Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I will commence with redress. Two honourable members have raised the issue of redress and raised a variety of issues. Both of them mentioned the allocation in the recent budget. That is a very important allocation—funding of $33.4 million for 2017-18. That is funding that is shared between the Department of Human Services and the Attorney-General's Department to the separate amounts of $23.6 million and $1.61 million, and DSS to the amount of $6.04 million. That, in effect, allows us to commence the establishment of the administrative bureaucracy that will actually run the redress scheme. So it is very much evidence of the commitment to the scheme, the commitment to the 1 July 2018 commencement and very important money that is established in this budget.

With respect to redress, the member for Jagajaga asked how the redress scheme is envisaged to deal with people who have passed away. My recollection is that we are following the recommendation of the royal commission—I think it was recommendation 47. The royal commission recommended that redress should only be available for applicants who are alive at the time that the redress scheme is operative and available. We are following that recommendation, which is to say that the scheme is not envisaged to be available for those people who have passed away. We will have a system of prioritisation so that those people who are in aged categories or in categories of ill health will be at the absolute front of the applicants queue and considered first. In that respect, we are abiding by the royal commission's recommendation but also recognising that, of course, timing is important here. We will be making every effort and giving administrative consideration to bringing forward and making a priority those applications that represent people who are in conditions of frailty or ill health or who are aged.

As to the issue, by way of passing, that you raised as to Labor's view that it should not be an opt-in scheme, the observation I would offer there is that we are following the royal commission recommendations very closely. Given the constitutional status of the Commonwealth's ability to operate this scheme, it is hard to envisage that there could be any scheme other than that which we would describe as an opt-in scheme. You then say that progress has been, in your words, slow. The progress, I think, represents the significance of the challenge in front of us. I would not describe it as slow; I would describe the progress as substantial and positive. The meeting that we had with attorneys-general was very positive. Issues were raised there, but none of them seemed to anyone in the room to be insurmountable issues that would cause a barrier to any jurisdiction entering. As an observation, the tone, language and constructive nature of that meeting was very different from some of the public statements that have been made. As you are well aware, there were what I would describe as unfortunate early public statements from the South Australian government that they did not have an intention to join the scheme. Those were not statements that were repeated in the attorneys-general meeting that I presented at. But there were issues raised, and these issues probably come as no surprise to you, Member for Jagajaga, or anyone else here. There were issues around funding of last resort, around the nature of the administrative costs and how they would be delineated and how we would communicate those, and around the legislation itself. The intention is to have draft legislation available relatively soon. I am giving consideration at the moment as to how we would release a form of that draft for open comment. I think that that is important to garner as much confidence in the joining parties.

On the issue of non-government institutions, so the churches and charities, a range of complications arise whereby organisations that we would see from the outside as representing a single unit are administratively and structurally a combination of a variety of different decision-making units. I will use a few examples of meetings that I have had recently. Scouts Australia is not one body but a federation of individual state bodies, each of which, they inform me, would need to make an individual decision about opting into the scheme. The Anglican Church represents a range of dioceses, all of which have independent decision-making power. It is also important to have Anglican schools in the scheme. It is also important to have Anglicare in the scheme, and Anglicare itself has two decision-making bodies inside it.

So the stage that I am at, at the moment, is the point at which we are formalising our approaches to get some kind of formal recognition of an opt-in, and we are trying to delineate exactly who that should be made with. (Time expired)

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