Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Social Services. The National Redress Scheme was designed to provide financial compensation to victims of child sex abuse, as recommended by the royal commission. Applicants have been told it will take a further 18 months to process, and they will not receive a gold card, despite the royal commission recommendation. Will the minister advise how the claim process can be improved to reduce the trauma of time, and whether the provision of a gold card will be introduced into the scheme's compensation package?

Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Mayo for that question. Since becoming the Minister for Social Services I've taken particular interest in the National Redress Scheme, and I have had a number of important meetings where I've been able to discuss progress, firstly with my ministerial colleagues, my state and territory colleagues, where we look to address the outstanding recommendations of the second-year review. The gold card was not one of those recommendations of the second-year review, but we are working through those issues and, hopefully, will be reporting early next year, when it comes to finalising that important work.

I also held a roundtable, a significant forum, with victim-survivors, as well with those delivering the redress scheme. We talked about some of the challenges around applications. Of course, dealing with applications in a timely manner is critically important; although it was noted that, in July last year, the scheme had gone online and there had not been appropriate resources allocated by the former government to deal with the influx of applications.

In the October budget I allocated an extra $15 million to deal with the application backlog. In saying that, I would like to note that the time it does take a participant to go through redress is not always the processing time. Sometimes it can be at the participant's request that they would like to pause because it becomes emotionally incredibly distressing. So, at times, it is directed by those who are part of the scheme to pause that. Also, when gathering information from institutions, sometimes those institutions are defunct and not able to provide it and that does cause delay. Application delay is something I am very mindful of. As I said, the government has allocated extra resources in the most recent budget. I look forward to continuing to work on how we best support people through that process, particularly making sure that those services that are funded to help them through in a trauma-informed way are there and that the application process within my department is also operating at its best.