Hansard

Advance care planning

Motion

Hon Kate Doust (11:35 am) without notice: I move:

That this house:

(a) notes two out of five Western Australians are at risk of dying without a will;

(b) recognises that as people age, more complex health issues arise which make financial, legal, or end-of-life decisions challenging;

(c) notes the number of Australians living with dementia is expected to double by 2058;

(d) acknowledges that increased literacy on wills, power of attorney, and guardianship arrangements will help avoid intestacy, and ease the pressure on families dealing with the complexities of ageing and care; and

(e) notes the resources available to families in establishing legal safeguards such as the Public Trustee, Legal Aid WA, Citizens Advice Bureau, and Peel Community Legal Services.

Thursday is a challenge, and I thought, let us uplift ourselves and talk about the one issue that none of us can avoid, and that is death. Sadly, we see that we have a significant number of people dying intestate where they do not have a completed or signed will. That is not only here in Australia, where there are approximately 9.2 million people who die without a will. In Western Australia we find that more than 40% of people in our state who could make a will choose not to.

As I have said in the motion, that pans out to about two out of every five Western Australians dying without a will. That is a pretty significant issue. It is a very complex issue; it is a complex challenge within the legal system and a lot of it comes down to that a lot of us do not want to have to deal with the idea of managing our own mortality. Therefore, it leads to a lack of preparation of our estates. Some people will make those advanced decisions and some people are prepared; they make their wills, they make their advanced care directives, and they plan for who will hold their power of attorney and their enduring guardianship. People do that, but we see that more than 40% in the state do not, and that is a significant number. That can then create significant difficulties for surviving relatives.

Despite the recognition that drafting a will is essential, there is a persistent belief that we are always going to have time. That is not always the case and I suppose, members, for me, having dealt with the death of my brother nine years ago—he literally dropped dead with no time to plan and no time to think about what he wanted to do with his estate—it left the family not only grieving, but it extended the process of having to work through administration and the complicated arrangements of dealing with banks and superannuation and all the other organisations that you have to deal with to wrap up a person's interest. It took five years to do that. I recently had a cousin pass away within 24 hours, who had a will, but had not yet signed it. We are working through all of those issues for her, her partner and her children and her friends.

In this motion today I listed a direct reference to the issues around our ageing community and our health issues that are complicated by people living longer. In particular, there is a focus on dementia, because next week is Dementia Action Week. If we look at the stats provided by Dementia Australia, specifically for WA, they say that we currently have 42,000 people living with all forms of dementia, and that this figure is projected to increase to an estimated 87,000 by 2054, with a projected percentage change of 107%.

Moving down a rung, it is not just that people are reaching an older age. In Western Australia we currently have 2,900 people living with young-onset dementia, and this figure is predicted to increase to an estimated 4,250 people by 2054 with the projected percentage change to 47%. The issue of making a will is not just something that a person does in old age. We need to encourage people to do it at an earlier stage of life when they have full capacity and able to make those very clear decisions so that they are not caught out without a will or with an advanced stage of dementia and no longer deemed to have the capacity to make decisions around their life or their estate. I say that because I, like a number of other members in this chamber to whom I have spoken, am dealing with parents who have dementia. My father and my mother both have different forms of dementia. Fortunately, my brother's death was a trigger that encouraged my father to make a will and we put in place a power of attorney and enduring guardianship. This has made working through my father's situation, now that he is deemed not to have capacity, easier and provided clarity about how he wants his life and his end-of-life decisions managed. But it is a challenge and not everyone wants to do it.

The number of people who do not make a will, either because they choose not to or they do not know how to, makes this a societal issue, and we have to look at why. Some of the reasons people choose not to make a will are that they are ignorant about the necessity for a will. Let us be clear: it is not compulsory. It is a choice, so a person does not have to make one. Many people have a sense of invincibility, particularly when they are younger. They think that it will never happen to them or that it will never happen to them at that point, but, let us face it, we have all lost friends at different points of our life and, sadly, some of them were very young. There is an assumption that others will manage the estate: "It's not my problem when I'm gone. Somebody else will fix it." There might be a distrust of community or government agencies, and I give the example of the Public Trustee because that is the body that a lot of people end up dealing with. There is a belief that the assets that a person has are insufficient to require a will, there are legal complexities around inheritance and there could also be a lack of education about will-making requirements.

