Page 658 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 February 2020
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when some letters were returned to sender, given that many of the ashes that were interred were from the late 1970s, Norwood did not go to any further lengths to get in touch with families to let them know. Indeed, it seems that the moving of the wall has resulted in ashes being lost.
Eddy’s courage—his absolute courage, and at a great personal cost to him—in speaking out resulted in more families coming forward, who revealed that Norwood had told them the same, that their children’s ashes simply were not there. Thanks to Eddy speaking up, the attention that was gained and the audit review that resulted from the commissioning of city services, Norwood eventually undertook a proper search and, fortunately, was able to locate the ashes belonging to two other families.
They remain forever indebted to Eddy for speaking up so that this got attention and action, and so that Norwood was required to act, and did act, and they got the ashes back. But, regrettably, Timothy Mol’s ashes are still missing. The continued loss of those ashes is, and I expect will remain, the biggest regret of my career, and I think about it most days. What did emerge is that Norwood had been and was still acting in a cavalier and dismissive way, from its communications with families to its record-keeping. I am happy to share with others the way in which Norwood had been writing to people.
Norwood failed the community. The audit report, which has been made public, is, in my view, disturbing reading. I have sent it to Ms Lawder in case she has not read it. For the benefit of the chamber, it found that there was risk that records within the Norwood Park database do not reflect actual holdings of interred ashes, and a risk of inconsistent treatment of the handling and management of ashes.
It found that there are “no documented policies, procedures or standard operating procedures that formally document the ashes management process and key points of control”. None. It further found:
Norwood Park’s database was developed using Microsoft Access, a technology that is no longer supported by Microsoft, further this database has not been upgraded since 2011.
There is no mandatory requirement within the Norwood database to capture details of whether whole, part or no ashes were interred as part of a memorial.
That is disgraceful. The government needed to act, and it has acted. Considerable swathes of this bill are dedicated to reform in this space, resulting in much tougher regulation—not red tape, just doing the right thing by families—to ensure that there are minimum standards that must be maintained. The bill also ensures that lost ashes will never occur again—it never should have occurred—and that strong action can be taken in the future. The bill sets out a regulatory framework, including minimum standards on how facilities should operate, whilst also encouraging facilities to work to higher standards and continually improve their services.
Under this new framework all private facilities must be licensed. This licensing scheme is what will provide the government with a more accurate understanding of how facilities are operating and allow conditions to be imposed to ensure that
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