TRANSCRIPT
FAMILY AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
Inquiry into social inclusion and Victorians with a disability
Melbourne — 3 March 2014
Members
Mrs A. Coote
Ms B. Halfpenny
Mr J. Madden
Mr D. O’Brien
Ms D. Ryall
Chair: Ms D. Ryall
Deputy Chair: Ms B. Halfpenny
Staff
Executive Officer: Dr J. Bush
Research Officer: Ms V. Finn
Administrative Officer: Ms N. Tyler
Witnesses
Mr L. Harkin, AM, Commissioner,
Ms L. Coulson Barr, Deputy Commissioner, and
Ms T. Reinisch, Principal Officer, Disability Services Commissioner.
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The CHAIR — Thank you for appearing before us today. I will give you some background information. I
remind you that all evidence taken by this committee is taken under the provisions of the Parliamentary
Committees Act 2003, which attracts parliamentary privilege and is protected from judicial review. Any
comments made outside the precinct of this hearing are not protected by parliamentary privilege. All evidence
given today is being recorded; however, the committee hearing is not being publicly broadcast. You will be
provided with a proof version of the transcript. I now ask you to introduce yourselves, state the name of the
organisation you are representing and then provide us with a 15-minute presentation to which we will respond
with questions.
Mr HARKIN — Sure. Thanks for the opportunity to come along to another parliamentary committee. It is
always pleasant to say hi to various MPs and give studious consideration to important issues. We appreciate the
time. I am Laurie Harkin. I am the disability services commissioner, in fact referenced in the terms of reference,
having been established some seven years ago. My colleague, Lynne Coulson Barr, on my right is deputy
commissioner; on my left is Tamara Reinisch, who is the principal officer in my office. That is who we are.
The CHAIR — Thank you.
Mr HARKIN — We have submitted a piece of advice to you, which has probably not been able to be
digested given that it was only provided to you on Friday, but there are a number of other things that we have
provided to you just now and I will give context for them, if I may. Two are Occasional Papers; one goes back
to a paper that we wrote about three years. The purpose that sat behind us writing that was we were
unconvinced that people with disabilities’ rights were being appropriately protected by the various arrangements
that are in place that ought to have afforded better protection than they were receiving. It is a paper based on a
range of considerations, including inquiries of our own, international research and significant consultation. I can
probably talk a bit more to that paper as my 15 minutes unfold.
The bright orange paper that you have with slightly pointed cogs on the front — we would hope the cogs mesh
when the wheels turn; they do not always — is a paper that we have only recently produced, and we were
moved to produce that again because we were not convinced that folks with a disability necessarily were
afforded appropriate opportunity. We looked at the sorts of things that characterised why things went badly in
relationship terms with service users, their families and service providers, it was typically that the well of
goodwill and trust had been poisoned over time, and finding ways to recover from those levels of distrust in
terms of rebalancing relationships was herculean as a task. But more to the point, we have taken a view that
says, before all of that, what is missing in the things that go not so well is typically a lack of agreement and
understanding about what it is that is to be provided by a provider and what it is that the family’s expectations
are, and there needs to be clarity about those things.
Ideally these things are written down, in particular to include, where things do go badly — and things often will
go not as well as you would hope, notwithstanding good intentions — that the ways in which these events,
should they arise, might be remedied are clearly articulated and understood by the parties. We hope that if those
sorts of foundational approaches are adopted — it is a bit like building the house not from the roof but from the
ground — then the prospect of better things happening for folks would be enhanced.
I do not want to be too tedious, but I draw your attention to the Disability Act — not all of it, just a few bits. I
invite the committee to give some thought to one or two things in the act, in particular its purpose at part 1. I
want to recite some words — not all of it, because you will lose the will to live if I do that. In the purpose,
among other things it uses the words:
… the recognition that this requires support across the government sector and within the community.
