Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Hansard source

The Criminal Code Amendment (Protecting Commonwealth Frontline Workers) Bill 2024 will strengthen protections for Commonwealth frontline workers who face increased risk of violence or aggression because of their role. In the financial year 2022-23 there were 10 million visits by members of the Australian public to 318 Services Australia service centres across Australia. Six thousand Services Australia staff worked with their customers in service centres to help sort out their Medicare, childcare, age pension, unemployment or a range of other payments that occur at various points in a person's life.

However, in the same financial year there were 9,000 reported acts of aggression against these frontline workers. Indeed, in the first six months of this financial year alone there were 6,092 incidents, of which 852 were serious. Tragically, the number of serious assaults is up by 261 on the previous year. Self-evidently, one assault on a staff member is one too many. Indeed it's almost a year to the day—23 May last year—that a Services Australia team leader's life was changed forever when she was viciously stabbed in her workplace. Joeanne Cassar was doing a job that she loved and has worked at for many years. She did so very well at the service centre located in the suburban shopping mall at Airport West, where she became the victim of a knife attack. I have met with Joeanne several times since the stabbing. I met her in hospital that week, where she was supported by her husband Andrew, and I met with her workmates. Last week I was able to deliver to her husband and to her workmates details about how the Albanese government is seeking to make them safer, including through this bill. I'd like to take a moment, though, to acknowledge Joeanne's strength, resilience and grace over this past year. We should almost rename the bill the 'Joeanne Cassar Bill.' She has a hard road ahead. She has a permanent injury, which won't change. But she wants to make sure that this can't happen again or that it can be prevented, to the best of our abilities, from happening to another frontline public servant.

The people who work at Services Australia service centres are the engine room of our social security safety net and our Medicare safety net. They make sure that Australians can get the services and payments that they're entitled to when they need them. They're trained to deal with complex and, at times, unpleasant situations, and they set the bar high with their professional, compassionate interactions with members of the public. They see people who may be having their worst day—the loss of a job, a family breakdown, a health issue or the uncertainty of options for an ageing parent. However, we do know that a small cohort of people take that frustration out on Services Australia staff or other customers. Stress, vulnerability and personal frustration are never an excuse for violence. It doesn't matter how bad a day someone has, there's never ever a reason for aggressive behaviour towards staff or another customer. It's totally unacceptable.

The Albanese government wants to make sure that the people who are there to help Australians in their time of need can go to work and come home safely and that they work in a safe environment. The day after the stabbing of Joeanne Cassar, I initiated a review of staff safety at all 318 service centres around the country. On the night of her stabbing, I contacted former Victorian Police Commissioner Graham Ashton to see if he was prepared to deploy his many years of meritorious policing experience to give me and the government answers to how we could make the service centres more secure for both staff and customers.

The Services Australia Security Risk Management Review, conducted by the former commissioner Ashton, found that Commonwealth frontline workers are facing increasingly violent and aggressive behaviour in the workplace in their dealings with the public, which also endangers other members of the public. In his review, Graham Ashton made 44 recommendations to Services Australia. The agency is implementing all 44.

In October of last year, I was able to announce that the government had committed an interim $47 million for immediate measures, including hundreds of additional security guards, enhanced security features incorporated into the design of service centres and improved training. Many of the service centres are in shopping centres and other busy places to ensure they're accessible to the public. We must do everything we can with the best advice possible to provide a safe environment for the 10 million visitors to Services Australia sites every year.

At the beginning of this month, at Airport West, with Joeanne Cassar and her husband, Andrew, standing alongside me, I announced that the government will invest a further $314.1 million over the next two years to continue to improve safety in service centres. That's in addition to the $47 million announced in October. The new $314 million investment will help the agency to fund up to 606 security guards, up from about the 200-plus that we had before these changes, which means there are two guards at service centres where there are higher levels of customer aggression. It will help with the redesign of an additional 35 services centres, with enhanced features to reduce the risk of harm to staff, as well as expand the customer self-check-in kiosks to service centres at risk of high levels of customer aggression. This will minimise queueing, which, for this cohort of people I referred to earlier, has been reported as a source of frustration. There will be an upgrade to security systems and enhanced security features at all service centres, and we’re going to establish a centralised security operation centre to help the agency respond in real time to customer aggression incidents in any of the offices. The funding will also see the implementation of a new agency-wide system to better record, view and manage incidents of customer aggression, and there will be increased liaison with local law enforcement.

