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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-06-16 Daily Xml
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Smith, Ms A.M.

Ms COOK (Hurtle Vale) (15:22): Today, I will be speaking about the terrible tragedy that was the death of Ann Marie Smith and the consequences of that and what has happened since we discovered, almost four weeks ago, that Ann Marie Smith passed away. She was found in her chair, she obviously was not getting the supports that she required and she had complex needs. She was taken to hospital and died within 24 hours. The community is fearful about that.

The community has expressed a lot of anxiety about that, and since that happened dozens of people reached out to us, asking us to get answers about how this could occur in a community where we are investing a lot of time, a lot of energy and a lot of love and care into people with disabilities. How does this happen in our community? This horrific story of alleged neglect and loneliness and a community that has let someone down is absolutely shocking.

We know that there are questions that need to be answered by the state government. We know that the state government has continued to have responsibility in the area of transition from the state disability funding model to the NDIS. We know that the state government continues to have responsibility in terms of the screening of people who work with vulnerable adults. We know that the state government should have had a line of sight over Ann Marie Smith.

For the past two years, we have been asking questions about how this was happening. How was the state government ensuring that people like Ann Marie were looked after—people with complex disabilities in our community who move from one system to the other, who were subject to the institutional layering of policy that we know causes people to fall through the gaps?

We have asked questions about what has happened in terms of the handover of Ann Marie from a support coordination point of view. We have asked about the screening of workers looking after people who have complex disability like Ann Marie Smith. We have asked for answers around the Community Visitor Scheme. We have tabled legislation about the Community Visitor Scheme. This week, that legislation has been supported in principle by the Law Society, which is the peak legal body in South Australia.

Today, we have finally seen the tabling of the report delivered by the task force set up by the government to investigate what they call 'gaps in the system'. South Australians rightly want to know how these gaps affected someone like Ann Marie Smith and how they were left to develop over time, during this transition from state to federal funding.

Ann Marie Smith barely cops a mention in this report. She is introduced as a terrible tragedy within the foreword of the report, but we do not see a deep dive into how the state government failed Ann Marie Smith. We know that the federal government has undertaken an independent inquiry into Ann Marie Smith, but the state government has pulled together a task force that is sadly overladen with government officials who have been part of the system that let down people with complex disability—people like Ann Marie Smith.

We have no issue with people on that task force who have lived experience and who are supporting their loved ones and working in the space. We have absolute respect for those people, but what we are not seeing in this report are detailed descriptors of what has gone wrong with the state system. There are suggestions about changes to the Adult Safeguarding Unit, which has only recently been operational in South Australia.

We have seen an admission that the Community Visitor Scheme must be developed, supported and strengthened, which is what we have been asking for, not just for two weeks. We have been asking questions about this for two years. We acknowledge that the Law Society has made some commentary in regard to some improvements that can be made to the legislation.

These are simple amendments and we are prepared to work with the government on this. What we do not have is a light being shone onto the failures of this state government over the past two years during the transition from state to federal funding.

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