Ms ROSOL – I’d like to ask some questions about the assisted‑bail facilities and what’s happening with those. I note that recommendation 12.14 of the commission of inquiry is pretty clear in outlining what assisted‑bail facility should look like. It says in paragraph (d) that we should ensure the proposed assisted‑bail facilities are small; homelike; and, subject to bail conditions, do not place restrictions on the movements of children and young people; have the capacity to deal with children and young people with complex needs; are designed to include wraparound services such as health, education, and employment; are culturally safe for Aboriginal children and young people; and include specialist therapeutically trained bail support workers to help children and young people attend programs and services and to comply with their conditions of bail.
That addresses quite a few things that we were talking about earlier when you were saying that if you built an assisted‑bail facility, it might not meet these things. I think there’s the capacity for it to be built that way. Not building the assisted‑bail facility is a breach of one of the recommendations that the government’s agreed to. Are you comfortable with stepping back from that recommendation? Is that what we’re hearing here, that you are stepping back from that recommendation?
Mr JAENSCH – We’re committed to meet that need the best way we possibly can and as soon as we possibly can. That’s why we established the Youth Justice Taskforce, which is led by DPAC and working across all relevant government agencies and departments to drive our responses to these recommendations and get things moving quickly. It’s also why we have reference groups of all of our community service organisations that we work with, and an expert panel, which is chaired by Mr Robert Benjamin, who was one of the commissioners with a particular interest in this area. We can bring back to them, here’s what we’re planning to do or proposing to do, to get their feedback, modify our responses and models accordingly, and make sure they are meeting the intentions of those recommendations.
Ms Hurworth might be able to speak to us about the 24‑hour assisted‑bail model. That’s the right terminology, yes? That addresses those commission of inquiry recommendations. That’s a piece of work that’s advancing now.
Ms HURWORTH – Through you, minister. What we’re trying to do is leverage the smallness of our community to have a really integrated system for young people. What you would already know is that there are lots of organisations that provide services to vulnerable and at‑risk young people. Some of what is described in that recommendation may already exist or does already exist. We’re trying to integrate that into a holistic model that goes to some of the questions that were raised earlier about picking young people up at the earliest possible point and diverting them out of the system. The 24‑hour bail support is part of that. It’s about leveraging a whole range of options that meet the differing needs of individual children.
Ms ROSOL – If you have all this work happening for this, how many staff do you have working on the Youth Justice Blueprint or on the implementation of the new facilities model? How many staff are working on that at the moment?
Mr JAENSCH – Can you speak to that one directly? Thank you very much.
Ms HURWORTH – Through you, minister. A taskforce was formed by searching for subject matter expertise from across government agencies. The taskforce is 12 FTE – that excludes me – and that FTE represents expertise from all the major agencies – things like people who have worked in out‑of‑home care or youth justice reform for a period of time; someone from the child and adolescent mental‑health system; and people with specific infrastructure delivery and development experience. That taskforce has come together for 12 months. In addition to the 12 FTE, we’re working extremely closely with DECYP who have the day‑to‑day operational responsibility, and learning from them. That’s on top of our expert panel and our community engagement group. I can’t emphasise enough how engaged our expert panel is in our work, and how integrated their advice is to what we’re delivering.
Ms ROSOL – Minister, has the cost of building the facility played a part in your stepping back and looking to community services, rather than building it yourself? And, if there was more funding and more staff available, would you still be looking at building the facility more quickly, not the department more quickly?
Mr JAENSCH – I’m learning about this as we go and taking advice from everyone who’s providing it. What I’m seeing is that each one of the young people we’re dealing with has individual and complex needs. They become more complex and the management becomes more complex when you start to put a number of them together because of the interactions between them and the need to be able to separate and manage their safety and their individual needs.
This is not about finding somewhere to put young people and hold them while they wait. This also has to be about actively managing their individual needs, and –
Ms ROSOL – That’s everything I read out.
Mr JAENSCH – that’s exactly reflected in that. Now, we could build a building, put six of them in there at a time, and try to manage that and keep them safe, as well as finding someone who wants to be a neighbour to a house that has kids who may have come freshly from violent offending. Alternatively, those young people might possibly be better dealt with in their own communities, by people who are set up to provide a service and a case‑management approach for them. I believe the latter has the better chance of meeting the young person’s needs, as opposed to the community’s need to put them somewhere. I’m drawn to that in the best interest of the young people.