When we look at the scope of the problem, the lack of engagement with estate planning has the potential to impact not only family and friends, but also our economy. I say this because for each individual now, the growth in superannuation or the growth in people having property, and starting to do so at a much younger age, also has an impact. The changes in the dynamics of family structures and multiple marriages can also add to the complexities around estate planning. That might turn off some people from making those decisions because it makes it harder. Nobody wants to offend anyone in the family about who is getting what, do they? Without a specific will to give guidance, the burden of administering the estate is quite often placed in the hands of the Public Trustee and sometimes, but not always, this can add to the frustrations, the grieving process and the delays.

Dying intestate can be regarded as a wicked problem because there are so many reasons that lead people to not make a will. On the flip side, there are also many solutions that we can apply to try and encourage a behavioural change so that people make a will. Why do people not make a will? One reason is that we do not want to think about dying; we do not want to think about not being here. We do not want to tempt the inevitable or fate by talking about it. That may lead to procrastination. People put it off and then, as I said using the example of my brother, it is too late. We never know what is going happen. We never know when we are going to go, and it is then left for other people to resolve the issue.

Governments of all persuasions have put in place legislation to try and codify these issues to make it simpler for people to manage, be they with wills or without wills—when they die intestate. A couple of years ago, the government improved the administration legislation to support families and provide a more equitable distribution of estates. We need to look at the barriers to estate planning. There are a diverse range of reasons: it could be a person's age, their gender, a smaller asset ownership or the family structures that make them think that they do not require a will. They might have only one child and think that they do not need a will because their assets will simply go to that child. That is not necessarily the case. There can also be societal barriers and issues around the distrust of government agencies and lawyers. In some cases, it is the fear of death that can leading to an avoidance of estate planning. It could be issues around language or location. A person living in a rural or regional area or in an Indigenous community may not have access to the information or legal advice needed to make a will. Governments have endeavoured to manage the complexities of the various asset-ownership structures in estate planning. Although sometimes these arrangements will require the use of a lawyer, a lot of people cite the fact that the challenges of the maze of legal processes, including issues around power of attorney, guardianship and end-of-life processes, all add to the complexities and confusion of the process, and sometimes people just back away from that because it becomes too hard. Part of the task is working out how we resolve that.

I noted in my motion that we are fortunate to have a range of organisations to help: the Public Trustee, Legal Aid Western Australia and the Citizens Advice Bureau. I used the Peel Community Legal Services as an example because it has been a dominant feature in part of my electorate. I am sure that all members have community legal organisations in their electorates that they would recommend as well. People can go to a range of places for help, not just high-end legal firms.

We have to change the conversation about making a will. The challenge is to shift the dial on the conversation and to try to find the triggers for change. A lot of evidence shows that people will quite often think about signing a will if there has been a life-changing event, be it an illness, a marriage, the birth of a child or a change in financial circumstances. People will then think about making a will. We also have to change the mindset so that people are encouraged to think that estate planning is not a burden but actually a gift—a gift that we want to provide to our family and friends when we are no longer here. That is about changing the mindset.

The biggest and the hardest shift—I know this from personal experience—is to have the conversation within our own families about forward planning for all these events. That is a really hard discussion to have, but we need to promote the reasons for doing that in the community so that we can reduce those numbers of people without a will and increase the numbers of people planning for their end of life and for how their families will deal with it.

I note a very good document that I encourage all members to read, The Inheritance State of Play Snapshot. It has been put out by Solomon Hollett Lawyers and it talks about inheritance, which is actually at the core of why people do not want to make a decision. There is a very good piece of work in here about the expectations of inheritance. I am not going to have a jab at millennials or gen Zs—I miss Hon Wilson Tucker when we have these sorts of discussions about Boomers and millennials, but he should read this document as well. It talks about inheritance and what people expect, and the expectations of certain generations around wills. It is a good read.

In my last couple of minutes, I will put to members some of the solutions that they might want to consider because we cannot expect people to change their mindset overnight. Sometimes we have to have micro nudges to instigate a change in people's mindset. These are some of the things that I have looked at that might encourage people to do things differently, to address some of those barriers to change and to increase the number of people making these decisions. Perhaps we need to enhance the method and manner by which we educate people and how we enable access to education around rule-making in estate planning.

