Page 3833 - Week 10 - Thursday, 27 August 2009
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MR SPEAKER: Ms Bresnan, a supplementary question?
MS BRESNAN: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Minister, the corrections coalition had requested that the revised community reference group include consumer representatives for men, women and Indigenous ex-prisoners. Can you please inform the Assembly as to whether you intend for all of these representatives to sit on the community reference group?
MR HARGREAVES: The answer, Ms Bresnan, is no. When I say “no”, I am not going to be definitive about that. There is going to be a cabinet recommendation. Personally I am not going to be definitive about it. I am going to make a recommendation to cabinet and cabinet has to decide. But I can tell you that the recommendation going forward will be that the model which was hitherto in place, which was to have 26 organisations representing all factors of the community, I do not believe is the correct model. For example, ACTCOSS is a member of that group, but so too 14 of the 26 people on that group are also members of ACTCOSS. That seems to me to be possibly the wrong direction.
What I propose to do is to look at it as being outcome based. Quite frankly, I am not interested in a whole bunch of people sitting in a room having a cup of tea and a doughnut and then yakking away and bringing their organisation’s view forward, which is a delegatory type approach. What I am interested in doing is seeking people who have an amazing amount of skills out there in the sectors actually supporting it. I would like to see people who have got experience and expertise in drug and alcohol support. I would like to see people who have got experience in youth services support so that they can address the issues around the young people in a family, a dysfunctional family, where one or both of the adults are in jail. We need to have those sorts of advices going forward. I am not interested in organisational egos. It needs to be outcome based. We need all of our representative fora to be outcome driven. I propose to put forward a proposal to the cabinet which goes along those lines.
Just because somebody belongs to a non-government organisation that is, in my view, an insufficient qualification to take part in this exercise. It is the people within it. Ms Hunter and I have had many years connection with young children and the Youth Coalition. I can remember sharing breakfast around the young carers. Those breakfasts affected me. It was not the organisation that impressed me; it was the people within the organisation which impressed me. That is what I want to tap into. That is the recommendation I am going forward with.
As to the time line, I have given a model to Corrective Services asking for their comments, after which we would put the paper to cabinet. Cabinet will then make a decision. I do not know whether that decision will be for further consultation on the process or to go with the model in the interests of speed. I have not got to the stage of actually doing a cabinet submission. You have got a window into the thinking. Quite frankly, having now told you the detail of this, as I did with the last one on the multicultural approaches, if you have got a question or two you might like to talk to me about it instead of putting out a press release within hours of my having given you a briefing.
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