If we find that there is not suitable capacity out there, or we need suitably hardened facilities, et cetera, to be able to withstand their elevated behaviours and things like that, then we’re on our way back to producing another little Ashley. I’m open to us being able to find something else, which is better for those young people and which carries that therapeutic model of care right from that point in the system.
Ms ROSOL – I don’t think anyone disagrees with that or thinks it’s anything but complex. My question is more, if this was funded in a way that reflected the urgency of the need, would it be happening more quickly? If we had more people putting their attention into it, could we make this happen more quickly?
Mr JAENSCH – We have a dedicated team of 12 people drawn from across government. We have several million dollars in the budget. We have –
Ms WHITE – You’ve had two years, as well, of funding. We still don’t know what your policy is.
Mr JAENSCH – We have a process that’s being overseen by the head of the State Service. Let’s say, for a typical day in Ashley at the moment, we have a dozen young people and nine of them are remandees, if a significant proportion of them, or six or so of those are young people whose behaviours are such that they may be able to be to be hosted and supported outside of a detention facility and courts, magistrates are prepared to bail them with support, then, we’ve maybe got six people at a time who we’re needing solutions for.
The question then is, do we build a building in the middle of the state and staff it to look after those six young people? Or do we have service providers dotted around the state who are able to be brought together to provide a solution for that young person where they live, where they can still maintain their connection to family, supports, school and other things, while they are in their own community. The latter sounds more like a child‑centred and a child‑rights‑centred approach than creating another more institutional environment. It’s also something that we can potentially escalate to more quickly than acquiring and building and staffing another facility that would need to have all the oversight, mechanisms, and safety built into it. Maybe we can buy that as a service for those individual young people more quickly and cheaply than building a building and putting kids in it.
Ms ROSOL – Ms White’s been asking questions about this, too. We’re looking at the Budget, we’re trying to work out what’s happening with it. At some point a decision will need to be made about whether you’re going to build that assisted‑bail facility or not. When will you be making that decision like?
Mr JAENSCH – The work that the Youth Justice Taskforce is doing now is about answering those very questions, including what the capacity is to deal with the intake of young people that we’re seeing and where the gaps are physically around the state, but also in terms of the nature of services, including accommodation.
Ms ROSOL – So, it’s a big unknown at the moment? There’s no timeframe for deciding and we have to keep waiting. We’ve been waiting for quite a while on quite a lot of things in this area.
Mr JAENSCH – You’re waiting, but nobody on this side of the table is. We’re working with all those young people and their individual case management every day, and we’re working with service providers. We are buying services to support those young people. We’ll do more of what works and we’ll identify where there are gaps that we need to fill and how quickly we can do that.
Ms ROSOL – It’s not really me or us waiting, it’s the children. They’re the ones who are waiting.
Mr JAENSCH – And we are working directly with them.
Ms ROSOL – Minister, we’ve talked about the taskforce and there’s 12 FTEs on the taskforce. We’ve heard that they’re also relying on DECYP staff to progress their work. Is there a dedicated team in DECYP that are working on the facilities model implementation? If there is, how many staff are on that team?
Mr JAENSCH – Wonder who’s best to show that navigation. Do you want to lead that discussion?
Ms HURWORTH – There are staff in DECYP facilities area that are collaborating with us, but also Infrastructure Tasmania (ITas) will be one of our key partners in State Growth and they’re supplying a specialised project manager to be embedded in the taskforce. That’s in addition to the FTE that I mentioned to work with us so that when we get to the stage of construction and delivery Infrastructure Tas will seamlessly pick that up and run with it as the part of government that has the expertise to deliver major infrastructure.
Ms ROSOL – So, there is no dedicated taskforce within DECYP? Not taskforce, but dedicated staff. They’re just working with the taskforce as needed?
Mr JAENSCH – There’s DECYP staff in the taskforce as well.
Ms HURWORTH – Yes, that’s correct. We also have a dedicated executive director whose focus is infrastructure in the youth justice space. She’s sitting in the taskforce. She works with DECYP facilities team who obviously manage the day-to-day of Ashley but also had the pre-planning work that we’ve talked about and a project manager from ITas will be appointed to her and she will lead that work.
Ms ROSOL – Has anyone in the taskforce or in DECYP working on this raised with you that they believe more resources are required or that more resources would be beneficial?
