NT Health ‘to blame for child deaths’

The NT Health Department’s ‘outrageous’ disregard for the law may be substantially to blame for the deaths of three Aboriginal children, the ­Coroner has been urged to find.

The Northern Territory Health Department’s “outrageous” disregard for the law may be substantially to blame for the deaths of three Aboriginal children who died from sniffing petrol, the ­Coroner has been urged to find.

In responding to their deaths, the department “undertook reviews but did not recognise its failures”, avoided producing information and presented an analysis “premised on mistaken views of the law that persisted” despite earlier warnings.

Evidence from a key subsidiary operating in the region where petrol sniffing is most prevalent contained “nothing … to suggest they accept the issues or have plans to correct them”, the Coroner was told. Lawyers for the ­department disagreed.

In his closing submissions at the end of a devastating five-day inquest, Deputy Coroner Kevin Currie — who acted as counsel assisting during the hearing — savaged the department for attempting to dismiss its flagrant breaches as a “technicality”.

Coroner Greg Cavanagh interrupted Mr Currie to remind those gathered — including top executives and the Chief Health Officer — that Health Minister Natasha Fyles had personally ­êassured him the problems were being fixed long before the children died.

The department’s failure to apply the law around mandatory treatment for high-risk volatile-substance abuse patients was a key theme of Mr Cavanagh’s 2017 inquest into the death of Edward Laurie, a serial petrol sniffer from the age of 10 onwards.

Mr Cavanagh recommended steps to ensure department staff would comply with their legal obligations to complete an assessment and recommend treatment within two weeks where a person might reasonably be deemed at risk of severe harm.

A response to the Laurie inquest findings — tabled in parliament by Ms Fyles — described the ways the department supposedly followed that advice. But Mr Currie told the Coroner on Monday there was “no evidence” those changes actually occurred.

“The difference between the representations of the department and reality are considerable,” he said. “‘Outrageous’ as a description doesn’t do the circumstances justice.”

Lawyers for the victims’ families endorsed Mr Currie’s characterisation and urged the Coroner to blame the department’s “indifference” for the children’s deaths.

“Nothing has changed in the last three years. The same practices that permitted Mr Laurie to continue to sniff petrol for about 10 years until he died persisted in these cases,” Mr Currie said.

“There is a very real possibility that the indifference of the (health) service resulted in the deaths of these three children.”

Ms Fyles declined to comment, citing the inquest.

Mr Currie told the hearing “none of these children was the recipient of the care and attention that the community has a right to expect”. He highlighted a lack of “holistic” care co-­ordinated across government agencies.

During the hearing, a department manager conceded that his staff should have found 13-year-old Master JK at risk of severe harm on at least 10 occasions. But they never found him at risk and so denied him a treatment plan and other interventions.

“He was deprived of everything the (law) sought to provide to him so as to mitigate the risks of the severe harm,” Mr Currie said.

“That’s not a ‘technicality’. Breaching the law should not be regarded as a technicality.”

Eleven-year-old Master W’s case was only sent to the Chief Health Officer to examine because Master W was so young no rehabilitation service would take him. The most significant issue in 17-year-old Ms B’s case was that “her sniffing was demonstrably because of the trauma of being raped”, Mr Currie said. She was raped again, present at a cousin’s suicide and repeatedly bashed by her boyfriend before she died.