Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present the report of the Community Affairs References Committee on the treatment of people with disability in institutional and residential settings, together with the Hansard record of the proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This time last year, Four Corners had a report that, I think it is fair to say, shocked Australia. The report was on the violence against and abuse and neglect of people with a disability. It contained some very shocking revelations. There was an outcry from the community, but unfortunately the government refused to heed the calls for a national inquiry. So the matter was referred—in fact, by me—to the Senate for an inquiry. I have just tabled the report of that inquiry.

I urge every senator and every Australian to read this report because it contains shocking information that Australia needs to understand and take action about. We heard honestly heart-rending evidence of violence, abuse and neglect against people with disability around Australia. We heard detailed accounts of abuse.

At the Perth hearing the Bolshy Divas, a group of outspoken women in my home state of Western Australia, told us of multiple accounts of people experiencing abuse, and for each account they tabled a rose. There were many roses on the table by the time they had finished their accounts. We kept some of those roses to remind us of those accounts, and each committee member here today has one of those roses.

I would like to thank and acknowledge the strength of the people with disability, their families and their advocates who presented evidence to our inquiry. It truly was heart-rending, moving, shocking evidence that we heard during our inquiry. It took great strength from people with disability to share their lived experience. People talked of their shame and of their trauma. And in fact giving evidence—and it breaks my heart to say it—retraumatised people. But, as we said to people when they were presenting their evidence, it was through their strength in recounting their experiences that we could understand the depth and the breadth of what is going on.

There is absolutely no doubt in our minds, and the evidence clearly shows, that there is widespread violence against and abuse and neglect of people with disability around Australia. This is not confined to one state. It is not confined to limited experiences. It is, without doubt, widespread and needs further investigation. That is why the No. 1 recommendation of the inquiry is to call for a royal commission.

Virtually everybody who spoke to the inquiry or who presented written submissions—and we had over 150 submissions—called for a further inquiry. They called for a royal commission. And the majority report supports the call for a royal commission. It is only with a royal commission that we can fully understand the extent of violence, abuse and neglect against people with disability.

One of the issues that is really clear is that we do not have good data around prevalence. We do not collect this data. We do not ask the questions. Yet that is the only way that we can understand what is going on.

People shared their experiences and their accounts of their lives so that Australia could listen and take action. To my mind, we will not do justice to the fact that we retraumatised people by the fact that they were recounting their experiences if we do not take action. If we do not have a royal commission and if we do not implement the 30 recommendations that we make in this report then that retraumatisation will have been for nothing.

We heard accounts of violence, abuse and neglect in institutional settings, in residential conglomerate settings, in schools, in aged care—across the board. Nobody at all in this country can say that this is not happening. This report clearly articulates that.

There were a number of headline issues, I would call them—and we call them that in the report—that came up during this inquiry: the call for the royal commission; a truly national disability complaints network. People were calling for and we are recommending the establishment of an independent statutory national protection mechanism that has broad functions and powers to protect, investigate and enforce the findings in relation to violence, abuse and neglect against people with disability, including investigating system issues. The other issue that came up really strongly and repeatedly was the need for national workforce and workplace regulation to address some of the systemic workforce and workplace issues that increase the prevalence of violence, abuse and neglect. There is a need for ongoing training, so we are calling on the government to consider the implementation of such a process.

One of the key things here was access to justice and the denial of justice for people with disability. Not only were people scared to report assault, abuse and violence, but when they had the strength to and could report it they were not believed by the police, by the service provider, by the judicial system. People were told: 'No, this would never stand up in court. People wouldn't believe you as a witness because you've got a disability,' and this was particularly so for those people with a cognitive impairment. So, even when people could report it, they were not believed. Evidence we got from South Australia shows that the changes that have been made through their Disability Justice Plan are really positive. We have evidence that it is not perfect, but it is a substantial improvement. The fourth headline issue is access to justice and taking a just approach to ensure that justice is achieved. We need to be working at a national level, and our states and territories also need to be working on this issue. I will come back to the issue of data because it came up again and again. I am sure Senator Moore will also address the issue around data, because it comes up for us again and again.

I will quickly go back to the issue about the royal commission and reinforce the fact that we would not call for a Royal Commission if we did not believe it were necessary. You do not call for them lightly. There are very significant issues that require royal commissions. But this one does. We have to shine a light on these instances across Australia because this committee has only been able to scratch the surface.

