Legislative Council Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2) 54 2 Parliament of South Australia Legislative Council published Question Time Disability Services Disability Services The Hon. J.S. LEE Legislative Council Disability Services The Hon. J.S. LEE (14:52): The question I ask is of public interest. My question is to the Minister for Human Services regarding safety for people with disabilities. Can the minister please provide an update to the council about how the Marshall Liberal government's new easy to use safeguarding app will help ensure the wellbeing and safety of South Australians with a disability? The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK Legislative Council Minister for Human Services Disability Services The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (14:52): I thank the honourable member for her question. It is a great honour to be able to talk about our proposal for a new safeguarding app for people with disability. We have contacted the Australian government. Both the new minister for NDIS, the Hon. Linda Reynolds, and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission have indicated their support for this particular initiative. The state government has committed $500,000 for the creation of a smart phone app and, as I said, we have endorsement from the federal government. We are intending that the app will be able to assist people with disability to do a number of things. During the COVID period, the Community Visitor Scheme, when it wasn't able to visit people in their homes, was conducting a number of its visits by audiovisual means. So we believe that audiovisual means will be a really useful way of people with disability being able to connect with a community visitor, to have a check-in with them—not a formal health check but a wellbeing check, I should say—and also to contact a range of different services that they may need through a range of functionalities through the app. Clearly, there would be emergency services available. We are anticipating that we would also have contact available, as I have said, through the virtual Community Visitor Scheme; potentially through advocacy bodies; the Adult Safeguarding Unit, which was extended last year to people with disabilities; the Quality and Safeguards Commission; the Health and Community Services Complaints Commissioner; and also to have all the hotline numbers that people may need to contact through that. Our next steps will be to consult with people with disability to see what sort of features they are interested in and the form which it should take. Clearly, we would want to have things in easy English and use the particular accessible functionality, which I think is known by the acronym WCAG, which means that it's able to be accessed by a range of people who might be sight impaired, hearing impaired and the like. So we look forward to hearing from anybody who has any suggestions about how this app might—what particular features and functionalities they would be interested in, and we intend that it may well be a pilot that can be rolled out across Australia in due course.