The next thing I would like to mention is in section 4 of the act. The objectives of the act include:
(a) advance the inclusion and participation in the community of persons with a disability;
(b) promote a strategic whole of government approach in supporting the needs and aspirations of persons with a disability …
It seems to me that these things are germane to your considerations, and that is the driver for my drawing this to
your attention. Part 3, division 1, section 8(2) of the act defines the role of the Secretary of the Department of
Human Services as, among other things, having a function:
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(a) to promote awareness and understanding of disability within the community;
I note that the secretary is the only person in the act who is required to do such a thing — nobody else is, just the
secretary. My submission to you is this: this is not about human services; this is about society. I will go on.
Trust me, I am nearly finished. Section 12 is about the functions of the Victorian Disability Advisory Council.
The act establishes an advisory council to give advice to the minister. In particular at 12(1)(a) it says:
(i)
whole of government policy directions and strategic planning and the implementation of initiatives for persons with a
disability;
(ii) the barriers to full inclusion and participation in the community of persons with a disability and the strategies for the removal
of those barriers;
Those are the things about which the council is required to give advice to the minister — one minister, just one.
Lastly, section 12(1)(e) of the act says the council will:
(e) monitor the implementation of strategies for promoting inclusion and participation in the community of persons with a
disability and for removing barriers to inclusion and participation.
My reading of the act ends there. The point I want to leave you with, and my reason for reciting that, is that this
is where I think legislatively there are deficits. The act refers only to particular responsibilities being vested with
the Minister for Community Services and the other titles that minister may hold, and the secretary is the only
person or government official who is nominated as having to do anything about it, leaving aside various other
things that are laudably said in the act. There is no particular regime of arrangements that requires a
whole-of-government approach to be adopted; it rests on the goodwill of the government, whomever the
government of the day might be. I find it curious that the expectation of government would have it all sit with
one minister. I again repeat that I do not think this is a question of human services or community services; it is a
societal question.
Recently when I spoke with some folk on a Channel 31 program I observed that in the work we do lots of
people are afraid to speak up about their circumstances. The fear people hold is influenced by two things
particularly. One is that they have been conditioned, if you like, to fear that if they say anything, they will lose
something they have — that something they have by way of support will be diminished in some way. The other
key factor in influencing fear is that if a person is in receipt of what is described as and understood to be
intimate supports, they are less likely again to say anything, because they do not want to poison the relationship
or the dependency that people may feel in terms of a recipient of supports of that kind.
I draw your attention to a vast array of other things. Here is the 2010–2020 National Disability Strategy, which
talks about inclusion. Here is a Services Connect thing from human services, which talks about inclusion. It
goes on. Here is more from Services Connect. Blow me down, there is even a Victorian state plan, and the state
plan unsurprisingly talks about inclusion.
I do not reckon anybody needs another document that talks about social inclusion; I reckon a simple thing that
needs to happen is that there be a genuine commitment to do something across government that everybody buys
into and that does not see social inclusion for folks with a disability as some add-on we need to think about
because we are kindly folks and we want to give appropriate and thoughtful consideration to other folks who do
not have the same abilities as us. Fundamentally that is a bigger issue.
The extent to which you can influence your parliamentary colleagues and indeed whether you agree with me at
all are obviously matters for you, but the views that I bring to you are informed by seven years of practice in the
complaints business with people with a disability. We have had something like 4000 people with disabilities
bring issues to us over this time. Through the complaints reporting mechanism under section 105 of the act, all
people who are registered providers are required to report to me every year on the number of complaints they
have had, what they have done and the outcomes they have achieved.
Significantly within that reporting tool there are two free text sections. Since the early days those free text
sections have been increasingly populated The two questions that are posed are these: ‘Can you name one
practice change you have implemented as a consequence of dealing with complaints in the last year?’ and ‘Can
you name one procedural or policy change you have implemented as a consequence of dealing with complaints
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in the last year?’. The message, given the increased extent to which providers populate them, is that we are
dealing with a growing and more thoughtful environment of service provision.
Are we there yet? I feel like a child in the back of the car and my father or mother turns from the front and
sternly says, ‘No, but please be quiet’, and I say, ‘No, I can’t be quiet; I just have to keep talking. Please don’t
frown at me, but when will we be there?’. The fact is we will not be there for a while yet, but what is
encouraging, when I look out the window of the car from the back seat, is that I can see we are actually going
somewhere, which is a really good thing.