There will be more work done with the Department of Social Services to improve the policy for and accessibility to urgent payments. This includes the use of electronic benefits transfer cards to safely assist customers who don't have access to a bank account. But, specifically, with the legislation and the amendments to the Criminal Code today, I talk of the implementation of recommendation 18 of the Ashton review, which called for amendments to the Commonwealth Criminal Code to increase the penalties available for causing harm or threatening to cause harm to a Commonwealth public official where the official is also a Commonwealth frontline worker.

The Criminal Code Amendment (Protecting Commonwealth Frontline Workers) Bill, which the Attorney-General introduced into parliament in March, promotes the right to safe and healthy working conditions and enhancing protections against violence and abuse for frontline staff. Specifically, the bill will increase the maximum penalties in the Criminal Code for causing harm or threatening to cause serious harm to a Commonwealth frontline officer. It does this by aligning the penalties for causing harm or threatening to cause serious harm to a Commonwealth frontline worker with the penalties that apply for the same conduct against a Commonwealth judicial officer or Commonwealth law enforcement officer. In other words, there won't be two classes of frontline Commonwealth public servants. It doesn't matter if you wear a badge and carry a gun or if you're just working at the Medicare or Centrelink office, you'll have the same protections under law of penalties for assault.

Specifically and further, where a member of the public causes harm to a Commonwealth public official, under section 147.1 of the Criminal Code the maximum penalty will increase from a maximum of 10 years to a maximum of 13 years imprisonment. In addition, where a person threatens to cause serious harm to a Commonwealth public official, under section 147.2 of the Criminal Code the maximum penalty will increase from a maximum of seven years to nine years imprisonment.

A 'Commonwealth frontline worker', as defined by this bill, is a Commonwealth public official who performs work requiring a person to deal correctly—whether or not in person—with the public or a class of the public as a primary function of their role.

The lessons from Miss Cassar's assault now mean that we will seek to cover service centre staff and team leaders, including face-to-face and virtual service centres, as well as security guards, call centre operators, inspectors and compliance officers, such as officers exercising monitoring or investigation powers under the Regulatory Powers (Standard Provisions) Act 2015. It will cover interpreters, front-facing staff at electorate offices and service staff at relief and emergency centres, such as during a natural disaster. These categories have been included in the amendments to reflect the diversity of Commonwealth frontline worker roles, from service delivery to regulatory functions. It will likely cover an extra 100,000 Commonwealth public servants.

While the bill we bring forward today deals with recommendation 18 of the Ashton review, there is also a body of work underway to introduce legislation to address recommendation 17, which relates to protection orders. Members may not be aware, but currently if someone assaults, threatens to harm or becomes fixated on a Commonwealth worker or their agency, the reliance is on using existing state and territory protection orders. A majority of these schemes place the onus on the individual to take out a protection order in their own name. The current law, as it stands, requires that if an individual Centrelink worker, Medicare worker, childcare worker or electorate officer feels the need to take out an apprehended violence order, they have to do it themselves. There's no ability for the employer or employing agency to take it on their behalf. This means that individual staff have a re-traumatising experience, not to mention an administrative burden at an already stressful time.

The fact that the offender may have a problem with their employer or the government, and not them personally, is now being recognised. The legislation being developed will look at protection orders already in place in the ACT, as a model for the Commonwealth framework. These allow the individual workplace to be the sponsoring entity for such orders. It will expand it to cover, as I said, staff working in electorate officers, who are often assisting vulnerable people in touch with acute supports, but too often face acts of aggression in their workplaces that cross over into threatening behaviour.

In conclusion, the Albanese government is not just talking about protecting frontline staff. We're genuinely acting, through the major financial investment that I outlined and by pursuing legal avenues of deterrence. The funding I've outlined and the amendments which support it send a powerful message to our very important Commonwealth frontline workers that we value them, and that violence and aggression towards them will not be tolerated and will be met with serious penalties.

I do note that, in speaking on this bill, the opposition have indirectly implied that somehow this is all down to cost-of-living impacts on family budgets and wait times. The cohort of people actually committing these offences is not a large number of the people who use the system. It's a small number. Most are known to those working at Services Australia and many have complex mental health needs or significant vulnerabilities. Many are already on managed service plans, meaning they have specific servicing arrangements over the phone or in writing and are prohibited from physically presenting at the service centre. Certainly, in proposing this legislation, I do not think that the vast, vast bulk of users of our system are anything other than excellent customers, but none of us in this place would put up with the threat of aggression which increasingly faces Commonwealth frontline workers.

We're fixing overdue loopholes, which treats our frontline workforce as important. Every worker in Australia should feel safe in their work environment, knowing that they'll return home after their shift without having had their mental or physical health threatened. We need to take the stress off the shoulders of the people we ask to look after some of our most vulnerable citizens. Commonwealth frontline workers are there for Australians in their hour of need and the government will protect them.

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