Thursday, 18 May 2023

Guardianship administration reform

Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (15:41): (232) My adjournment this evening is to the Attorney-General, and I ask the Attorney: will you reform the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal Act 1998, clause 37, schedule 1, relating to guardianship? I speak to an issue tonight raised by a disability advocate whose experience has shown the need to reform VCAT laws on guardianship. Uli Cartwright is a young Victorian man who is a filmmaker and rights advocate who also happens to live with a disability. He spent five years making a documentary about his life, entitled Life is a Battlefield. It was shown on SBS on International Day of People with a Disability, but then VCAT contacted SBS because in his documentary Uli had talked about going to VCAT for a hearing and about his financial administration order, and the law as it stands says he cannot do that without VCAT’s permission.

Uli had been under a guardianship when he was younger, and that guardianship has since been lifted. SBS took Uli’s documentary off their website after they got the letter from VCAT. Even though he was no longer under a guardianship, Uli’s life was still subject to clause 37 of the VCAT act, which says he cannot discuss his own matters, so Uli had to find a lawyer, go to VCAT, have a hearing and get a waiver in order to be able to discuss his own life. Uli makes the excellent point that, if Britney Spears had her guardianship order made in Victoria, nobody could have written about it or said anything without VCAT’s permission.

Although the balance between protection versus equal freedoms for vulnerable groups can be complex, recent changes have navigated these difficulties. The Guardianship and Administration Act 2019 stopped talking about ‘best interests’ and started talking about the ‘will and preferences’ and the rights of people with disabilities to make their own decisions. Victoria’s Office of the Public Advocate supports the call to reform the law, saying:

Ensuring people can freely tell their own stories will increase transparency and promote public trust in this essential safeguarding system.

What is clear is that there is currently an effective gag order on all people with disability regarding VCAT decisions about them, meaning that the balance is currently far too close towards an old-fashioned protect, shield and silence approach to people with disabilities than the contemporary rights-based approach required under the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It does leave Uli wondering who the law is there to protect. So I ask the Attorney-General: will you reform the VCAT act, clause 37, schedule 1, so that people with disabilities have the same rights to tell their own stories as the rest of the community? If so, when will that reform take place and how do you plan to incorporate the views of people with lived experience like Uli and others in this reform process?