Page 2974 - Week 08 - Thursday, 15 August 2019
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The bill also includes legislative principles to guide the exercise of an official visitor’s functions. An official visitor must respect and promote the human rights of entitled people and promote high quality care, service and treatment that is centred on their needs. They must consider the wishes of entitled people in relation to visits and how complaints are dealt with, and encourage the early resolution of complaints whenever reasonable and practicable to do so.
The bill improves the coverage and flexibility of the official visitor scheme. Under the current framework official visitors are appointed under their separate operational acts. The legislation has prevented official visitors from covering for each other and visiting places under a different operational act if an official visitor goes on leave or resigns. This has created particular difficulties for the homelessness official visitor, who is the only official visitor appointed under the Housing Assistance Act. The bill rectifies this situation by centralising the appointment of official visitors under the Official Visitor Act and allowing official visitors to visit places under different operational acts where required. It also avoids any perception of conflict of interest by ensuring that official visitors are not recruited by the operational areas that they oversee.
The bill helps to make sure that entitled people are aware of their rights to contact official visitors. An operating entity for a visitable place must give an entitled person information about the person’s right to make complaints to the official visitor in a way that is accessible to the person.
The bill makes important changes to the Housing Assistance Act so that the homelessness official visitor can visit more people. The bill expands the definition of a “visitable place” to include independent accommodation provided by specialist homelessness services and to allow the homelessness official visitor to visit these premises on request or where they have concerns. It does not extend the operation of the official visitor scheme to public housing or community housing.
The bill amends the Official Visitor Act to give official visitors greater access to records kept in visitable places, in situations where this is reasonable and necessary. An official visitor may inspect a record to perform their functions if the official visitor has taken reasonable steps to find out if the entitled person consents and forms the view on reasonable grounds that the entitled person may not be able to consent but the person has not indicated that they object to the records being inspected. This means that the official visitor cannot override the entitled person’s expressed wishes about the inspection of their records.
The bill contains a range of safeguards relating to the operation of these provisions, such as requiring the official visitor to report any instances where this power has been used to the minister. I will also ensure that guidelines are developed under this provision, following further consultation with stakeholders, to ensure that official visitors exercise these powers in a way that is consistent with the human rights of entitled people.
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