If you go to the sorts of things we have said in particular in our submission to you, we have drilled down to a
number of the dimensions I have spoken to at a high level around what would be useful to see. I do not think
you need another plan, and I am not suggesting you are trying to work on one. I think there is enough work
done. There is opportunity to really make a difference. People are working at really making a difference. There
is not a shortage of commitment or goodwill, but things still go badly wrong. People with disabilities are still
abused. It gives me no joy to sit here with you today and say with some level of confidence, if not disturbance,
that there are people out there right now who are being treated badly because of a service system and a society
that do not recognise that folks are entitled to be treated the same as everyone else. It should not be an additional
question.
If I think about the work more recently, some work has been written by the Association for Children with a
Disability. They go to the question of special schools and what they mean, and they talk about something
philosophically that is very powerful. Why are the schools so special? What is it that causes us to think about
small children with a disability in a way that needs to label them that way? What message does it give to the
small children as they grow up that they have already been labelled as special — that they are different? These
are bigger questions for us to all think about so that we touch the society we are part of in a different and more
caring way.
Without wanting to proselytise about anything in particular, those subtle messages reinforce in people’s lives
that they are special. In a not special school that has some special children, when a specialist teacher comes in
typically the special children are taken away to another part of the classroom and are visited upon by the
specialist teacher whilst the other less special children — the ordinary children — are dealt with in the routine
way by the education system. It is surely flawed, I would have said, if you are thinking about that as being
inclusive. It is clearly not inclusive, but there is an embedded practice that we do not challenge enough as a
society what it is that we do and why we do it. I am mindful of time; I can talk under wet cement.
The CHAIR — Thank you very much, Mr Harkin. I will kick off with the first question. In relation to the
complaints mechanism you talked about all of those reports feeding in to you. I am obviously referring to social
inclusion, but we can look at all aspects of complaint. Is there a mechanism for collating that data and then,
through that, putting forth recommendations on the improvement of standards of disability services and also the
improvement of operations of disability services, or to the wider scale of statewide?
Mr HARKIN — The simple answer is yes, but I would invite my colleagues to also speak, if that is alright,
rather than sit here with me.
The CHAIR — Certainly.
Ms COULSON BARR — What we do with the complaints that are made to our office is — we have a data
system — we identify what the issues are presenting in each of the complaints and we categorise them. We
identify themes related to quality of standards of disability services. We also identify where there are issues
around the adequacy of support for people to participate in community activities — activities of their choice.
We report that in our annual report, and we also compare that to the data that the service providers report to us
on complaints made to them. We are in the process of producing another of those occasional papers that will
look at the data over six years in terms of: what are the themes and what can we learn from those complaints in
terms of improving services? We can also, in relation to specific instances, provide a notice of advice to a
service provider or the department in their role of policy-maker when we identify themes, where there are real
issues in terms of quality of service, and we identify an area that needs to be addressed.
The CHAIR — Trends from that perspective?
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Ms COULSON BARR — Yes.
Ms REINISCH — Just to add to that in a little bit more granular detail, there is the annual complaints
reporting tool, which is an online tool that all funded services can access. It is quite a dynamic tool that can be
accessed from the staff level to the manager, and they can see their organisational complaints. The benefits of
having a consistent tool that goes across all services is that, one, this tool was designed — and you will see a bit
more information in our submission — to come from what we call a person-centred practice point of view. So it
is very much asking about how that person viewed the complaint and what the outcome was for that person, but
it also asks what the detail is around the service issue and trends — exactly what Laurie was saying before about
‘What have you learnt? How difficult was this complaint?’ and other issues.
What comes out very strongly year to year, and what is also supported in the early data for our occasional paper,
is that communication is the number one issue. Quality in accommodation is also a key issue; likewise, the staff
or people supports that sit around a person is another critical issue. What that says to me, when you look at the
data and you look at the free text, is that this is not just a service system response; this is really about how we
embed true inclusion and respect for people with a disability. They are some early findings for that paper.