Mr JAENSCH – The Budget that you see in front of you today reflects a process whereby the secretaries of our agencies together assembled a set of budget bids for the resources required to deliver on the commission of inquiry priorities. That was part of the budget process and there’s substantial alignment with the out-of-home care and youth justice reform work that was underway anyway. They’ve been brought in together and made priority projects. This Budget delivers the resources that have been sought to make these changes.
Ms ROSOL – A question because there is a change of direction here in the assisted bail model that we’re looking at.
Mr JAENSCH – There’s a change of how we deliver it. The aim is consistent all the way through that. What we want to do is divert more young people who don’t need to be in detention from being in detention and given the care that they need. Who builds and runs the house is a different argument. We’re looking at the best ways of doing that.
Ms ROSOL – Which is a shift that has come to light this week through the Estimates , I think yesterday and today, with more questions today. Do you believe that the parliament and the community deserve to be told when there’s a major shift like that? What date did you first start considering this shift in emphasis, moving away from building it yourself to having community services providing that instead? When did this alternative option come on the table? When did you start thinking about it? When were you going to tell the public that there was a shift?
Mr JAENSCH – It is no secret we’ve been talking with the sector about it as we go. This is something which is evolving rapidly and will continue to over 12 months. We’re undertaking significant reform. We’re engaging with expertise from around the world. We’re bringing in new information all the time and we’ve got magnificent collaboration with the sector. There was a date, probably we could find a few weeks ago or months ago, when the Greens in parliament demanded that we close Ashley straight away and put all the kids into community –
Ms ROSOL – That is a misrepresentation of the question.
Mr JAENSCH – into community service organisations care and demanded that I explain why I wasn’t going to do that.
Ms ROSOL – I’m sorry, minister, you’re misrepresenting the question that I asked. I asked when it was going to close, not is it going to close immediately.
Mr JAENSCH – It wasn’t you that I was referring to. It was your leader at that time. But I’m seeing that we’ve made any change in policy. What we’ve got is a perhaps a better way of delivering it sooner and I think that’s what people expect us to do.
Ms ROSOL – You’re misrepresenting the questions that are being asked by the Greens. There’s been a shift in the assisted bail – the way that’s being structured and funded and provided.
Ms ROSOL – I asked earlier about resourcing, and whether the task force or DECYP staff have directly asked you for extra resourcing, and whether they’ve said that would be beneficial for urgently progressing the work that they’re doing on the youth justice facilities. You didn’t answer the question and you instead went to talking about the Budget.
Can I take from that, not answering the question, that resourcing levels have been raised with you as an issue, and that you’ve diverted attention away from that? Have your staff asked you for extra resourcing so that they can urgently do the work to develop alternative models and facilities?
Mr JAENSCH – Nearly every conversation I have with my department around the priorities and the urgency of work we’re doing comes down to a discussion about resources. This is particularly over the last six months or so, with preparation for budgets and dealing with the commission of inquiry and how we’re resourcing all the things we have to do there. Sometimes we talk about little else for days on end, how much we need and what priorities we have to spend on a whole range of things, and also where we’re going to get the people and the skill sets that we need within our department to do these things. That’s why we’ve ended up with this new authorising environment for youth justice reform where we’ve got an all‑play model which is overseen by the head of the State Service to be able to draw in the talent from across government that we need to deal with some of this complex area of rapid development of policy, legislation and reform.
That has been funded with a new entire allocation of $174.89 million to ensure we’re delivering on the reforms associated with the commission of inquiry including out‑of‑home care and youth justice. Every part of government, every one of my children, my own and those I’m responsible for, could use more resources to do more things. We’ve got more resources than we’ve ever had before invested into this work now. Our challenge is going to be to use the resources that are budgeted now, within a very limited period of time, to drive massive change. I think this is our moment in these areas to achieve significant reforms.
Has my department asked me for more resources? My department has presented me with budget bids. We’ve taken them into the budget process. We’ve come out with a version of what we went in with, and then we apply that as responsibly as we can to deliver the jobs that we’ve been given to do. We’ll keep doing that.
Ms ROSOL – It sounds like more money, more funding would have been useful but in the context of broader government decisions, there have been other priorities and choices made in allocation of funds.
Mr JAENSCH – I can see where you are angling this to. In a context of a budget Estimates hearing, you could go to this table or any other table for any committee and ask any department, would it be okay if you had more money? Could you do more stuff? And they’d all say yes, absolutely, every single time.
