Page 2748 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 6 June 2012
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On the points that Mr Corbell made, as I said, we have spoken to all the official visitors in relation to the exposure draft, which is why we came forward with the bill we are now debating today. They did not raise the concerns that Mr Corbell has raised today around workload, attracting staff or gender issues. On the issue raised about an entitled person requesting to speak directly to someone, the official visitor can refuse that. So those concerns that have been raised about this putting people in danger are not accurate.
As to the offence provisions that Mr Corbell raised, they currently relate to the mental health official visitor. They are in existence and are now being applied to all other official visitors. Again, this is not something that we have put forward that is coming up with a solution or coming up with something which will occur. It is something we already have in operation.
I will go into more detail about some of the things that have been raised. The government has said that each official visitor is different and we cannot have standardised complaints processes. The Greens listened to these views through the consultation process and amended the legislation, which does not propose any standardised processes. It does allow for the minister to make guidelines about the complaints process so that if standardisation did occur it would be because the minister did that at a later stage. The government argument does not make any sense as such. As I have said, I can only assume that the original bill was what was being referred to.
I have already mentioned the community visitor scheme. The community visitor scheme that the government was proposing, as has already been noted, was not in legislation and we believed, therefore, it did not offer the certainty that should be required and that is provided with other official visitors here in the ACT; nor again, the independence that is needed for this role and the strength that legislation has provided. As I have already said in relation to some of the concerns Mrs Dunne raised, the reason we put forward legislation and favour that, and the reason that legislation was provided for other roles, is that it does have teeth if it is required and it provides greater certainty and strength to what the official visitors need to do.
There are two other issues on corrections. The government have indicated today in their speeches and had indicated to us that they would have come back to legislate for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander components of the Official Visitor Bill. Again, I think we go to that. We have got the legislation here today. We do thank the Liberals for supporting it but the government could have supported it and had that role already put in place today in legislation.
We also had some information put to us by the government about the costings, which we did challenge. The government costed the official visitor scheme at $520,840 for recurrent costs in 2012-13. This included administrative support for rent and $206,400 for one-off fit-out and relocation costs. As I said, we challenged the costs in that the scheme would place an additional cost, we determined, of about $215,648 recurrent and $68,000 one-off capital costs. I think we do need to note that funding is actually allocated in this year’s budget for the official visitor scheme.
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