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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2342 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

In his speech introducing the Appropriation Bill 1999-2000, the Treasurer revealed that the previous victims of crime scheme paid $8.4 million in compensation. The new scheme will not be paying that amount. What victims will receive instead is support from the victims assistance scheme, which has been allocated a budget of $1.1 million. The amount paid under the old scheme will remain as the benchmark of how much crime victims have lost on top of the trauma caused by the crime itself.

Victims of crime are not the only losers in this part of the budget. One community legal service that has served the people of Canberra extremely well will close tomorrow. Canberra is losing a legal service tomorrow. Others are still waiting to learn their fate. It is ironic that the Chief Minister and her personal staff received $180,000 in government funding for legal expenses for a non-adversarial coronial inquiry into the hospital implosion, but the government could not find $84,000 to fund the Care community legal service, which in one year provided representation in a number of adversarial court hearings for 78 separate cases. This valuable service for underprivileged people who have found themselves in financial difficulty closes tomorrow.

In the last financial year we paid out $180,000 to the Chief Minister and her personal staff. We need to pause and reflect that of course the cost and the expense of the fatal hospital implosion are still with us. The Bender family is suing the ACT government and Totalcare. Totalcare has indicated that it will vigorously defend the action. Totalcare spent its half-million or more dollars on legal costs associated with the implosion. Totalcare, in the words of its chief executive officer, is vigorously defending the action.

The Attorney thinks it is sub judice for him to advise members of this Assembly whether or not the ACT government will defend the action. In one of the most amazing answers I have ever heard to a question without notice, the Attorney said it was inappropriate for him to advise the Assembly whether or not the ACT government would be defending the action that the Benders have launched. That is a stretch of legal reasoning that is still beyond me. We, the representatives of the people of Canberra, are not permitted to know whether the ACT government will defend the Benders' action. This is a very open and accountable government!

The Treasurer, wearing his Attorney-General's hat, expects the Legal Aid Commission to fill the gap of the closed Care legal service. The Legal Aid Commission, I understand, will be fully stretched with its normal workload, plus a number of lengthy murder or manslaughter trials, without being expected to fill this gap. In the draft budget process it became apparent that the justification for not funding community legal centres is that the government believes that funding is largely a Commonwealth responsibility. It is not apparent what basis there is for this belief, as community legal centres provide advice and representation on a wide range of matters, including disputes with the ACT government over housing, debts and consumer matters-all territory government responsibilities.

Whilst the Legal Aid Commission may fill the gap left by the community legal centres, I wonder who will service the ACT Law Reform Commission. I am informed that no provision is made for the department to provide the necessary secretariat services that would allow the commission to fulfil its critical role in determining difficult and important issues in law reform. For instance, the Attorney referred the question of surrogacy to the commission in December 1998. There is at yet no report from the

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