COMMUNITIES
— INDIGENOUS PSYCHOLOGICAL SERVICES REPORT
123. Ms M.J. DAVIES to the Minister for Child Protection:
I refer to the Indigenous
Psychological Services report authored by Dr Tracy Westerman, AM, received by
the Department of Communities in October 2019. Does the minister stand by the
comments she made yesterday in Parliament
that the findings of the report, that there is widescale and endemic racism in
the Department of Communities, is a ludicrous proposition and that she
continues to reject them?
Ms S.F. McGURK replied:
I
began my response yesterday by saying that I thought that the Department of
Communities was taking more decisive action to better understand how it
can respond and work with Aboriginal people, communities and representative
organisations and, in fact, better serve its own Aboriginal workforce than many
private and public agencies by asking
difficult questions about its own cultural competence, if you like. That is the
first point. It is way ahead of the game in asking these difficult
questions.
I venture to say that if most
organisations within Australia, whether they are public sector organisations or
private sector organisations, asked
themselves about their cultural competence, many of those organisations would
probably be found to be wanting. We are on a journey to better
understand and appreciate the very rich legacy that we have in this country as
one of the oldest continuing cultures in the world and how we work with that.
That was what I think about the Department of Communities commissioning this
work.
The IPS report authored by Dr
Westerman took a sample of 295 people out of about 6 000 employees and looked
at their cultural competence. Those people as a representative group were found
to be wanting. She also carried out a survey of Aboriginal people within the
organisation. From my recollection, none of them said that they felt culturally secure. That says that the Department of
Communities has a long way to go to properly understand the Aboriginal
communities that they are working with—the Aboriginal families and the
individuals but also their representative organisations. That is a challenge
across the state. Things are very different in rural and remote areas compared
with metropolitan areas. From memory, I venture to say that out of the 295
people who were surveyed about their
cultural competence, 26 of those were Aboriginal and fewer than 10 per cent of
those Aboriginal people were found to be culturally competent. Even
within certain language groups, the point is that Aboriginal people could
improve their cultural awareness amongst different language groups and
cultures. That is important to appreciate. Just because someone is Aboriginal,
they may not fully appreciate issues that are going on in the Aboriginal
community.
There is a lot of work to do. The
IPS report was certainly challenging and confronting for the department but I think
it was well received and began a piece of work within the department to improve
its structural response. Now we have an
Aboriginal outcomes division within the agency and an Aboriginal woman,
assistant director general Cheryl Smith, leading up that division. The
department is also doing a range of other things to start to work to improve
the cultural competence of its staff. That is within the agency itself.
External to its work, we are doing a whole
lot of things, both within my portfolio and with the other four ministers who
have responsibility within the department,
most particularly the Minister for Housing, but in all areas, to improve outcomes
for Aboriginal people.
It is not the case that the report
was commissioned and then received and then gathered dust, as the member for
Vasse described it yesterday. It has informed change and a journey within the
department to improve Aboriginal outcomes. We are actually starting to see some
results in very, very difficult areas, particularly in child protection, but
also some of the feeder issues like domestic violence and homelessness that
were challenged with regard to Aboriginal disadvantage.