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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-04-01 Daily Xml
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Disability Services Workers

The Hon. T.T. NGO (14:58): My question is to the Minister for Human Services regarding frontline disability workers. What is the government's plan to privatise the work of state government disability services workers?

The Hon. J.M.A. Lensink: Sorry, to do what?

The Hon. T.T. NGO: What is the government's plan to privatise the work—

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: I can't hear the Hon. Mr Ngo. I will be assisted if the government backbenchers are quiet. The Hon. Mr Ngo, start again, please.

The Hon. T.T. NGO: What is the government's plan to privatise the work of state government disability services workers?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (14:59): I think what the honourable member is referring to is the supported accommodation services that are run by the state government. We did have a policy in terms of our supported accommodation services that, as with all of the government services through the NDIS process, we were going to transition all of them to the non-government sector and/or provide a timetable.

The position that we have in terms of people residing in accommodation services is we did a lot of consultation, which I may well have referred to in this place before. In 2019, we did significant consultation with the workforce, with the residents and also with the families of people living in our accommodation services. I think at that stage South Australia had just achieved full transition; that is, anybody who had previously been under the old Disability SA system had transitioned to the NDIS. Therefore, they had their package, but there has been a whole lot of change associated with the transition to the NDIS.

While some of that is settling, it is still quite a challenging space for a lot of people, particularly for people who were in supported accommodation. They can often be quite high-needs clients, so they are generally receiving a lot of services. Some of them are non-verbal, some of them need support in terms of their communications and the like, so it is a fairly sensitive area for us to ensure that we are doing our best to support people in our accommodation services.

There has been a lot of work to improve those services in that time, which includes a zero tolerance framework that has been adopted, which has assisted with quality and safeguarding. There has been a rearranging of a lot of the supervision. My understanding is that a lot of the staff, when we came to office, did not even have emails and were quite disconnected from the rest of the system. There has been a range of audits to ensure that we can meet the standards when the in-kind arrangements end: additional training and development; a reporting system which enables people to provide anonymous complaints for staff, clients and families; reviews of restrictive practices; and a customer charter.

I have also talked about the People's Advocacy Group, a client reference group within advocacy services that enables them to provide feedback on the services. That has been a huge success, and we are continuing to expand that, from what I understand. A lot of work has gone into the quality, and so we have kept the current arrangements in place through the understanding that there are a lot of people who did not wish to change providers. If people do wish to change providers, they are enabled to do that, because of course the NDIS is about choice and control, so people should be able to choose their own providers, but we continue to provide that support on an ongoing basis.

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