Before I finish and hand over to my colleagues, I would like to once again thank all those who appeared at the committee, who gave evidence and who wrote submissions. I would also particularly like to take the opportunity to thank the secretariat of the Community Affairs References Committee, who are outstanding and have done an outstanding job. I would like to particularly thank our committee secretary, Jeanette Radcliffe, who has done an outstanding job; and Kate Gauthier, our principal research officer, who has done the most amazing job pulling this report together. I thank them most sincerely for the work that they have done. I thank my colleagues for the work that has been put in, because there has been an outstanding amount of work put into this. I urge you all to have a read of it and I urge the government to implement the recommendations.

Jo Lindgren (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into the abuse against people with disability in care was started due to an urgent need for a better system of independent monitoring and better protection mechanisms for people with disability who are in institutions and residential care. As a signatory to the disability convention, the Australian government retains ultimate responsibility for ensuring that the treatment of people with disabilities in Australia is compatible with the provisions of the disability convention. It is for this reason that the committee examined the issue of violence, abuse and neglect with people with disabilities from a whole-of-issue perspective. This committee has taken on the very important role of reviewing one of the most significant social programs with great care and compassion. I commend Senator Siewert, the other committee members and particularly the secretary for showing sensitivity to those who had lived abuse and shared their stories.

The overwhelming evidence presented during hearings showed a systematic failure of systems to protect some of our most vulnerable people from violence, abuse and neglect. It also heard of the failure and lack of support for those who do not respond to the occurrence of violence, abuse and neglect. The committee heard very disturbing accounts of abuse from a range of people that included the victims themselves, advocates and supportive families and from staff who worked at a number of these infamous institutions. It is important to acknowledge the individuals who chose to open up and share their stories, no matter how unpleasant they were. As a member of the committee I heard many personal stories that sickened me. I consider myself to be a strong individual, but on a few occasions I struggled to contain my emotions. Many lived experiences were given, but one story in particular saddened me, and I will never forget it. This very brave lady gave her harrowing account of abuse. She described her abuser as a monster, and rightly so. She showed me the lengths that some of the abusers will go to to hide their heinous crimes. This lady and many others like her should be protected from predatory abusive behaviours. I say to the victim: thank you for sharing your story and being brave. I wear this rose for you today.

It is a challenging task to capture the full scale of the violence, abuse and neglect of people with disabilities. There is clear evidence to suggest that the abuse cases reported are not isolated but instead may be more prevalent than first thought. I acknowledge that there are some excellent initiatives out there as well as programs that seek to improve both service delivery and protective mechanisms. Some of these programs are having significant positive impacts. I congratulate those who are trying to assist people with disabilities to have a good quality of life.

Another big issue is around appropriate mechanisms that address low-level service complaint systems. This area is inadequate and does not appropriately address the victims' complaints, many of which are criminal offences. Reporting abuse is everyone's responsibility. Stopping violence is everyone's responsibility. A broader complaints system that has national consistency between jurisdictions rather than a silo approach is an imperative initiative.

As a coalition senator I feel very strongly about this matter, and I believe that further, deeper investigations are needed. I concur with the other members of the committee that there needs to be an overhaul of systems that include reporting and investigating frameworks across all jurisdictions. It is these failures that have not protected and still are not protecting the most vulnerable people with disability.

Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Chapter 1 of the Community Affairs References Committee report into abuse against people with disability in care actually begins with a quote. We have a mechanism in our reporting to ensure that the voices of the people who talked to the committee are heard throughout the report. Chapter 1 starts:

Violence against people with disability in institutional and residential settings is Australia's hidden shame … The evidence of this national epidemic is extensive and compelling. It is a deeply shameful blight on our society and can no longer remain ignored and unaddressed.

The reason we have committees in this place is to ensure that issues that need to be exposed and concerns that need to be shared with our parliaments are able to be expressed openly and safely, and then responded to from the parliament and the government of the day. This report gives us an opportunity not just in this parliament but in the community to respond to something which is truly a deeply shameful blight on our society.

All senators involved in this committee inquiry were deeply affected. You have heard that today from the contributions in this discussion, and I think you will continue to hear that because it will not just be a report being brought down this afternoon; this will go on and these discussions must continue. I have been involved in a number of reports in this place and they will always live with me. There is no table of one that is more important than others. When the committee was pulling this report together, we all agreed that this was one of the most confronting experiences many of us have had, and we have had extraordinarily difficult discussions and issues brought before us in the past.

