Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Families and Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Siewert for her follow-up question Let's be clear: no. The implication that possibly comes from your question is that people haven't been able to exit the card. I have not said that. What I have said is that the process under which we need to undertake the assessment—working with various stakeholder groups, with state and territory governments and with local providers to be able to gather the information to determine whether those criteria have been met—has been complex. So the process is ongoing. People who have made application will be assessed on a case-by-case basis, and obviously processing times are going to vary between applications. So we will continue to work with the trial sites and with the local providers so that we can make sure that, when we make the assessments to determine whether people come off the card or not, we are dealing with issues like the drug and alcohol related issues, crime, violence and antisocial statistics.