Some other interesting ideas I have come across include the concept of having holographic wills, digital wills, educating students at school about the need to plan for the future and community end-of-life processes. I want to give a shout-out to my friend Mr David Scaife, the member for Cockburn. I am supporting him in a community event he is holding that is really focused on the discussion of end-of-life planning. I know Hon Matthew Swinbourn has been very active over many years in delivering messages and explaining to people the legal arrangements around estate planning as well. I think there is a challenge for us as members of Parliament, and I throw this out to you: What are we going to do as members, as role models in our communities, to go out and encourage people to change their mindset and to encourage them to think about the future? I know dying is a tough thing to think about, but we should think about it so that families are not left in such a difficult and complicated legal matrix that then just exacerbates grief and all the other problems. I think the challenge for all of us is to have those conversations so that we can drive the behavioural change on this issue and encourage more Western Australians that it is significant, not just for them but certainly for their families, to make a will and make those decisions that will ease the pressure on their families when they move on.

I wanted to have this discussion today. I think it is an important discussion because it is going to impact on each one of us, our families and certainly all our constituents at any point in time. I look forward to hearing from members about what they plan on doing to try to change the numbers that we currently have and increase the number of people who make those very significant decisions for themselves about the end of life.

Hon Pierre Yang (Parliamentary Secretary) (11:51 am): Thank you for the opportunity to make a contribution on this very important motion moved by my good friend and senior colleague Hon Kate Doust. As we heard from Hon Kate Doust, there is one thing that we cannot avoid and that is death. No-one can avoid that. Some of us may be able to avoid paying tax, but I certainly would not advise anyone here to do that.

Members may know that I worked in the legal profession for about 10 years from 2007 to 2017. After I was elected here, I stopped practising law. During my time in the legal profession, the first couple of years was spent doing articled clerk training and then becoming a restricted practitioner under the supervision of a senior colleague. After that, I became an unrestricted practitioner in the legal profession. In the last three and a half years of my time in the legal profession, I was practising as a sole practitioner. The majority of my cases and clients were family law–related matters but a large number of cases were also estate planning, will drafting and probate-related matters.

I want to focus my contribution today on one aspect—that is the Administration Act, to which a very significant improvement was made by this government back in 2022. I want to give a shout-out to Hon Matthew Swinbourn, who was the parliamentary secretary with carriage of the Administration Amendment Bill 2022 in this place. That was a few years ago, but it was a significant reform that we implemented for the benefit of all Western Australians.

It was significant for the following reasons. The Administration Act 1903 obviously was amended throughout the last century. Nonetheless, one aspect of the act had not been reformed or amended for more than 40 years. When a person died intestate, the Administration Act 1903 stipulates how much a person would inherit in accordance with section 14. That aspect of the Administration Act was left untouched for about 40 years. The last reform took place in 1982. If a person died without a will and left a husband or wife or a de facto partner, the surviving partner will take all the chattels of the household without question. But if a person died leaving a husband or wife or de facto partner, and leaves issue, the net value of the intestate property would be inherited by the person no more than $50,000. That was the situation prior to the 2022 bill. That amount was significantly increased by this government and passed by this house. At that point, the figure was increased to $472,000. Members could imagine the difficulties caused to the surviving partner prior to that reform, knowing that life would be uncertain and the only amount that they would be guaranteed was $50,000. It was just unimaginable.

I had a case that fitted exactly that scenario. A client I represented at the time had a partner who unfortunately passed away without a will. He had a number of children and this client was a new partner to the deceased person. They had to go to the Supreme Court under the Family Provision Act 1972 to have a lengthy legal battle to arrive at a fair and reasonable outcome. In that case, at the last minute before the start of the trial, the parties settled, notwithstanding spending hundreds of thousands of dollars collectively on legal fees. There were no winners in that scenario. The legal fees had to be paid out from the estate. It was a really unfortunate situation with no winner emerging from that legal debate. I guess the only good one could extract from that scenario was that they avoided the trial, which would have been more expensive. I give a shout-out to the government for increasing the amount available to the surviving partner.

I wish to add that I am not giving the government response on this measure; I am providing a contribution as a member of this place.

