Page 1881 - Week 05 - Thursday, 16 May 2019
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As I said, on the face of it this amendment bill does the right thing by including NDIS providers and workers and clarifying the terms and conditions upon which registration can be given or denied. I note this is a requirement under the intergovernmental agreement and is consistent with the NDIS act. This tranche of amendments is timed so that the ACT government can meet its obligations under the IGA. However, I note that quite a few comments have been made by the JACS scrutiny committee with regard to how the legislation and explanatory statement have been written. In their present form this appears to be quite a complex or possibly even convoluted way of including these changes. I am aware that the minister was asked to respond to several of the issues raised and I am pleased that this has happened.
I note that there is intention to further amend this legislation, in line with recommendations from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. I hope these amendments will result in consistency and clarity across the legislation when they occur.
I fully support the specific inclusion of people working with or volunteering in the NDIS sector, as it is clear that people with disability are particularly vulnerable to abuse. I have no doubt that the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation of People with Disability will uncover horrific and systematic abuse, possibly greater than we have imagined.
We already know that people with a disability experience disproportionately high rates of violence and sexual abuse and other forms of abuse and neglect. Some research articles indicate rates of sexual violence against women with a disability as high as 90 per cent, and for men it is still a very high 60 per cent. These are astronomical numbers, but they are not just numbers; they are people and their experiences and their lives.
The lives of these people have been devastated not just by experiencing abuse but through their inability to get traction when seeking justice. All too often we hear about people with a disability not being believed when they tell someone about the abuse. Even if they are believed, they can be deemed unreliable witnesses because they need assistive communication devices or because they may have an intellectual disability.
Of course, if violence and neglect of people with disability can be prevented in the first place that is where our efforts should be, and that is where this legislation provides protections. Strengthening background checking processes for those working or volunteering in the disability sector is an important avenue to increasing protections.
I note that seniors in their own right do not appear to be covered by this legislation, just insofar as they may be resident in a respite care facility. As we hear more about the exploitation and abuse of people in the aged-care system through the current Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, we may—in fact, I fear we will—need to turn our minds to ensuring that any senior in need of support is also defined as a vulnerable person in our community and will thus not only deserve but, hopefully, get at least the same protections as other vulnerable peoples in this legislation. The Greens support the bill.
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