Child Protection

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:52): My question is to the Minister for Education and Child Development. Can the minister confirm whether the royal commission's suggestion that all staff answering CARL lines and the calls in particular have at least three years' field experience has been adopted and, if not, why not?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (14:52): We are still working through that recommendation. We did immediately accept the recommendation, somewhat to my chagrin, that we not have non-social work qualified people answering the calls. As members will be well aware, I was pretty keen on doing a trial of non-social workers answering calls in order to see if we could get the wait time down. However, there was an explicit recommendation that we not proceed with that and so we accepted that immediately. Otherwise, we have staff management and disposition issues of course. We can't just pull people off work that they are doing that is important but we are working through the staffing profile at present.