If we look at the average property price in Perth over the last 40 years, it increased from a mere $41,000 in 1980 to an average of $635,000 in 2024. If we go back a year, it was $590,000. You would not be able to buy even a bathroom with the $50,000 stipulated by the Administration Act prior to the amendment we implemented in 2022. However, this reform is now striking the right balance enabling a surviving partner in a situation in which their partner has passed away without a will to get a fair outcome. More significantly, the Administration Act 1903 now allows the minister to review that amount every two years. The last increase was put in place by the Attorney General on 27 June 2025. The amount now allowed is $546,000, which is in line with the property price increase we have witnessed in the state in the last few years. It is a significant reform.

I want to give a shout-out to the government and the parliamentary secretary who had coverage of the bill back in 2022. I want to thank Hon Kate Doust for bringing this very important motion to this house. I encourage all of us in our daily conversations and communications with our constituents, other family members and people we are associated with or we come across to have the conversation, when there is an opportunity to do so, and encourage people to look at having their will drafted and signed or updated, and at getting an enduring power of attorney and an enduring power of partnership and guardianship because it will help those who love us dearly to look after our affairs after we have gone.

Hon Michelle Hofmann (12:01 pm): Nothing in life is certain except death and taxes is a fairly famous phrase, and I echo the comments made by my colleagues this morning—but I will leave it to Hon Pierre Yang on whether or not they are both certain.

I rise to speak on this motion today because I have worked in this space. I had my own sole practitioner business as a lawyer, providing wills and estate planning advice to clients for several years. One of the biggest challenges about working in this space is that we as lawyers are engaging in very difficult conversations with our clients. Most people do not want to talk about death. They do not want to talk about what happens when they die. They do not want to talk about what would happen if they were to be involved in a terrible accident and receive an impairment or were to suffer from dementia or another condition that would impair their ability to make decisions. The reality is that it is so important to engage in these conversations and to act in a preventive way. Most people put getting their affairs in order on the "important but not urgent" list of things to do, and it often never gets done, and that is a great shame.

We already heard in quite a bit of detail about what happens in Western Australia if a person passes away without a will. I challenge everyone to ensure that their legal affairs, particularly their will, are in the best state possible—finalised and signed. It is the best thing you can do; it is a gift for your family when they are having to deal with very tragic, difficult circumstances. It will give people not only peace of mind, and they can tick it off that to-do list, but also a real gift. I have seen how important it is. I understand we have talked a lot about when people pass away without a will, but we are also talking about significant issues that arise from a legal perspective when there is what is termed "a loss of capacity" and impairment such as dementia. I have experienced this firsthand with my grandfather over the past few years. It is challenging on a personal and emotional level to continue to work on a family relationship with someone who, on a good day, remembers your name, who your husband is and how many kids you have, but, on a bad day, cannot recall where they are or even the names of their kids and their spouse.

When it comes to getting your affairs in order in this space, it does not have to be difficult. A lot of innovation has happened amongst legal practitioners in more recent years. There are many lawyers who operate mobile practices and who will actually come out to your home and help you work through the legal requirements for preparing a will and other estate planning documents. Often, they also have fixed fees. A lot of people, particularly as they get more elderly, are reluctant to make an appointment to go into a lawyer's office in that sense, but there is the convenience of many lawyers who offer this service.

In many situations when someone passes away without a will, the Public Trustee gets involved. I note before I continue my comments that the vast number of cases involving the Public Trustee are never publicised. They are dealt with, and we do not tend to hear about the good cases. But I will highlight some of the issues that have been raised about the Public Trustee and some of the suggestions about how we can improve its operation in the administration of trusts and deceased estates. I start by acknowledging the good work of the Office of the Auditor General. A performance audit was conducted and a report came out in August 2022 titled Public Trustee's Administration of Trusts and Deceased Estates. The Auditor General looked into the Public Trustee. It is quite important that we have sufficient oversight because the Public Trustee manages more than $1.4 billion worth of assets. It administers trusts and handles deceased estates, often in cases when a person has passed away without a will. The Auditor General looked at the application and appropriateness of the fees, which is something that has been an issue of contention. The Auditor General found that although the Public Trustee has a gazetted fee schedule and it was not breaching that fee schedule in any way, some trust clients were charged large fees for relatively little work being performed on their behalf. There were also findings that the Public Trustee should better inform its clients of both what could be charged and what has been charged in their efforts. This goes to the structure of the funding of the Public Trustee, because the way that it works is that the Public Trustee is able to subsidise the costs of the organisation from fees taken from other clients, so some clients pay for not just work done on their behalf, but also subsidise work done for clients who do not have the means in their estate to pay. The commentary around this from the Auditor General is:

While people should pay for the services they receive, it is not fair for a public institution entrusted to act in their best interests to have them unknowingly subsidise others.