Ms HALFPENNY — I have not read this, but in terms of the complaints, are they mainly complaints about
a service or that the result of a service was not — —
Mr HARKIN — Yes.
Ms HALFPENNY — If you are talking about a whole government approach, I guess, if it is also people
complaining or you investigating the outcome — for example, ‘I had a disability. I went to a job service, and I
never got a job out of it’ — do those sorts of complaints come through and so then you can go and look at other
agencies? Are you able to do that as well?
Mr HARKIN — The limitation, if you like, is that the act limits what we can engage with to be concerned
with the services provided by registered providers — that is, registered with DHS to provide disability support
services — and in 2012 the act was amended to include other than contracted service providers. To use your
example of a job search organisation, the short answer is no, I have no jurisdiction. If you were to say to me,
‘What if I was a parent of a child in a special school or indeed in a regular school but my child had disabilities
of a kind that needed the provision of supports?’. Can you come to me and express concern about that service
provision? No; not within my jurisdiction. Typically about 40 per cent of the things that come to the door are
out of scope or outside jurisdiction; that is a fair bit. It is probably an indicator, I suspect, of folks’ aspirations to
be able to go somewhere, where currently they would see nothing.
Ms HALFPENNY — Are you saying that you refer them to somewhere else where they can go, or there is
nowhere they can go?
Mr HARKIN — It depends on the circumstances. Let me tease out education a tad more for you. Let me tell
you — this introduces yet another dimension of the fear that I referred to before — lots of parents of children
with a disability in the education system are afraid to complain because they have the fear that their children
will be excluded from the education system. That is a really bad thing, but that is how people feel. The process
of complaint review is an internal process run by the Department of Education and Early Childhood
Development. There is no independent, separate oversight of those processes. I have contended for a while there
ought to be, and I have said this in my annual report more than once and I will keep on saying it, because I think
that is a gap, and the extent to which there are other gaps, it kind of goes on.
Ms HALFPENNY — Would you say, then, that there needs to be some reform in terms of the legislation? I
know you have been talking about the Disability Act and some gaps there, and I think everyone is talking about
a whole-of-government approach, and it does not talk about that.
Mr HARKIN — Yes. For me it is important, when the term ‘whole-of-government’ is used, it is spelled
with a ‘w’. Leaving off the ‘w’ in fact can be most unfortunate.
Ms COULSON BARR — Can I say that there is an issues paper in relation to the need for independent
complaints processes for education. We can provide that to the committee, if you would like, as an additional
attachment.
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Mr HARKIN — Yes, we would be happy to forward that to you.
Mr MADDEN — That would be very good.
Ms HALFPENNY — Just in terms of Aboriginal or CALD communities, in terms of fear or not knowing
where to go or whatever, do you get many complaints?
Mr HARKIN — The short answer to the question is no. The longer answer is that, particularly with
Indigenous people — when I have talked to leaders within the Indigenous community — the sort of thing that
people have responded with is, ‘How many more bloody labels do you want us to have?’. I would point out that
in Indigenous language there is not actually a word for ‘disability’. They would talk about uncle or auntie or
cousins being a ‘bit different’, but there is not a word for ‘disability’. There is a learning, I suspect, in that.
Mr O’BRIEN — Thank you, commissioners. What I want to follow up is your submission. In part 3 you
say that there is a need for a call for a new conversation between families and service providers, and you outline
a number of parts to that.
Mr HARKIN — Yes.
Mr O’BRIEN — And you make the statement that you frequently find that families and service providers
are at odds about what should occur, and then you put in a number of steps.
Mr HARKIN — Yes.
Mr O’BRIEN — How does this fit in with the strategies that are identified in the hopes and aspirations for
the NDIS? And from your knowledge today, how are they playing out, particularly in the Barwon trials?
