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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-11-30 Daily Xml
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Statewide Gambling Therapy Service

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (16:14): I rise to talk about, or raise again, the growing concern at the proposed Weatherill government's defunding of the Statewide Gambling Therapy Service. Today, we have seen correspondence from international mental health leader, Professor Abbott, from New Zealand, who has written to South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill and members of the cabinet to express concerns about this particular decision. In his letter he says:

The decision to terminate the therapy services, apart from the loss of an established, proven, high-performing treatment provider, threatens the survival of the associated Flinders Centre for Gambling Research and education and practitioner training programmes. It seems likely that a team of established specialist practitioners and treatment researchers will break up and be lost to the field. Once lost, this type of resource can take years or decades to rebuild.

It is one of an increasing group of people who are raising concerns about the defunding of that particular service, and the AMA continues to raise the issue, as I said. I also want to raise the continuing concerns and questions about the tender process the Labor government went through to give the new service to a company associated with former Labor Party candidate, Dr Quentin Black. In particular, on this occasion, I want to highlight what appears to be a quite deliberate process of airbrushing in a most significant way his publically available CV.

Up until the recent controversy—and I have a copy of his LinkedIn profile from late October—Dr Quentin Black described himself as a senior lecturer in psychiatry and clinical psychology at the University of Adelaide. In his experience, he lists the first experience as being senior lecturer in psychiatry, University of Adelaide, 2014 to the present date in the medical school Department of Psychiatry.

After the recent controversies, when a lot of questions and concerns had been raised about the Labor government process and this particular winning bid, that LinkedIn profile has now been very significantly changed to no longer make any reference to Dr Quentin Black being a senior lecturer in psychiatry, and when one goes to the experience section there is no reference to the senior lecturer in psychiatry from 2014 through to the current day period.

There is a very serious question to be asked as to why that has been changed because a lot of questions were being asked about the accuracy of the claims that he made. Were those claims, for example, made in the winning tender bid and, therefore, is the winning tender bid misleading in any way if that LinkedIn profile was inaccurate when it was publicly available in late October of this particular year? I think that is a critical question that the minister now needs to respond to.

Having lodged FOI documents, the minister and her department are now trying to prevent the release. They say now, 'There are 400 documents, which are too many to give to you. We are going to have to charge you a large sum of money. Will you please reduce the extent of the discovery process for those documents?' If the minister and her department are trying to hide the details that were provided by Dr Quentin Black on his then winning tender bid, then it is shameful in terms of the minister and the processes of her department. I would hope that there would be some reassessment of the FOI process and that those documents are released.

The other airbrushing of the LinkedIn profile is very significant as well. In late October, a very significant part of the CV refers to all of the work that Dr Black did for various Labor Party leaders over the last 20 years in terms of providing advice and the fact that he was the chief of staff to the South Australian premier, or so he claimed, from 2004 to 2006. That is clearly wrong. He was never the chief of staff to the South Australian premier. He was the chief of staff to a minister, but that claim on the LinkedIn profile was wrong. Was that a part of the winning tender bid as well and is that another reason why the minister and her department are refusing to release the documents under FOI?

The LinkedIn profile now has airbrushed out any connection to the Labor Party at all. In late October it was loud and proud, listing all of the Labor Party people he had worked for or helped but now, after the controversy, all of that connection to the Labor Party has been conveniently airbrushed from the history of Dr Quentin Black. Clearly, Dr Black is feeling considerable pressure as a result of the genuine questions that are being raised and I can only hope that the minister and her department will not assist in the concealment of any important information by continuing to refuse the release of documents under FOI.

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