…

This model delivers an inherent incentive to maximise fees from clients regarded by the Public Trustee as having the capacity to pay, but who by community standards would not be considered wealthy. This is not appropriate.

Going through the findings of that report, it was not a condemnation of any staff. The staff were acknowledged as very hardworking in trying to fulfil their duties but have very large and immensely emotionally demanding workloads. They have to deal with people in very tragic circumstances who are dealing with grief. The findings of the report were:

Trust fees did not always reflect actual work effort and were not effectively communicated to clients

…

The Public Trustee charged deceased estates in line with the fee schedule, but did not meet its administration timelines

…

The Public Trustee has controls to manage many but not all of its fraud risks

Further work has been done in this space including into fraud risks, which, very positively, revealed minimal issues had been raised. The comments in that space were more around the fact that the complex environment within which the Public Trustee operates raised initial concerns around potential fraud, but there was no indication of systemic breach of financial management principles. It is always reassuring to know that we can have some faith in the management principles within our public institutions.

Interestingly, the Public Trustee, Brian Roche, who very rarely speaks out on matters in the media, spoke to the media on 18 June, calling for the government funding model to change in some ways. He considered that it would be helpful to subsidise fees for vulnerable clients who are unable to pay. Instead of the self-funding model—the Public Trustee has suggested that it could be within the remit of the government to decide to not charge fees, but that is a matter for the government to consider what is appropriate—the state government should help subsidise those who cannot afford the trustee's fees, rather than offsetting those charges against the accounts of people who have the capacity to pay.

I will highlight briefly in the short time I have remaining that there are cases when further investigation is required because there could be significant issues. A recent news article in June reports that the WA Public Trustee charged a woman with dementia $137,000 in fees while managing her assets at a loss. Clearly, an issue like that needs to be investigated when it arises. There is a concern that some of the practitioners and organisations who are aware of these issues are concerned about even speaking about them out of fear of jeopardising their relationship with the Public Trustee.

In my last few seconds, I would encourage everyone to go and get their will done. If even one person goes and gets their affairs in order after this debate, it will be worthwhile. I encourage members to speak about this in their community as well.

Hon Dan Caddy (Parliamentary Secretary) (12:11 pm): I acknowledge at the outset that I will be giving the government's response. I will address various aspects of the motion that have been put to us today but, given the time restraints, obviously, I do not think I will get to everything. By a happy coincidence, my very good friend and previous resident expert in the house on this topic—although I see that now we have two of them—covered a lot of ground on intestacy legacy amounts. I will start by acknowledging my friend Hon Kate Doust's contribution. I know this is a topic in which she has an incredible personal interest. I acknowledge her personal story that went along with her contribution.

I will talk generally about guardianship and administration and what is happening in that space in Western Australia. As members would be aware, the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia is currently undertaking a comprehensive review of Western Australia's guardianship and administration laws. The existing scheme, which is administered under the Guardianship and Administration Act 1990, enables substitute decision-makers to be appointed to make personal health and financial decisions on behalf of adults who do not have the capacity to make those decisions. The decision-makers can be appointed by the State Administrative Tribunal or under an enduring power of attorney or guardianship, or advance health directive made by the person prior to losing capacity.

This is a little off topic, but it is important because it is all interrelated. As members would be aware—certainly those who were here in the 41st Parliament—the former Attorney General referred the review to the commission in 2024 to fast-track the consideration of the recommendations relating to guardianship and administration laws in the final report of the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. The commission was initially due to provide a final report to government on 1 April this year but the Attorney General has approved an extension of time until the end of this year, following a request from the Law Reform Commission. The discussion papers are already out in two volumes. They have been released, as has an outline. That and the report, as it stands, have been released in English, Chinese, Italian and Vietnamese.

