Logie Jan: Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 14 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7241. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): It is with pleasure that I rise to speak to the Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill which has been put forward by Labour’s Carmel Sepuloni and congratulations to that member on getting this drawn. It is a bill whose time is well and truly overdue and the Green Party is very pleased to offer our support to this bill.While I stand though I do feel compelled to address some of the arguments that I think I understood from the last speaker Matt Doocey although it was a little bit unclear to me exactly what the main point of that speech was. I was hearing on the one hand that skill sets are really important and that if we are looking at ensuring safety and good social change in our communities then we need our social workers to have the skill sets. Well actually that is part of what this bill is about. Social worker registration is the oversight and the assurance of skills and ethics within the social work system. But I also heard from that member kind of contrary to that that actually what we need to be doing to solve our social problems is not looking at social workers at all but signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement because that is going to solve all our social problems! Well I have news for that member. We have signed quite a few free-trade agreements over the years and somehow our social problems have not dissolved. It does not seem to be that simple. Actually there is a place for registration.Earlier we heard from the member Alfred Ngaro that the Government cannot support this bill because although it agrees with significant amounts of the content of this bill the Government is doing a review. So the Government does not want to hear from the public to help inform that review which actually sending this bill to a select committee would enable? I really do question the logic of that. If the Government is interested in this—and the Government says it is on its agenda—then support it to the select committee. Enable the public enable unregistered social workers and enable registered social workers to comment on this bill.There was one specific point in the content that I heard challenged by the member Alfred Ngaro and that was the transition time of 1 year. He pointed out that initially back in 2003 when the Social Workers Registration Act—which did not bring in mandatory registration—was brought in Steve Maharey said it needed 6 to 8 years’ transition. We are 12 years on and surely that is not enough reason to block this bill. If that was your only point of difference let it go to the select committee and argue that point. Change the transition time. I personally do think that maybe it is somewhere in between—that there is a degree of urgency on this but maybe 1 year to register the 3000 unregistered people who are practising at the moment may be too short. We should have that public discussion.Yes there are issues to consider with this. We know that the funding of our community organisations has been deeply squeezed by our Government while they are having to deal with more and more complex cases that theChild Youth and Family Service is referring to these community agencies. With that funding being squeezed there is a real danger that they are increasingly going to start using unregistered social workers because they may not feel they can afford registered social workers. The increased costs that would be associated with this bill in that locked funding environment may be detrimental to them.But surely our priority is our children it is the people who are using these services and it is the importance of us making sure that they have a body that they can complain to if something goes wrong that they can be sure that when they are dealing with a social worker that person is a social worker who has been trained and who has a code of ethics that they are working to which is what comes with being a registered social worker. There have been all too many stories of unregistered social workers who have not been able to be monitored and whose behaviour has been out of line. In 2003 my colleague Sue Bradford said that the underlying question of the original bill was whether we as a society want to begin the process of professionalising social work in a positive and empowering way. Twelve years on to me the answer is still yes and registration is the way.