Families SA Staffing

Ms SANDERSON (Adelaide) (14:47): My question is to the Minister for Education and Child Development. Given the Public Service Association claims that the vacant positions for Families SA workers are as high as 200, will the minister confirm the number of positions currently vacant?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (14:48): Mr Speaker, I would have to take on notice the precise number today. It is in the order of 120 vacancies. We have been steadily filling positions in Families SA over the last year in a very concerted effort.

Previously, some years back, the practice in Families SA was that each office would go through selection processes, and that is a respectable way of addressing vacancies. More recently, the practice has centralised and we have gone through establishing panels, having a call for positions and then working through filling those positions both for social workers and youth workers, and also for administrative staff. We are catching up and closing in on the FTE cap, but we are not there yet.

One of the challenges, of course, is attrition. So, as fast as you bring staff in, you will lose some. It is no secret that Families SA is a workplace that is going through a high degree of criticism publicly at the moment, and it is not easy for the staff in that area. Not only is it at times, I imagine, quite tempting to go to a different job because of the difficulty, complexity and, in some cases, the very deeply distressing nature of the work that they do, but I also imagine that the degree of public scrutiny over the last year has caused some people to rethink their roles.

We are earnestly working on closing that gap still further, but it is unlikely that we will get to zero, given the constant need to deal with attrition. But we are a long way from the 200 that was previously the case and closing as diligently as possible.