Since the ACT's guardians office was merged with the Public Trustee, the number of people being looked after by guardians has been cut by more than 40 per cent, Public Trustee Andrew Taylor revealed on Tuesday.
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Mr Taylor, appearing before a parliamentary committee, said the guardians were looking after 160 clients, down from 230 a year ago.
The merger of the guardians and trustees office last year hit strong resistance by the guardians and others, with a former head of the guardians office describing it as a travesty that increased the risk of exploitation and abuse.
Guardians are appointed to advocate and make life decisions, such as about medical care or housing, when people have no one else to help. The trustees' office controls people's finances.
On Tuesday, Mr Taylor said one of the problems with the former guardians office was that it had been staffed mainly by social workers.
"As good as they are, [social workers] tend to need to fill gaps that are there; they need to help people, rather than walk away and say, 'I can't do that'.
"The result had been that we had a lot more work on our plate as guardians in the previous regime than we do now," he said.
"We were venturing into area's of people's lives that we didn't need to be or perhaps shouldn't have been. And we did a full stocktake, if you like, of all of the clients that we had which reduced the client group down to 160 from I think it had been 230."
Asked how the client numbers had been culled, Mr Taylor said the public guardian was supposed to be a guardian of last resort and find someone else to do the job where possible. For some clients, they had looked for others to take that role, while others had left town.
For some, circumstances had changed and the "episodic" nature of their issues meant they didn't necessarily need an ongoing guardian.
The ACT is the only jurisdiction in Australia to combine guardians and trustees in one office, with the guardians arguing last year that the offices are deliberately separated elsewhere so that financial considerations do not get in the way of decisions about what was best for each client.
Mr Taylor said this week that in NSW, the guardians and trustees operated as a "loose coalition", but the ACT was the only jurisdiction with a full merger.
The merger had been "rocky", he said. Four of the six guardians had left, with another on extended maternity leave and the sixth moving to the merged office.
"It was said to me if that was going to happen we will not work here any more," he said.
"The loss of those four people was a significant loss. They were extremely well educated, compassionate, articulate people who had very very good, long experience in guardianship, it was very very difficult to replace those people."
But their departure presented an opportunity to diversify beyond social workers, and the guardians office now had people with human rights, corrections, psychology and legal qualifications.
"So the representation is better," he said.
The guardians had had a "mindset", considering themselves "to be a profession of their own, rightly or wrongly, and when they were acting under an order of the tribunal that they more or less owned everything about the person's health, medical, accommodation to the exclusion of community advocate services", Mr Taylor said.
He offered the example of someone being admitted to hospital: "It's not a role of the guardian to sit there and hold their hand for nine hours while they're admitted to hospital."
The separate offices had also led to frustration because there had been two decision makers in each person's life - one making life decisions and the other financial decisions.
"A financial manager for example would say a person can't afford to go to a particular facility, whereas the guardian is hellbent on making something happen in a person's life."
Now, there was "single decision making", with a person's advocate and trustee making decisions together. The result was a more agile system that cost less to run, Mr Taylor said.
Mr Taylor acknowledged that the fraud uncovered in 2014 in the Public Trustee's office had affected trust, the office taking "a hit in the number of wills that we were writing for people in that immediate first year".
