Page 5867 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 7 December 2011
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community services directorates. Included in the statistics are incidences of nurses being verbally abused by members of the public, community service workers being physically assaulted while serving clients and teachers being hit by students or by thrown objects.
I am a little concerned that Mr Rattenbury has sought to directly compare the reported incidence of abuse against public servants with the incidence of offences against the person for the public generally as reported to police. The categories are so dissimilar as to make comparisons meaningless. The reporting requirements are not the same and the categories of abuse are not the same. Therefore, we do not believe any meaningful correlation can be drawn from community-wide statistics relating to offences against the person and work-related verbal and physical abuse encountered by front-line public servants working with society’s most vulnerable.
In the same way, it may actually not be very useful to directly compare the incidence of abuse in one part of the private sector and another. One would not meaningfully compare the incidence of abuse in the hospitality industry with that in the horticultural sector any more than one would usefully compare the incidence of abuse in the horticultural sector with the incidence in the police force.
We are more than happy to make data available when it exists. Indeed, we are only debating this motion today because the government openly and transparently made public the data in relation to the abuse of public servants. Today I take the opportunity to table that information for members for the period from 1 January 2010 to 31 October 2011, which shows over 500 reports of violence against public servants, with both the Education and Training Directorate and the Health Directorate leading the way.
We hope any data we release would be used in a meaningful way. A small proportion of the incidents reported to our whole-of-government system relate to in-house bullying, aggression and assault—in other words, abuse of public servants by other public servants. According to the Commissioner for Public Administration’s annual report for 2010, there were eight substantiated cases of bullying and harassment across the service. The numbers may be small but, as far as I am concerned, a single case is one too many.
Achieving a safe workplace requires leadership. Every director-general in the ACT public service knows what is expected of them. They know they have a responsibility to ensure that models of respectfulness and courtesy are displayed through their organisation, that it is clear that workplace bullying will not be tolerated, that the respect, equity and diversity framework actively endorses the ACT public service respect at work policy and implements the preventing work bullying guidelines, that they promote the ACT public service values of code of ethics and conduct, and that they consult and communicate with staff about prevention initiatives and ensure that incidents of bullying are taken seriously and responded to where appropriate.
Appropriate action can and will be taken against individuals found to be in breach of their obligations under the Public Sector Management Act, the Work Safety Act and the Discrimination Act. We want to ensure that staff feel empowered to speak up and
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