Senator Siewert talked about why the committee felt there was an absolute need to make a recommendation about a royal commission. When we were pulling that recommendation together, we also thought that we needed to make it clear to the people reading the report and hearing the arguments that this was not something that we did easily. There have been a number of royal commissions in recent times and people value the work that is done by them. For the Community Affairs Committee to actually recommend a royal commission was a major step. The reasons for doing that were the people who gave us their evidence and talked about the horror—and there is no other word to describe it—of the abuse not just individually but systemically and across the country, abuse on those who are most vulnerable, abuse on those whose voices have not been able to be heard before.

I want to quote again from the report from some of the evidence received from people who were in the advocacy area. The need for effective advocacy came up consistently. One women said that one thing that affected her most deeply was when someone with a disability actually said to her: 'Do I have the same rights as everybody else? Do I have the right to talk about what happened to me?' No-one in our country should have to ask that question. The committee spent time in this report listing human rights declarations about why people with disability have rights, why countries—our own included—have signed up at the international level to say that we respect the rights of people with disability. We table that and say that: all the different conventions that have been signed, all the different agreements and all the different plans that have been put in place not just at the federal level but at the state level say that we will ensure that people with disabilities are being treated fairly in our country. That in itself is a challenge to us because we have all these rights. We have them itemised. We have programs and plans. But we also have the stories that came before the committee over the last six months. It is not historical. In the past, we have come to this place and talked about historical neglect and historical abuse. That needed to be exposed and those people needed to have support as to how they would live with that.

What came to this committee is abuse that is happening now—abuse in institutions, in group homes, in living areas, in areas where people are supposed to be safe when they are receiving care, where their country has said, 'This is a safe place for you to be.' They and their families accepted that because we told them that. Our nation, our parliament and our governments have told them, 'You will be safe and we will make sure that that happens.' But it did not happen. And it is not just in isolated cases. It is not in remote areas. It is not in areas that we cannot visit or see. The issues brought forward in this inquiry happened in the centre of our cities, in our suburban areas and across Australia. It is not good enough.

Senator Siewert spoke about the rose that we are all wearing today. The Perth hearing of this inquiry took evidence from a group known as the Bolshy Divas, an incredible group of sheilas—and I think you would enjoy meeting them, Acting Deputy President Bernardi—who work with disabilities and women and ensure that their voices are not silent. One of the very many confronting episodes was when the women came into the hearing and very quietly just read out the evidence—and I will talk further about that when we have the chance. They lay roses in front of the committee and told the account of a person with a disability who had been abused

The stories are confronting, tragic and overwhelming in many ways, but they are no longer hidden and they are no longer dismissed.

For this rose, thank you to the secretariat. We have said before that, for every piece of confronting experience that we on the committee have shared, the people working in our secretariat have done more so, because they have developed relationships with people who have been putting in submissions and they have shared relationships with people on the phone, working through the questions of how they come to give evidence, what they can do and, in fact, whether they have the right to be there. The Bolshy Divas made sure that in 40 cases—not individual cases but many groups of people—their names and experiences were put on record and everyone was represented by one of these roses. The secretariat very cleverly managed to salvage some of them from the room, something I did not think about. I did not think of gathering them together, but the secretariat did, and they provided them to us, so they will live with us as a remembrance of the experience that we have had through this committee.

So we had the challenges, and we will have the opportunity to talk about them more. I will put on record the issue of data, because the data should be there. It should not need a group of women to come into a committee with roses to ensure that the data is there about these cases, what caused them, where it happened and what the responses from the various state authorities were. The response to this inquiry will need the engagement of every state and territory with the federal government to work together to ensure that we can build an effective national safety framework that will make sure that this will not happen again, so that no longer will people have to ask whether they have the right to make a complaint and no longer will we have to ask what has happened in the state of Queensland, my own state. There will be effective data on where institutions have acknowledged abuse, what they have done about it and how the future operations will happen. At this moment we do not have that, and that is replicated across every state. So I will talk about data, because data is not just evidence that is put out—not just figures and numbers. Data reflects the lived experience of people who are in our system, and it does not matter whether it is about this issue or others. Data is the extraction of information that we can do better. So, if we can do one thing apart from having a royal commission, we must ensure that the data is accurate and maintained.

I seek leave to continue all of our remarks, because there will be many more opportunities to talk about this inquiry.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.