Mr HARKIN — I launched the orange book I referred to, which you have just been provided with, and that
is the book from which the citation within the submission was extracted. I launched that, in fact, at the Having a
Say conference, so-called, in Geelong a few weeks ago, and in the room were the directors of every NDIS trial
site. It was helpful to have all of these good folk in the room at the same time. There is a curiosity, I venture, in
terms of the NDIS, and I think the curiosity is this: I do not believe that the commonwealth sees itself, and I do
not think the agency sees itself, as in the business of service provision; they see themselves in the business of
assessment and funds allocation. That is what that is about. What is not clear yet — and it is still early, to be fair
to everybody — is: what does it mean in terms of what we might describe as community development, the
extent to which there might be a so-called reasonable and necessary support allocation to a person with a
disability to pursue their social objectives? It is defined as a legitimate thing to be funded. As to how it plays
out, there is no evidence yet, but you would hope that it would play out satisfactorily.
If the NDIS is as I describe it, the issue then remains that when a person who is allocated funds engages service
provider X or Y, they have exercised their choice. Is service provider X or Y going to be at such levels of
enlightenment that they will provide services of a character that would intrinsically recognise their rights as
citizens? We cannot be sure about that until more time passes.
The agencies within the trial site in our experience are variable because we have a lens through the complaints
history with all of them. We can look at what they really say or do about themselves. It is one thing to talk about
what you do and another if somebody says, ‘Well, show us’, and they think, ‘Damn, I wish he hadn’t asked me
that’. This is why I argue consistently and across the state — and I am cautious to now use consumer language,
but it is a better way for it to be generally understood — that unless organisations which provide services
regularly and systematically test the client experience, then the prospect of them learning from things that have
not gone as well as they might have or that did not work out as they had planned as a business, improvement
and hence improvement for the consumer — the person with a disability — will not be a characteristic of how
things work.
It can be argued, however, that in this free choice market a person with a disability can say, ‘All right. Thank
you. You are no good. I will now choose service Y’. It assumes this, though: that all persons with a disability
are able to form such a view and exercise such a choice. I think that is a wrong view to take. There are many
folks with cognitive impairment who are far less able to form such a view. It typically falls to family members;
that is why we have given the focus to who is involved — family is the natural support — and we say that
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service systems and others in society need to recognise the validity and status of those other parties in the life of
a person with a disability who is less able to exercise those choices and therefore those controls. I do not put it in
a way that is condescending, paternalistic or any of those things; I am saying this from the perspective of their
rights and how their rights are exercised. I do not know whether I have answered your question.
Mr O’BRIEN — You have identified the dangers and the challenges. The fundamental question I would
like to ask is: do you consider that the direction and the feedback you have had and your understanding of how
the scheme is to roll out is fundamentally consistent with the conversation model, where you place greater
ownership and importance on an upfront discussion between the family and the carers and that notion of
choice?
Mr HARKIN — The answer has to be yes, because if the answer is no, I will migrate now. On the basis that
the answer is yes — but with some level of optimism and anticipation — I remember saying to all of these
NDIS trial site directors who were in the room at the same time, ‘Into the future I do not say that what we have
written about family engagement and the rights of people is something that you will do, because you are not
providing a service’. What I did say to them was that as an organisation they should be insistent upon — as a
protection, if you like, and a protection of their own investment as well; it is an economic driver as well as a
human rights driver, adding all of the providers who ultimately will have services purchased from them by
people exercising the allocations they now have from the NDIS — satisfying themselves that at least those
standards are in place in those organisations. They can do that in a powerful and influential way with all of those
service providers, and I call upon them to bloody well do it. I beg your pardon. I was speaking in the vernacular
for a moment.
Mr O’BRIEN — Thank you.
Mr MADDEN — My question is a fairly general one. The term ‘inclusion’ is very broad, generic and
accommodating. Disability is more a targeted focus for a particular cohort. How do you make that quantum leap
around the things you talked about — the legislation — where you step back to include all these things in
definitions, workload and administration and not dilute some of the targeted effort in the disability sector, for
want of better terminology? Can you comment on that?
Mr HARKIN — It is a kind of Job-like question or a Job-like answer.
Mr MADDEN — It is a bit broad and general, but you are the man to answer it, I think.
