Ms ROSOL (Bass) – Deputy Speaker, I am pleased to provide a response from the Greens to the Justice Miscellaneous (Reporting Procedures) Bill 2025. The Greens support this bill. I would like to make some comments around the changes to the Registration to Work with Vulnerable People Act, and to say that we have many mechanisms in place across the state to keep our children and vulnerable people safe, and they are all important.
In volume 8, page 128 of the commission of inquiry report, the former registrar of the Registration to Work with Vulnerable People scheme, Peter Graham, described some of the importance of this, and I am going to share some of that here. He described the obligation to notify the Registrar of ‘reportable behaviour’ as the ‘backbone of the scheme’, because ‘it forms the basis of information available to the registrar to consider when conducting a risk assessment of a person applying for registration or an additional risk assessment of a person who is already registered under the scheme.
Mr Graham said:
Notifications made under this obligation give the registrar of the Registration to Work with Vulnerable People Scheme significantly more information when undertaking risk assessments than is contemplated by the National Standards for Working with Children Checks. The information available to the Registrar includes criminal intelligence and other information provided by reporting bodies, including allegations that haven’t been tested by an investigation (unsubstantiated allegations).
We welcome the expansion of the act to allow for anybody to report to the working with vulnerable people registrar. We appreciate that this will strengthen the scheme and enable the registrar to ensure that those people who are registered to work with vulnerable people are indeed safe, because they have access to more information.
We welcome the legislation here in part 3 that amends the original principal act. That is all I have to say on this. We, we support the bill. We are glad to see another commission of inquiry recommendation being completed and hope that this will be part of the suite of things that we continue to do as a state to keep children safe in Tasmania.
