Chris Ellison (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I think that ‘more acceptable’ is the wrong way to put it. None of the behaviours described by Senator Allison are acceptable in any form or shape. But where you attach mandatory reporting, you are breaking away from the law across the board as we know it. It is rare. It is not often that you find in our laws a duty to report. It is a departure from accepted practice. In this case, we are making that departure for serious cases, and those serious cases relate to sexual assault and serious physical assault. To extend mandatory reporting to all of the activity we have been talking about would be excessive. That is the first bit.

The second bit is: do you offer the protection for the reporting of only the serious behaviour or criminal activity? Do you extend that protection to the reporting of all of the activity that has been mentioned? We believe the same argument applies. The protection should be attached to the duty to report; and, in the wider sense, the reporting of neglect, emotional abuse and other forms of abuse can be made anonymously and confidentially, by anyone, to the department. Those activities are contrary to the Aged Care Act. So we are saying: where there is a duty to report, there is a protection to go with it; where there is not a corresponding duty to report then there is not the same protection. What I have said is that this will be monitored, and it can be monitored by the department assessing all the reports it receives over a given time. It will assess the nature of the reports, the number of reports, and who made them. From that, it can draw conclusions as to whether or not the regime in the bill is working. If it is working, that is fine; if it is not, that is something we will have to revisit, if that is the case.