BackSunday, 24 September 2017
Vulnerable Witnesses Act
5AA | Andrew Reimer
Andrew Reimer: Good evening to you Kelly
Kelly Vincent: Good evening Andrew. You will remember back in 2015 the Parliament passed the Vulnerable Witnesses Act which was legislation arising from the Disability Justice Plan, a plan that the Dignity Party and others within the Government had worked very hard on for years to ensure that we had policies and laws in place to ensure that courts and police interviews were much more accessible to people with disabilities, especially people who need assistance to communicate, someone who might be non-verbal or need to use an assisting device and needs someone to help them communicate that evidence as part of that legislation we also brought in new interviewing techniques and one of those things was for prescribed people, people who were especially authorised to conduct interviews with either very young children under the age of seven or children and young people who have a disability that complicates the way they communicate up to the age of 14. It would appear from information that has come to light in the last few days that because the government essentially forgot to go through the proper processes and some of that evidence that’s been gathered over the last year or so, may in fact be inadmissible in court those child protection officers within SA Health weren’t actually properly authorised. This means that people with charged with committing crimes, violent abuse against children particularly vulnerable children, could in fact walk free because it may well be that that evidence is inadmissible and I’m struggling to tell you just how angry I am about this.
Andrew Reimer: And so you should be.
Kelly Vincent: it’s dangerous, it could well mean that people who are dangerous and violent could walk free of the offences that they have committed, we risk South Australia’s reputation we know that the success of other disability justice plans in other states have been looking to us in terms of following in our lead, so if this all comes to nothing through this bungle, I think we could well be a national laughing stock.
Andrew Reimer: Now you talked about children under the age of seven, six year old children could be forced to give evidence in person, in court. How can that be allowed?
Kelly Vincent: The risk that we run here is if this evidence that has been collected already ends up being inadmissible those children may have to testify again if you are traumatised it’s difficult for young children to give evidence in court anyhow.
Andrew Reimer: well it’s an intimidating place to be at the best of times even as an adult.
Kelly Vincent: it’s a very daunting place to be, a very daunting process to undergo even for adults so for young children it can be particularly traumatising, if you’re there to talk about alleged physical or sexual abuse that happened against you to retestify could bring up that trauma all over again. We know that not only is going to court and gathering evidence important for conviction and important for a case, it’s actually also often an important part of the healing process as well in terms of telling that story to force those very young and very vulnerable children to undergo that process again is absolutely outrageous and unforgivable.
Andrew Reimer: So what do you plan to do?
Kelly Vincent: Well the Government has made hasty steps to fix its own mistake by putting draft legislation to the Parliament this coming week. I will certainly be calling on the Opposition and the Government to make sure that the Cabinet meeting deal with this as a matter of priority if we have to stall usual processes in order to get this through as soon as possible so be it. I’ll be calling on both the Labor and the Liberal Parties to prioritise this and to put all processes on hold including the parliamentary process if needed to do so. If we need to put other bits of legislation aside for one day to deal with this then so be it because we can’t have children being re-traumatised, children who rely on adults within Parliament to get this right. This could well again undermine people and indeed the community trust in the court system and we can’t afford that.
Andrew Reimer: Thank you very much for that information, please keep us updated, it would be great if it can be sorted out.
Kelly Vincent: Absolutely, that’s what we’ll be calling for and that’s what I’m absolutely demanding from both sides, Liberal and Labor, when I speak to you next week I look forward to hopefully telling you that the legislation has passed because I’m certainly not going to accept any other outcome.