I would like to talk a little bit to the Administration Act 1903, which has been referred to in some detail by my good friend Hon Pierre Yang, so I will not go through all the figures at the end. That act governs what happens to someone's estate when they die intestate. For the benefit of members of the house who are not across this, the act describes how an estate is distributed by providing a formula for dividing assets based on family relationships, particularly a spouse or de facto partner, and children. That was referenced by Hon Pierre Yang in his contribution. In 2022, amendments were made to the act that changed how a deceased estate was to be distributed on intestacy, and also to increase the minimum distribution thresholds, known as intestacy legacy amounts. They were the figures that Hon Pierre Yang went through. Those increases were long overdue. No changes had been made to them for just over 40 years and the distributions to relatives had really lost pace with market values. I think Hon Pierre Yang outlined the differences in housing prices between 1982 and now to show what that meant. There were three main effects of the amendments made by this government, which were to immediately increase those amounts, to prescribe a formula for calculating the amount of the intestacy legacy amounts from time to time in the future and to require—this is critical—the relevant minister, which is currently the Attorney General, at specified times to review the intestacy legacy amounts and decide whether or not to apply the prescribed formula to alter those amounts and, following a review, report the outcome. The reason that is important goes back to the fact that nothing was changed to those amounts for nearly 40 years. Because of those amendments, we now have a built-in mechanism whereby every couple of years the amounts will be reviewed so that in the future they will be more in line with the current values in Western Australia when people find themselves in this situation and are dealing with those things outlined by Hon Kate Doust.

I am fast running out of time. I want to briefly go to paragraph (e) of the motion. I think four entities were named. I note that it is not an exhaustive list, but I just wanted to touch on the list briefly and talk about the services that are available and some of the great work that has been done. One of the entities named on that list is Legal Aid WA. Obviously, Legal Aid is a statutory agency that provides legal assistance right across the state. It receives funding from the Department of Communities to provide assistance to Elder Rights WA, which is a specialist legal advice and assistance service relating to a whole range of things, within which is wills and powers of attorney and guardianship and advance health directives, which is something that has come up previously. It is capable of providing some legal assistance on guardianship and administration proceedings in the State Administrative Tribunal. One of the other entities mentioned is Law Access. That is a statewide pro bono referral service. If a person cannot afford a lawyer and is not eligible for free or low-cost legal assistance services and meets Law Access's eligibility criteria, Law Access may well find a lawyer who will assist without charging their usual fees. There are also a host of legal centres such as the Citizens Advice Bureau, the Fremantle Community Legal Centre and the Great Southern Community Legal Services that also provide for people who find themselves dealing with an estate without a will. Those centres provide low-cost legal assistance. They are spread right across the state. This is very much a statewide thing. Once again, similar to the other two entities that I mentioned, they will provide legal assistance with concerns about everything, from superannuation to advance health directives, but specifically included in the remit is guardianship and administration, and certainly wills and estates.

The state government also funds a diverse range of initiatives to support older people in our state. I have less than a minute left. I was going to talk about two specific programs, but I will not now. As we know, the number of seniors as a percentage of our population is ever increasing. I echo the sentiments of Hon Kate Doust and Hon Michelle Hofmann by saying that the most critical thing that everyone can do to unburden their loved ones when it eventuates that they are no longer here is to go and get a will, however they want to do it. That will help their loved ones.

Hon Klasey Hirst (12:21 pm): I am really pleased to be able to make a contribution to this really important motion brought to us by my colleague and friend Hon Kate Doust, and I want to thank her for doing so. I also want to thank Hon Pierre Yang and Hon Michelle Hofmann, who are out of the chamber on urgent parliamentary business, for sharing their experience as lawyers. Hon Kate Doust mentioned navigating and dealing with complex systems once someone has passed. She mentioned banking, and that is something that I can talk about because I was a banker. I spent most of my career working in a bank branch. During that time, both here in Perth and in Kalgoorlie, I became a bit of a deceased estates expert. That was not something that I wanted to do; it happened because I dealt with so many matters. Far too many people die without a will. As we have heard, around 40% of Western Australians are at risk of dying without a will. When we see that figure on paper, it looks high, but from my own experience, I can tell members that it feels even higher when the person looking across from you is grieving. I have so many stories that I could tell, but I want to share just a couple that illustrate the point of this motion.