Mr HARKIN — I will give it a shot. I will retreat to my earlier remarks about the need not to see this as an
add-on. Most MPs would be familiar with the so-called Every Australian Counts campaign, which seemed to
garner a good deal of support across all parties, or people who represent folks in the Parliament. They said,
‘Yeah, I can see that. Why wouldn’t we want to support that?’. Hence the bipartisan character of what has been
implemented so far.
It is almost as though there is a need for another campaign that says, ‘Not only does every Australian count; it is
beyond service delivery. Every Australian counts as an equal citizen’. We need to behave in ways that are
sensitised to that reality. Unless we move beyond these very nice plans to actually do things as a whole of
government — spelt with a ‘w’ — then not a lot is going to change. I think it is in all of our hands.
In the late 1990s I was human services director for the City of Glen Eira, which was the old Bentleigh,
Moorabbin and Caulfield. One of the things that struck me at the time was the need to develop a so-called
disability action plan. That municipality — not because of me but because of others — was the first ever to
implement one. Before that one of the things that struck me was that when somebody made a town planning
application — and I will see how I go with a segue here — what typically did not happen was that people would
front the council with their planning proposal or application and the town planners, good folks that they are,
would sit down and consider all the things that relate to the town planning legislation. What occurred to us was
that there was another question here: what are the physical and social impacts for folks who do not have the
kind of ability to access all the things that might be routinely considered as part of a town planning application?
We had a conversation with the town planners in which we asked, ‘Why wouldn’t you ask the question?’, and
they said, ‘There’s absolutely no reason why we wouldn’t ask that question’. So you implement arrangements
that are sustainable. They still ask it to this day, and I venture it has gone beyond that. It is a question of
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embedding changed practice and thinking and not being limited. The only thing that holds social inclusion back
is the extent to which the rest of us are limited.
Mrs COOTE — I would like to thank the disability services commissioner, the deputy disability services
commissioner and the disability services commissioner principal officer for being here today. Thank you for
your ongoing work in this area. You are trailblazers in this country, and I think your work is extraordinary.
Laurie, I was really interested in your reference to the act. Building on what Bronwyn said, you would know
that a whole-of-government approach is a really important aspect of the state disability plan. Gill Callister, the
Secretary of the Department of Human Services, was here this morning. She was speaking about the
whole-of-government approach as a consequence of the state disability plan.
You obviously believe one of our recommendations should be to revisit the act and include, as per the
paragraphs and clauses you read out, a broader definition of ‘whole of government’ so that it is instituted in the
act. We should be working towards whole of government as a tool; is that correct?
Mr HARKIN — If I might presume, for the committee not to do so would be a significant opportunity lost.
You can only find one secretary who has a responsibility; there is no other secretary. Regardless of what
machinery of government change arrangements apply as political changes occur, if that is the best the act can
do, then it is probably not good enough.
Equally I want to make a point about ministers. It does not matter how committed they are, how deep their
commitment is or how zealous they might be unless it is seen as a shared responsibility across colleagues so that
other ministers say ‘We’ve all got a part in this’ and want to actively hold their departments to account, not just
to produce attractive looking reports but to actually do something. What are the measures?
Mrs COOTE — Do you have a lead minister?
Mr HARKIN — Indeed.
Mrs COOTE — Community services?
Mr HARKIN — Indeed.
Mrs COOTE — I also wanted to ask you: is it a whole-of-community approach as well?
Mr HARKIN — Indeed.
Mrs COOTE — Whose responsibility is that?
Mr HARKIN — In my view everyone needs to play their part, hence my comment about every Australian
counts. I am not sure how insistent, for instance, government is with organisations like the Victorian Local
Government Association, the MAV or the unions. There are so many other peak organisations that I am not sure
how well they are engaged. There is the institute of architects — you name it, there would be other people,
because we all have a part to play and a perspective to deliver. I think one of the things that properly sits with
government in terms of leadership of community is that level of encouragement and almost insistence.
Mrs COOTE — Not a schedule of regulations in the act to build on and encourage those peak organisations
to do what you are expecting?
