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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
2014-09-23 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

Child Protection Screening

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (15:11): I rise today to talk about a constituent issue I have been dealing with over the past number of weeks. When you first come into this place with high-minded ideals and the idea that you can help people, I thought that I would help to make a positive contribution in people's lives, but alas I have spent quite a bit of time saving people from the very government that I wish one day to become a part of. No such example could be more stark than a woman called Jasmine Kerr who came to my office a number of weeks ago.

Jasmine works at the local Nuriootpa Community Children's Centre, and eight weeks before the expiration of her DCSI clearance she submitted paperwork on getting a renewed certificate. Those eight weeks came and went and she was without a certificate. As a consequence, she had to step down temporarily from her position working at the kindy and also working at the out-of-hours school care. At the same time she was furiously emailing the department to ask where her clearance was. The answer that she got back from the department was very bland. It was basically, 'We will get to it and you will know when we get to it.'

In sheer desperation as a young mum who does not have infinite means, she contacted my office to try to get some help. The staff at my office quickly wrote an email to the minister, and the subsequent investigation came back that she was merely missing the middle name on her application. What I find quite interesting is that it was not in those first eight weeks that they came back to her and said she would need to resubmit; it was something in the order of 14 to 15 weeks afterwards that the department got back to her, and it only did so after the urging of my office. I find that quite disgusting.

What happened after that was she very quickly resubmitted her application and a couple of weeks later was given her clearance. I put on the record for the house that here is a woman who waited 17 weeks to get her clearance, nine weeks of which she had to spend at home with no income because this government could not get its act together. I do not know of too many people who could survive for two months without a job. I know that in my situation I would struggle to survive for two months without a job (and in no way at this point am I casting aspersions on my wife's spending habits). This poor woman was sitting at home for nine weeks, stressing and fretting because she was not able to go to work.

Nuriootpa is not a town that has a surplus of workers in early education, and the kindergarten found it very difficult to find alternative arrangements, especially to fill her position for a short-term appointment. Here we have a situation where not only was she incredibly inconvenienced but the kindergarten itself was also inconvenienced by struggling to find staff to fill her position. Jasmine tells me that other people are in the same situation and have had to take long service leave to cover off the gap. Again, I find it disgraceful that those who say they stand up for the worker and workers' entitlements force workers to use those entitlements to cover government ineptitude, and it is simply not good enough.

Subsequent correspondence from the department suggests that people who wish to get a renewal of their clearance need to contact the department six months—six months—before the expiry of their current clearance, and that is simply not good enough. I would contend that there is a need for the level of staffing within that department to be increased to cover off the increased workload.

In phone calls made to the department, the department did indeed suggest that it was ready, willing and able to fill the shortfall and had people willing to work overtime. They wanted to have increased staffing to fill the positions and get through the backlog of work so that situations like Jasmine Kerr's did not exist. The answer from those up on high was that those decisions were not able to be made. I find it an absolutely disgusting shame that this government is disadvantaging the very people it says it champions, that we have a situation where people are not able to actively do the jobs and go about their daily lives, and that this government is interfering in them.

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