Child Protection

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (14:20): My question is to the Premier. Has the recently established Nyland Royal Commission Response Unit made any recommendations to government that have been rejected and, if so, what were they and what were the reasons for the rejection?

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Justice Reform, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Child Protection Reform, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for Consumer and Business Services, Minister for the City of Adelaide) (14:20): The response unit is essentially an internal unit within government which tries to bring together the different agencies and work through, in a methodical way, what has been recommended in the royal commission report. As I think we canvassed last week, the government has embraced 38 of those recommendations already. The remaining recommendations are being worked through in an orderly fashion.

As each one of the recommendations is dealt with, the government will determine whether the recommendation is accepted or not accepted. Thus far, we have not come to the point where there has been a situation where there has been any recommendation that we have so far dealt with which has not been accepted. Some of them were recommendations which we felt we could move forward with irrespective of how the final child protection model looked. Some of them were recommendations which the royal commissioner in her report said were things that we should be doing straightaway.

One example is the notion that there should be no proceeding with the use of people other than social workers to take calls on the CARL line. That is something the government had been thinking about and was very keen to pilot, but the commissioner said, 'No, I don't want you to do that, full stop.' So there is one recommendation, for example, that we accepted straightaway and acted upon straightaway by not implementing what was a planned rollout of a new pilot.

We are working our way through methodically. There have been no examples so far of where the commissioner has recommended one thing and we have decided we're not going to do it, or indeed that working group has come to government with propositions which we have been in a position to be able to say yes or no to, because we are working through a great many recommendations at the same time.