Mr HARKIN — Foundationally, yes, at least. In an ideal world I do not exist, because we are in a society
that is of such an enlightened character that people with disabilities are treated fairly. As a minimum, yes, it
ought to have a legislative basis, platform or foundation, but making it happen rests not only with compliance
with legislative requirements but with something deeper, and therein lies the challenge. You can legislate all
you jolly well like. I can assure you that I am confronted every day with people who do not follow what the
legislation says they should be doing. I am not going to pillory them or get a bigger city square and line them all
up and do bad things to them publicly, but there needs to be different approaches — —
Mrs COOTE — You are getting soft.
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Mr HARKIN — I do not mean to do that. I will not admit to my recent purchase of a market garden so that I
can grow lots of vegetables to throw at people who need to be pilloried.
Mrs COOTE — Thank you very much indeed.
The CHAIR — We have a few minutes left so I will ask a further question. Can you give the committee
some examples of outstanding practice in the areas that you are talking about, where there is that broad
acceptance, understanding and integration into normal daily living in all circumstances? Or can you give us
some examples of where you think we can do better?
Mr HARKIN — Yes, I can, and I will speak in a general way. I can provide — and do each year I hope, and
resolve to do more of this in the next annual report — more reflections of the lived experience of people. Over
time in a job like mine you are moved to write these analyses and give lots of statistical information. You think,
‘I don’t want to make people lose the will to live’. Increasingly we will provide personal reflections of people
who have had an uplifting experience as a consequence of being dealt with in a way that they have never been
dealt with before. I talked before about embedding a practice of testing the experience of the service user by
asking people what they say. Of course the danger is that if you ask people what they say, they will usually tell
you and then you think, ‘Oh my God, I wish I hadn’t asked that’. But that is about learning; it is about being
prepared and big and open enough, as people who lead organisations, to hear that and to learn from it.
If I can go back to 2007, when I travelled about the state visiting all the providers, they would say things to me
like, ‘Parliamentarians change acts and now you’re here. You’re just part of the legislative burden’. I said, ‘I get
why you say that, but I want to try to help you think about it in a different way’. Yes, the act is a compliance
requirement; it says you have to tell me these things about what you have done, but there is another word that
starts with ‘C’ and it is not ‘compliance’; it is ‘contribution’. We have sought to recalibrate how the sector sees
itself so that it sees the benefit in sharing the experience — good and bad. That is what we use the annual
complaints reporting tool for — to share practice learnings across the sector.
When people walk away from us saying, ‘In my lifetime, I have never felt heard before. Our views have never
been particularly respected. In fact we have always been treated poorly’, it does not matter how real that is; it is
real for them. When people have sat with my colleagues, as they have, in a significant emotional state as a
consequence of moving somewhere beyond where they have felt locked into and disempowered — I am
cautious to use that language, but that is how folks felt — it is uplifting and inspiring, so the more we can share
those practical examples, the better. Did you want me to add to that comment; I am conscious of your time.
Ms HALFPENNY — Organisations hide behind the Privacy Act. Do we need to look at making some
changes there? I have had a few complaints from people in my area. You can always argue that you can divulge
that information, but there is still a big, long argument to get through that. Do you think there is anything we can
do on that?
Mr HARKIN — In all probability. The short answer has to be: yes. For me to say, ‘And it’s this’ — I am
not sure that I want to say that at this point, but I will happily say it at another time. Did you want to add to the
previous comment?
Ms COULSON BARR — I was just going to comment in terms of how we see social inclusion - as
experienced through relationships. It is about people feeling valued and connected with others. In terms of
thinking of good examples, an excellent example can be as simple as a person with autism being supported to
make one friend — —
Mr HARKIN — One friend.
Ms COULSON BARR — I think we need to think on a more personal level; that can be true inclusion for
instance for a person with autism. We need to think about it on that level as well as on the broader levels.
The CHAIR — On behalf of the committee, thank you very much for attending today. I remind you that you
will be provided with proofs of the transcript. We really appreciate your contribution. Thank you very much.
Mr HARKIN — Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you.
Witnesses withdrew.
3 March 2014
Family and Community Development Committee
9