Page 1387 - Week 05 - Thursday, 18 June 2020
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Just as most other jurisdictions have done across Australia, this bill stipulates that the general compensation clause does not apply to any claims relating to loss or damage in relation to the COVID pandemic. The compensation clause in the current legislation is not well targeted to the scale of the COVID pandemic and, given the impacts on our community, opens the government up to a range of unpredictable claims that were never the intention of the legislation.
While the government has worked very hard to support our community in the many ways I have outlined, if there are special circumstances where ACT government actions are directly responsible, people are still eligible to apply for act of grace payments. Such payments enable the Treasurer to authorise payments in special circumstances. The guidelines for these payments were revised late last year and are available on the Treasury website. I believe the criteria and procedures are easily understandable for those rare cases where people feel they have suffered in circumstances beyond the average impact to our community and wish to make a claim.
That is the reason we will be supporting this bill: where there are outstanding or particularly rare circumstances where there has been a disproportionate impact on somebody, there is a pathway available through the act of grace mechanism. We do not think there should be a pathway for a range of compensation claims under the Public Health Act where the entire community has been affected and some people choose to exercise that and others do not. That would be an uneven and inappropriate outcome as we work to support the entire community through these exceptional circumstances.
We support the bill. Mrs Dunne has circulated an amendment which I assume she will move later in the debate. We will not be supporting that amendment for the reasons I have outlined.
MS STEPHEN-SMITH (Kurrajong—Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Minister for Children, Youth and Families and Minister for Health) (5.41), in reply: I start by thanking Mrs Dunne, particularly for her remarks at the beginning of her contribution, and for her engagement in the conversation as we worked through this bill and potential amendments. I note that I did acknowledge that her feedback had improved the bill when I introduced the bill. She does not need to suppose that she had an impact on the bill. I have already acknowledged that she did and that the current form of the bill does reflect her early feedback in the briefings, which I thought were thoughtful and were much appreciated. We have acknowledged that.
I would like, however, to respond to Mrs Dunne’s commentary about our preparedness for a pandemic. Mr Rattenbury has referred to elements of the bill. We have all acknowledged that a bill written in 1997 is not perfect in responding to a global pandemic and, as we spoke about the first time we came back to this place after the declaration of the public health emergency, neither would the Emergencies Act have been appropriate to respond to the pandemic. We, as a government, had to make a choice about whether the emergency would be declared under the Public Health Act or whether it would be declared under the Emergencies Act. Mrs Dunne indicated that
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