Parmar ParmjeetDr PARMJEET PARMAR (ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'm taking this call to support this bill on behalf of ACT in its third reading. To start with I would like to thank all social workers for the important work that they do and the direct and indirect role they play in people's lives. I would also like to acknowledge the select committee that worked on this legislation and each and every submitter for their contribution to this legislation.As I said before social workers play a very important role in people's lives. But on the other hand it's really important for people—those who are receiving services from these social workers—to also be getting the assurance that the social worker who is working with them is professional and can be held accountable. So that is what this bill is about.There is this component of registration which used to be voluntary but the bill originally made it mandatory and now we have experienced that there were two pathways to getting registration. One pathway is through qualification and the other pathway is through experience. Because there are so many positions—around 700 social worker positions—still unfilled we realised that we need to keep the options open. So just going with one option of qualifications may not be enough though we know that the take-up through the experience pathway is quite small—around 3 percent. But still when there are 700 unfilled positions we want to make sure that there is every opportunity available to any person who is enrolled as a social worker to get registered to satisfy the Social Workers Registration Board's requirements and to be officially called a social worker.I have seen personally how hard social workers work and we don't want them to get exhausted because of the shortage of social workers in the field. I chaired an NGO that helped victims of domestic violence and I would say this: I used to see social workers involved in that NGO and NGOs that this NGO worked with—these social workers used to work day and night. During the day they used to get several calls and during the night as well. There used to always be a social worker on duty at night too ready to take a phone call if the phone rang. Especially on Fridays Saturdays and Sundays it used to be really busy. It wasn't just about taking that phone call; it was about once the phone call has been received responding to that incident so these social workers would get in their car straight away and arrive wherever they were needed according to the phone call. What is really important in this kind of work which I want to note is that when a social worker is attending a case like that of domestic violence victims share a lot of personal and sometimes a lot of sensitive information about their experience their trauma and what the situation has been. So they need to have that confidence that the social worker that they're dealing with is fully professional is competent and they can be held accountable. That is why having this registration process is important. But on the other hand we have to see that we have enough people in the workforce so that the social workers that are working in different fields of social work are not getting exhausted.It's really important to also emphasise that we need to see how the pipeline is working to ensure that we are able to fill these positions. As I said the experience pathway was always going to be a temporary measure and now it is also going to be a temporary measure but this extension of allowing people to use the experience pathway for another two years will allow some last-minute social workers those who are out there and are considering getting registered as social workers to really seriously consider and come on board and get their registration done.We know that there is a lot of demand out there and people do consider different kinds of career pathways just because of the shortage of social workers. We don't want social workers those who are already working as social workers to start thinking about other career pathways because of the pressure that they are going through and that is why this extension is important. I would also like to speak to the amendment which was put through during the committee of the whole House and I acknowledge contributions from members from the other side and that they would have liked it to be four years. The extension is for two years but it's important to note that we have to find a cut-off time and that cut-off time needs to be reasonable and at this stage we support that amendment which was put through during the committee of the whole House. So we support the Social Workers Registration Legislation Amendment Bill and commend it to the House. Thank you.