Back in 2012, I was still working here in the city. My husband and I were preparing to get married, and maybe that is why this story has stuck with me so much. A young woman of a similar age to me sat down in front of my desk. She was trying in vain to gain access to a bank account to which she was a signatory. There was a hard hold on that bank account. Then she shared her story with me. The other account holder was her partner, or had been her partner. They had both originally come to Australia on a working holiday visa. He had arrived slightly earlier than her, and they had made the innocent decision to add her as a signatory to his bank account. This is not uncommon; it happens all the time. All their wages and expenses went in and out of this bank account, and they also had a savings account set up in the same way for all their hard-earned savings. Then the unthinkable happened. While they were working at a small winery down south, they were involved in a head-on crash on Bussell Highway between Busselton and Margaret River. She miraculously survived with serious but not critical injuries, but he died at the scene. As per banking procedure, when the bank was notified of his death, a hard hold was placed on the account. Everything was frozen. That is not uncommon. But he had no will. This was further complicated by a dispute between the woman and his parents, who were overseas. We could see that her wages had been coming in but she had no access. I met her several weeks after the crash. She was dealing with the unimaginable grief of losing her partner and recovering from her own injuries, and now she was trying to navigate how to access funds to live and rebuild her life. I will never forget the look in her eyes—a young woman so far from home who had lost the love of her life. At the moment that she needed stability most, her hard-earned wages and savings were locked away. That is why I plead with people now: do not leave your loved ones in that position.

Another example I have is from a few years later. I had just arrived at the West Perth branch and a lady in her 60s sat down in front of me with a young man in his mid-30s. She was clearly going through something difficult; there were tears in her eyes before I even said hello. The young man was her son and he told me that his father had passed away very suddenly just days earlier. He was bringing his mother in to sort out the bank accounts. They explained that her husband had always taken care of the money. They had what she thought was a joint credit card, which she used occasionally. She admitted that she did not really understand banking. When I looked up the accounts, none were in joint names. She was not even a signatory on the accounts. The credit card of course was not truly joint; she was an additional card holder. The funds in the account were not insignificant; they were heading towards retirement. When I asked if there was a will or if either had been named the executor, the answer was no. I had to explain that all the accounts would be frozen and the credit card would also be stopped. They thought that they would leave the bank that day with full access to the funds and instead they left with even less. Because of the size of the estate, sorting it out was extremely complicated. I worked in that branch for a year. When I left for Kalgoorlie in 2015, it still was not resolved. I worked with them through that year, trying to make progress, but because she had not worked for years and she had no income, she was not eligible for a credit card. There was money and assets—a significant amount—but until the letters of administration were granted, they were completely inaccessible to her. A colleague called me late in 2016—I had been gone for over a year—to tell me that it had finally been settled, more than two years after her husband had passed away. This story has stayed with me for over a decade. Imagine suddenly losing your life partner and finding that you do not even have access to the money to pay your bills. That is what dying without a will can do to a family. This woman was grieving her husband of many years; she was suddenly left without him or the means to live at the same time. To carry both those burdens at once was a cruelty that she should never have faced.

This story hits home at the moment. I am at the same stage in my life now as her son was. My mum has been retired for some years and my dad is heading there very soon. Mum does the banking and Dad, by his own admission, does not know what to do. We are helping them put things in place now, but I know we have left it really late. That is the reality for so many families; we do not talk about it soon enough and, too often, we do not act until it is almost too late. There is also a misconception among so many that an enduring power of attorney continues after death, and that the person they give power of attorney to will be able to sort out their estate. It does not; it ceases at death. That was always such a difficult conversation to have. I can recount countless conversations with the person in front of me having a power of attorney but not being the executor. In most cases, the will was old and the executor may have either passed away or been unavailable. Sadly, on more than a few occasions, the relationship had broken down. These are complex situations to navigate, which brings me to my next point: wills must be kept current.

On a personal level, my dad's dad wrote his will in 1970 when my dad was just nine years old. His siblings were already adults. Of course, by the time he died in 1989, his circumstances had changed significantly. He had verbally told people about his updated wishes, but he never updated his will. A will is not a set and forget; life changes and families change, and wills must change with them. People should not only get a will, but also keep it up to date. The stories are heartbreaking. I share them not to dwell on the sadness but to show why planning matters. Too many families only discover these difficulties after it is too late, but what gives me hope is that there are services out there, often free or low cost, that can help families avoid being in these situations in the first place. We have heard about some already: the Citizens Advice Bureau, Legal Aid WA, Elder Rights WA, the Public Trustee and the community legal services. There are so many of these across the state doing this important work, but I just want to give a shout-out to a few special ones that mean a lot to me. To the Goldfields Community Legal Centre: I have lost count of how many people I referred to you over the years. Thank you for what you do for the people of the Goldfields. To Midlas, helping the people in the north-eastern suburbs: thank you. To Redgum Justice, formerly the Gosnells Community Legal Centre: Sarah and her team do incredible work in the south-east to support and help people, thank you.

