year.
CAMILLA BELICH: “A great year.”, Grant McCallum says. Obviously, this Act has been in place for quite a period of time.
Now, this was actually quite interesting, when I looked into this particular clause. It appears to me that in clause 23—which is the only operable part, really, in Part 6—that, essentially, what this is doing is making sure that a certificate on the cause of death can’t be entered if there is a suspicious reason for that particular death. That seems to me like it’s quite a serious matter, and I just wondered maybe—obviously, it’s such a small part of the Act, and I have gone back to the Burial and Cremation Act 1964 to kind of make sense of this provision. But the question I had, really, is that this appears to be a bit of an operable change in terms of making sure that a really important thing—a certificate as to the cause of death—is not given in inappropriate circumstances, and considering that this has been in place since 1964, what has arisen for this change?
I did look at whether there had been some further amendments to the 1964 primary Act, and I think that there was a 2018 change to a change that was brought in in the 2016 Parliament. But I suppose that the question I have—and I’m slightly hesitant to ask the Minister for fear of her response. But does that mean that from 2018, we’ve had a bit of a hole in the law in terms of the nature of how—these are very serious matters, and very important matters for families, of course—certificates as to the cause of death were or could have been issued in inappropriate circumstances?
Thank you, Madam Chair. It’s not the 2018 amendment. It was the Coroners Amendment Act 2016. That one actually repealed section 13(1)(b) of the Coroners Act 2006. This is a consequential amendment, because that subsection was actually replaced with section 14(2)(f), but the reference was not updated at the time.
Part 6 agreed to.
Part 7 Amendments to Conservation Act 1987