Domestic Violence Accommodation

The Hon. C.M. SCRIVEN (15:02): Supplementary, for clarification: in terms of the crisis accommodation beds, is the minister saying that not one of those is up and running and they are still only looking at signing contracts?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:02): This comes back to my white knight comment before. We need to get these services right. We need to ensure that the service providers, because these are services that will be provided by specialist domestic violence services—we need to make sure that we have an agreement on where they are going to operate from. It is quite customary, I think, in these things that negotiations will sometimes take longer than we anticipated, but we certainly want to make sure that we get the services right so that, from the day they are operating, people are receiving the right mix of services. I make no apology for that.