Tasmanian Civil & Administrative Tribunal (TASCAT) – Ensuring Compliance with Instruments of Enduring Guardianship

The Tribunal registry is receiving Instruments of Enduring Guardianship that are not compliant with statutory requirements under the Guardianship and Administration Act 1995.

The two most common errors are:

• The use of old templates that do not contain the new wording required since amendments took effect on 1 September 2024 (namely Form 1 of Schedule 3 and changes to terms such as ‘decision making capacity’ as opposed to ‘disability’).
• The failure to include the occupations of appointor and appointee.

With respect to the first issue, the Tribunal cannot register these Instruments and they are being returned.

With respect to the second issue, the registry has proceeded to register instruments that have failed to include the occupations of appointor and appointees under SR16 of the TASCAT Rules 2021 but has notified law firms of the issue and encouraged law firms to review their templates and ensure the correct information is included in future applications.  This is generating considerable additional work for the registry and the registry is still seeing new Instruments of Enduring Guardianship from law firms that have been notified of this, that are not addressing this issue.

Would you please ensure a review of all Instruments of Enduring Guardianship templates that being used by your practitioners are actively reviewed to address these two issues.

Please note that any Instrument of Enduring Guardianship that is executed/created after 17 April 2025, that does not include the occupation of appointor and appointee will be automatically returned to the law firm for correction and resubmission.  ‘Occupation’ can reference that they are retired from their occupation such as ‘retired teacher’ or other such description.

The registry acknowledges there will be Instruments of Enduring Guardianship created before that date that will not have been corrected by reference to including occupations.  Any Instruments of Enduring Guardianship that were executed before 17 April 2025 will continue to be registered in accordance with the current practice of use of SR 16 of the TASCAT Rules 2021.

Yours sincerely,