Page 1738 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 17 October 1989
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on the environmental aspects and consequences of the stocking of the National Aquarium project. I shall inform the Assembly as to the outcome of that inquiry in due course.
POWERS OF ATTORNEY (AMENDMENT) BILL 1989
Debate resumed from 28 September 1989, on motion by Ms Follett:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR COLLAERY (3.46): I rise to support this Bill on behalf of the Residents Rally and, I am sure, all other members of the house. The passage of this legislation has been quite lengthy. I recall the original suggestions came forward about 15 or 16 years ago from a report of the precursor of the current Law Reform Commission. Happily, in October 1987, the community law reform group for the Australian Capital Territory, in its third report entitled Enduring Powers of Attorney, brought forward the recommendations and largely the draft Bill which is before the house at present. I also speak, by way of introduction, as a law practitioner and someone who is, to an extent, conversant with the issues faced by this Bill.
Mr Speaker, the Bill approaches an issue which was last dealt with, so far as statutory provisions go, in the Lunacy Act of 1898 which we have borrowed from New South Wales, so to speak. The law relating to powers of attorney was brought up to date, as it were, in 1956 in the principal Act, as I will call it from now on, the Powers of Attorney Act 1956.
For some years many of us have been concerned about the position that people are in when they have a relative - often a dear relative - who gives a power of attorney, commonly in a situation of illness and relative incapacity, and when that party moves on into a comatose state and the like. In our community there are a number of such persons, and I can think of quite a number of situations like that which I have come across over the years, in which there is a comatose person whose affairs are being somewhat mistakenly managed under a subsisting power of attorney.
It is a very common misconception that your power of attorney looks after you when you have had a stroke and you cannot read or write or comprehend in other fashions, such as sign language, what is going on. I do not want to cause alarm in that respect, because on occasions I have personally taken wills and testamentary dispositions by simple hand pressure from the testator. That involves a lot of difficulties, of signalling instructions and attempting to put things in the positive or the negative and many complications of that nature. To keep a traditional power of attorney alive in that respect, when
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