I turn to another thing quickly. Your union can also help you with this. It will provide will-drafting services. As a proud unionist, I have to say that it is another great reason to join your union, not just for your rights at work, but for the practical protections for your family when it matters most.

I think about that young woman stranded here after a crash, unable to touch the savings she and her partner had worked so hard for. I think of that mother in West Perth, suddenly widowed, unable to access the very money she needed. If you do not have a will, please make one. Do it today. If you made one years ago, pull it out, check it and update it. Do not leave it until it is too late. This is not about lawyers or paperwork. This is about your family, about giving them clarity instead of confusion, about sparing them the heartache on top of grief, about making sure your wishes are honoured and your loved ones are protected. Making a will is one of the greatest acts of love you can leave behind. Please do not put it off. Do not put your family through what I have seen too many families endure. I thank the honourable member again for bringing this important motion to the house.

Hon Dr Katrina Stratton (Parliamentary Secretary) (12:31 pm): I am acutely aware that I am standing to speak after hearing from three much more learned colleagues from both the finance sector and the legal sector. I stand with a different kind of expertise of lived experience. I thank very much Hon Kate Doust for bringing this matter to the chamber today. We have had many conversations in the corridor about the importance of estate planning.

Much of my childhood was informed by the story of a will, but it was not the absence of one, it was the outrageousness of one from my great grandfather. He was a very wealthy man and had seven children with his wife and one child with his mistress. The conditions of his will were that the entirety of his estate was to go to his mistress and the child that they shared on the condition that she did not re-partner. It is fair to say that he was looking to practise some coercive control from beyond the grave. The eight children contested this will, as you might imagine, and, very sadly, it meant that my grandfather never spoke to any of his siblings again. So not only should we have a will, but we should probably make sure that it is an appropriate will, for want of a better legal term.

At age 39 I was widowed very suddenly. I sat out the motion yesterday on road trauma because I have lived the experience of it. Of course, we did not have the opportunity to discuss what Steve's end-of-life choices were. It sounds really odd to say it now with the distance of time, but I had forgotten that we had signed our will, so I spent a number of weeks in that very early traumatic grief space thinking that he had died without a valid will. We had had our will done. We were both members of the Community and Public Sector Union–Civil Service Association of WA. He was a child protection worker at the time that he passed away. We had had this will done after the birth of our second child, so it was an updated will, but in the craziness of the baby time, I did not remember that we had had it signed and it was not until somebody asked me whether I had actually looked at the will to check that it was not signed that I realised. We had in fact signed it, dated it and had it witnessed. But even those few weeks gave me a glimpse of what it would be like if he had died without a will—what that would mean for my financial future, for my ability to service the mortgage and for when my children became adults. I have had the honour twice of being the executor of a will and, as others have said, it is a gift because it means that you can carry out the wishes of your loved one as they wanted them to be carried out.

There are other ways that you can gift people after your death. I was telling Hon Kate Doust yesterday about one of the other gifts that my mother-in-law gave to me. She knew that she was going to die and she was a committed Catholic. She had outlined for me the hymns and the prayers that she wanted to have at her funeral. As a non-Catholic who did not necessarily have an understanding of the meaning of some of those hymns, I felt that was a really, really powerful thing that she had gifted to me. One of the greatest challenges I had after Steve passed was choosing the music for his funeral. He had very eclectic musical taste. Even though it is not necessarily legally enforceable, I have outlined in my will the songs that I wish to have played at my funeral—another gift to my children.

Again, I am not a legal expert, but one of my widow friends had a devastating experience. She and her partner at the time had created a will. They got married some six months later. Nine weeks after their wedding, her husband passed away very unexpectedly and the marriage had nullified the will, so she lives with that consequence, as her children turn 18, of navigating what that means for them. If you have not got a will, please get one. It is a very, very loving gift to your family.

Motion lapsed, pursuant to standing orders.