Page 657 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 February 2020
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In sharing this information with the Assembly, I wish to let members in the Assembly know that the multicultural community do not want to compete with the current crematorium. They are businesses themselves and know and understand this aspect. I thank those who have so generously and sensitively responded to my request for clarity. I am grateful for both the diversity and the vibrancy of the faiths and cultures that can be found in the ACT.
MS CHEYNE (Ginninderra) (4.50): I rise today to speak in support of the bill. On a broad level, as a member of the environment, transport and city services committee, which reviewed cemeteries and crematoria in the ACT some years ago, I am pleased to see that this bill addresses a considerable number of recommendations in the report and I commend the minister for the work done in this space.
Even though there were at least two opposition members on that committee, it is useful to note that it did recommend that a second crematorium be constructed as a high priority and that the management and the operation of any future cemeteries or crematoria, or any other interment facility, be performed by the ACT public cemeteries authority. That was a unanimous report, so perhaps opposition members can do further research on what they agree to.
The key reason I speak today is the considerable reform contained in this bill related to the management of cemeteries and crematoria. The opposition also seem to need to be schooled in why this is so incredibly important. I am genuinely surprised to hear opposition members say that they have not heard complaints about the crematorium, when in June last year, in question time, Mr Hanson asked the Minister for City Services:
In January the Canberra Times reported that you had instructed the city services directorate to investigate Norwood Park crematorium and the ACT cemeteries authority after a number of cremated ashes had gone missing. How can Canberrans be confident in laying their loved ones to rest in our city when their remains go missing?
That was a question from Mr Hanson. Minister Steel’s response, apart from thanking Mr Hanson, was:
The regulator of cemeteries has been investigating the matter of the missing ashes at the privately owned Norwood crematorium. The report is currently being finalised in consultation with both Norwood Park and the affected families involved, and I look forward to the regulator releasing that report tomorrow.
And that report was then made public. As the Assembly should be aware, in late 2018 Mr Eddy Mol, through me, brought to the attention of this government and this Assembly that Norwood had lost his son Timothy’s ashes. Eddy wanted to have his son’s ashes returned to him so that he could scatter them with his late ex-wife’s ashes. That had been her wish. But when he asked Norwood for them, Norwood told him they were not there.
It turned out that Norwood had moved an entire wall of children’s ashes in the early 1990s. Norwood had written to some families explaining what it were doing, but
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