Page 2975 - Week 08 - Thursday, 15 August 2019
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The review recommended that the Official Visitor Act be amended to provide a more comprehensive reporting framework. The bill amends and strengthens the quarterly reporting requirement for official visitors. The bill requires the official visitor board to prepare an annual report. The report must be provided to the official visitor minister for tabling in the Assembly. The report must also be published. The annual report must include information about the number of visits, complaints and referrals, and a summary of systemic issues identified by official visitors.
The bill also makes an important change to the way visitable places are recorded. The bill abolishes the requirement for the minister to specify addresses and details of visitable places in guidelines. While in some areas, such as corrections, visitable places do not change often, in other areas, such as homelessness services, disability accommodation and residential out of home care, numbers and locations of visitable places change more regularly and it can be difficult for operational areas to keep the guidelines up to date. The process of developing and notifying new guidelines is an administrative burden and there are also real privacy concerns associated with publishing details of certain visitable places; for example, residential out of home care facilities.
The bill replaces the guideline requirement with a requirement for the director-general of an operational directorate to maintain a register of visitable places that can be more easily updated. Details of the register are required to be provided to a range of specified people.
Other amendments proposed by the bill include clarifying the role and functions of the official visitors board, strengthening the independence of official visitors by confirming that they are not subject to the direction of operational directorates or other entities, except as provided by the act and other legislation, and removing the title of principal mental health official visitor.
The title of principal mental health official visitor was a remnant of the previous standalone mental health official visitor scheme. Many of the roles that were previously performed by the principal mental health official visitor, including coordinating annual training, will now be undertaken by the dedicated executive officer.
In conclusion, this bill makes significant improvements to the official visitor scheme to help official visitors provide vital support to vulnerable people and to enhance the oversight of visitable places. I commend the bill to the Assembly.
Debate (on motion by Mrs Jones) adjourned to the next sitting.
Environment and Transport and City Services—Standing Committee
Statement by chair
MS ORR (Yerrabi) (10.48): Pursuant to standing order 246A, I wish to make a statement on behalf of the Standing Committee on Environment and Transport and
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