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

Senator Pratt, I think that, in moving this amendment in relation to the naming and shaming, you have misrepresented what we already do and how the scheme operates in relation to the naming and shaming of institutions that fail to join the scheme within the timeframe that has been allocated to them. I think you fail to understand that, in many instances, these are incredibly sensitive situations and every application that we receive is different in some way, so the scheme needs to retain the flexibility to make sure that we are acting in the best interests of the survivor and providing the information to the survivor. When you end up with some extraordinarily complex applications—some of them are terribly heartbreaking to read—that have named many, many institutions, the process whereby we make sure that we get all the institutions to join is extremely complex. What we have sought to do is to make a commitment to this place through the redress board—sanctioned by the redress board—to name and shame organisations that have not joined up within six months of being notified that they have been named in an application. We made the same provisions for those organisations that were named in the royal commission. We have clearly honoured that commitment. On 1 July we named and shamed six institutions. It was pleasing to find that two of those joined the scheme subsequently. On 1 January this year we didn't have to name any institutions, because all institutions that had exceeded the time period we put in place had joined the scheme. That enabled us to progress the applications of survivors against those institutions.

We made a further commitment, which was approved through the redress board, that, from the federal government's perspective, no further grants could be accessed by an institution that failed in its moral obligation to join the scheme. That is already in place. I'm pleased to be able to advise this chamber that the state and territory governments have also instigated proceedings to make sure that no institution that is named is able to access grants from their respective jurisdictions either.

The final thing that we announced and did as part of our name-and-shame exercise—and, as I said, pleasingly we didn't have to name and shame any further institutions on 1 January this year—was that, through the process of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, we would be revoking charitable status for any organisation that did not join the scheme. This will have a significant impact on any organisation that has been named by the scheme and doesn't do the right thing. Their charitable status will be revoked.

We have been absolutely committed and we have done everything that we said we would do. We have committed into the future, through changes to the act, that we will continue to name organisations. We got the policy through the redress board to say that any institution would have six months to join from the time that they were advised they'd been named by an application.

I would also like to take this opportunity to commend the many organisations that have not had an application named against them but have joined the scheme. These are organisations that have a history of working with children and have taken their responsibility of working with children going forward to such a degree that they have joined the scheme without an application against them. That means that if in the future we receive an application against that institution we won't have to wait to go through the six-month process for them to join, because they'll have already joined.

The federal government, in conjunction with the state governments through the redress board and in the actions that have been taken, have demonstrated our absolute commitment to making sure we name and shame organisations that do not join up to the scheme, as well as taking further sanctions and actions against those organisations to penalise them in a monetary way. We seek to maintain a level of maximum flexibility, understanding the sensitivity of the scheme, so that the government, as the scheme operator with the states and territories, can make sure we're doing the best we possibly can to have a trauma-informed response to survivors, so we can get them their redress in the least traumatic and fastest possible way.