Page 4497 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
I have spoken to a number of organisations who have been receiving fee for service and it appears to me that every time an invoice is put in, there is a haggle; it is haggle, haggle, haggle over each invoice. The invoices are not paid on time. This is not working. We need to move away from this arrangement and we need to move to an arrangement that is respectful and that properly remunerates the agencies that are carrying out this very important work.
It comes as no surprise to me that we are here discussing the need to protect Canberra’s most vulnerable young people. The trauma and lived experience of these children and young people is hard to describe and not something that we find easy to talk about. But it is real and it is happening in our community. The findings of the Public Advocate report tell us that some of the abuse and neglect experienced by children occurs within the system that is there to protect them.
I was contacted by NBSS in early September 2011 about the suspension of their services. Reading through the documents provided by NBSS, and they included documents from both the directorate and the Government Solicitor, I was shocked that a community service provider was being treated this way.
I wrote to Minister Burch on 8 September asking for clarification around several issues. Some of those were about policy and procedure. This organisation had been told that they were not meeting the standards of the policy and the procedures. But when we actually really pushed for that, there did not necessarily appear to be procedures or policy that matched up to the issue that had been raised by the directorate.
This is a real issue. If you are going to have workers on the ground, and we do—we value our workers on the ground; they do a fabulous job—I think they do need to know that this is not about the work that they are carrying out day to day. They are dedicated and committed staff. This is a failure of management in my view. It is not a failure of front-line workers.
In order for them to do their job properly they need clear policies and procedures that are not in an ongoing cycle of some sort of update and where they are not provided with those clear guidelines on how to work. We have been told this morning that there are some policies and procedures. But I am still not clear who has got those policies and procedures, how many policies and procedures there are, how they are rolled out, how workers are kept up to date and trained in those policies and procedures, and with what sort of support.
We have recently heard that there is going to be extra supervision, or supervision, put in place for these workers. I am sorry, but that is really social work 101. You need to have supervision in place for workers to be able to debrief, to be able to reflect on practice and to provide that support. That is how you ensure a healthier workforce that feels valued, that feels listened to and that does not get burnt out too early on.
Since the time that the NBSS incident was raised, I do recognise that the minister did take the initiative to request the Public Advocate to conduct an investigation into the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video