Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move opposition amendments (27) and (52) together:

(27)  Schedule 1, item 11, page 13 (after subsection (5)) (after line 9) insert:

    ‘(5A)    The proclamation referred to in subsection (5) may only be made after the Accreditation Rules referred to in section 10A have been tabled in Parliament.

(52)  Schedule 4, item 36, page 77 (after line 28) insert:

        (3)    Without limiting subsections (1) or (2), the Accreditation Rules must provide:

             (a)    standards that require family dispute resolution practitioners to have adequate training to recognise the signs of family violence, even where no complaint of family violence is made, and make appropriate referrals;

             (b)   processes for regular monitoring of the quality and performance of family counsellors and family dispute resolution practitioners;

             (c)    rules that require family counsellors and family dispute resolution practitioners to provide their services in a manner which does not discriminate on the basis of race, religious background, language, ethnic background, gender disability, age, locality or socio-economic disadvantage.

These amendments deal with the accreditation rules that will apply for the new family relationship centres. I noted that in summing up the second reading debate the Attorney referred to the competency standards that are being worked through with the training body. All of that is an appropriate process, but at the end of the day it is still a job for government to ensure that there are standards and accreditation processes that can be enforced by the government. It is not adequate that, as the Attorney suggested, each family relationship centre should simply have an internal complaints process. The issue is what sort of external complaints process there is going to be.

I do not want us to take a backward step rather than a forward step with these relationship centres. One of the early problems with the Family Court was people’s concern that there was nowhere they could go to raise their complaints about the court. If we are going to encourage more and more people to resolve their matters through family relationship centres, which are going to be much more dispersed and run by a range of different organisations, we should ensure that we have some proper accreditation rules in place. Amendment (27) provides for the accreditation rules to be tabled before compulsory mediation through these family relationship centres and other services becomes part of our law.

In particular, amendment (52) outlines a number of items that we believe should be included in the accreditation rules. I admit that this is probably an unusual process, because the range of accreditation rules are not in the bill before us, but a number of things do appear in the bill and we do not see any reason why you could not include these specifications to put standards in place that ensure there is proper training for staff of family relationship centres so that they can recognise the signs of family violence—and, most importantly, that they can recognise those signs even where no complaint of family violence is made. All of us in this House know that issues around disclosure, such as people’s fear and embarrassment of disclosure, need to be taken into account. We know from talking with experienced counsellors and others that it is a very difficult area and that they need adequate training, experience and support to make sure they can identify these circumstances easily.

The amendment also provides for the accreditation rules to have a process for the regular monitoring of the quality and performance of family counsellors and family dispute resolution practitioners. Again, we do not want to be in a position where we are encouraging people to resolve their matters outside court, which I think is a very good idea, but are then caught without adequate accreditation standards or training in place and are requiring people to use services that might be handling the matters before them quite inappropriately.

I do not think that is likely to happen. We have a lot of good services in this country that are likely to apply to run these. Hopefully, the government will have a good procedure through their tender process of choosing those services which will be able to do this job well. It seems to me that one of the things that would effectively ensure that we have people providing quality services is to make sure that there is some monitoring of that. It seems to me to be pretty much government 101 to want to be able to have some standards in place to be able to monitor the work that is being done.

Finally, we are asking that the accreditation rules make clear that family counsellors and family dispute resolution practitioners have to provide their services in a manner which does not discriminate on the basis of race, religious background, language, ethnic background, age, locality or socioeconomic disadvantage. What we are trying to say here is that if we have government funded services, they need to be made available to everybody irrespective of religious or political views or other matters. As I said in my speech in the second reading debate in the House on this matter, it is fine that there are many differing views of what are appropriate family relationships, and that there are differing views that people might have on divorce, parenting and other things. I think the community is well served by having a diverse range of views. We need to make sure that government funded services do not see their service provision as an opportunity to try to persuade people to their point of view rather than to provide services of mediation or counselling that the government is paying them for. I hope the government can support these amendments. I think that they enhance the package rather than detract from it.

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