A law firm working with survivors of abuse in State care is asking the Government to treat all survivors of abuse equitably, after an announcement last week about survivors of the Lake Alice Hospital Adolescent Unit.

Cooper Legal’s Principal Partner, Sonja Cooper says that while the Government might say that paying Lake Alice survivors’ legal fees is the fair thing to do, the State is still not treating all survivors equitably.

“We have to understand that this payment covers a very small group of survivors who settled their claims in the first Lake Alice tranche through lawyer, Grant Cameron.

“At the same time as these settlements were reached, we were representing clients funded through legal aid. As the State likes to say, legal aid is a loan not a gift, even for people who were abused by the State.

“While we now have an agreement with most State agents, such as the Ministry of Social Development to cover legal aid debt as part of settlement, back when Mr Cameron was settling the Lake Alice cases, Legal Aid would take legal fees from our clients as part of any settlement.

“Is the Government planning to reimburse these people the money that was taken out of their settlements too?

“Minister Stanford says that the Government wants to do right by survivors and do what it fair. We’re asking the Government to treat survivors equitably.

“First that would involve reimbursing all survivors who had legal fees taken out of their settlements, including those where the lawyers were paid by Legal Aid.

“Second, it involves ensuring that payments are similar, regardless of where a survivor was placed and who the abuser was.

“As it currently stands, survivors from the Lake Alice Adolescent Unit receive average settlements of $68,000 if they were given ECT or paraldehyde as punishment.

“A survivor who suffered exactly the same abuse, which the Government has labelled torture, at another psychiatric institution will receive a maximum payment of $9,000.

“I would like to ask the Government, where is the equity in that? How is that doing right by survivors?

“If the Government is really committed to doing the right thing, it should look at all the state redress schemes and the ministries or departments that run these, including the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Education and others, to ensure that these State agencies offer equitable redress to survivors to adequately addressed the serious harm that the State caused them,” Ms Cooper concluded.

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