Community Visitor Scheme

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY (14:36): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Human Services a question regarding the Community Visitor Scheme.

Leave granted.

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY: The community visitor can now only visit state-operated services. This leaves thousands of people living in services now principally funded through the NDIS (that is non-government services) without access to the community visitor. The opposition is aware that many operators and residents would prefer the oversight of the community visitor, with organisations prepared to sign agreements with the community visitor to allow entry.

In July, the minister stated she was working with the Attorney-General's Department to make the appropriate legislative arrangements to allow the visitor to continue their important and vital work. The minister explained that the Victorian government has made the legislative changes required to allow the community visitor to continue to visit non-government schools.

My question to the minister is: why is it that the Victorian government has been able to make the legislative changes required to allow the community visitor to continue to visit non-government services in June 2019, and yet the South Australian government has not, leaving vulnerable South Australians at risk?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (14:37): I thank the honourable member for his question. At the outset, can I reject the last assertion in his comments, because all the NDIS participants—and South Australia is now at full scheme—are funded through the National Disability Insurance Scheme and therefore their services are registered and regulated through the quality and safeguarding commission, which is part of the new system that has been operative in South Australia since 1 July of this year, and that is now the appropriate oversight body for regulation of services.

We have, indeed, had a Community Visitor Scheme for mental health and disability in South Australia for some time. I was actually the person who moved the amendments to the Mental Health Act, whenever it was some time ago, that established the Community Visitor Scheme under the Mental Health Act, which was then extended to disability services. Disability services were able to be visited through the funding arrangements that the South Australian government held with providers.

I do understand, as I have received representations on the matters that the honourable member has raised, but it is also important to remember that, regardless of what the providers themselves might think, it's actually somebody's home that we are talking about. It is like inviting someone into someone else's home without their permission, I think is the analogy that should be made. Providers can also, if they wanted to, in some way approach the community visitor to use that service as a quality assurance process, which is what a number of them found useful. Then that is something that could also be looked at.

We have also made some changes recently which the honourable member referred to. He might have missed the more recent media in which we have been able to extend the role of the Community Visitor Scheme to include people who are under guardianship of the Public Advocate. That has extended that to a cohort of—it is several hundred people, from memory.

So the participants who are still in state-funded, state-run government properties are still covered by the community visitor, as are that cohort of people under the Public Advocate, and the quality and safeguarding commission is the appropriate place for regulation, complaints and so forth for anyone who is a fully transitioned NDIS participant who is not covered under those state areas I have referred to.