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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-11-23 Daily Xml
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FAMILY SAFETY FRAMEWORK

The Hon. CARMEL ZOLLO (15:20): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Regional Development a question about the Family Safety Framework initiative in Berri.

Leave granted.

The Hon. CARMEL ZOLLO: As part of the Women's Safety Strategy, the Family Safety Framework seeks to ensure that services to the families most at risk of violence are dealt with in a more structured and systematic way through agencies sharing information about high-risk families and taking responsibility for supporting these families to navigate the services system. My question to the minister is: can she please provide the chamber with information on the progress of this initiative?

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Minister for Forests, Minister for Regional Development, Minister for Tourism, Minister for the Status of Women) (15:21): I thank the honourable member for her most important question. I have spoken in this place before about the importance of the Family Safety Framework. The Family Safety Framework includes: family safety meetings, which are held at the local level and are focused on identifying individuals who are assessed to be at high risk of domestic violence; and a common risk assessment to ensure consistency across agencies so that the assessment of high-risk cases can be reliable.

I am very pleased that the family safety meetings are now being held in 10 regions throughout South Australia on an ongoing basis. We now have new family safety meetings occurring in the metropolitan policing regions of Sturt and Adelaide Eastern, as well as the Limestone Coast. This now gives us a complete metropolitan coverage of the Family Safety Framework.

The framework has also recently been rolled out to the Berri policing area, with the first family safety meeting being conducted there on 2 November this year. I had great pleasure in being able to attend their second meeting, which was held at Housing SA's Berri office on 16 November when I was visiting the Riverland at the time. It was a great opportunity for me to reaffirm the government's commitment to continuing this most important initiative in person. I had the opportunity to speak with representatives from all of the agencies involved, who were very positive about holding family safety meetings in their region.

They felt that the Family Safety Framework helped formalise processes for managing the risk and safety of women and families in that region. I congratulate the Berri team for their incredible commitment and hard work. These Family Safety Framework meetings really can only be successful when agencies are prepared and willing to work collaboratively together to produce the very best possible outcomes for those women who are assessed as being at high risk. It is a fabulous group, and I commend them for their enthusiasm and commitment.

The meetings are chaired by South Australia Police, with administrative support provided by Victim Support Services. The meeting includes representatives from agencies like Mental Health Services, Women's Health, the Department for Correctional Services, the Department for Education and Child Development, Drug and Alcohol Services SA, Families SA, Housing SA, Murraylands Domestic Violence Service, and Relationships Australia—they are some examples. As I said, I congratulate them on their collaborative efforts.

The need to roll out family safety meetings to Berri and Murray Bridge was identified by the Deputy Coroner in his preliminary findings in a recent very tragic inquest. Work is currently underway to roll out the framework to the Murray Bridge policing area which will expand the framework to 11 regions. This valuable work would not be possible without the support and commitment of a range of government and non-government agencies.

I want to acknowledge the fantastic work that goes towards keeping women and families safe at all of those family safety meetings. As I said, these meetings do identify those women who are at very high risk. An evaluation study was done a number of years ago and that evaluation showed that the Family Safety Framework meetings and case management style of work indeed did significantly reduce the risks to those women who were involved.

The Office for Women continues to take a lead role in this work, providing training and training materials and also working with agencies to provide best practice, as members may recall. As I said, an evaluation was conducted and three-quarters or 75 per cent of referrals that remained in South Australia, the evaluation found, had no SAPOL record of revictimisation for at least three months after the referral, and that was the maximum timeslot that we looked at.

I am sure that members would agree that these are great findings and the Family Safety Framework is a great example of what we can achieve by working together.

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