29 July 2015: The Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Indigenous Complaint Handling Forum

Indigenous Complaint Handling Forum – July 2015

The Commonwealth Ombudsman – Introduction and Welcome

Colin Neave - Commonwealth Ombudsman

Welcome

I’d like to extend a sincere thank you to Aunty Agnes Shea for welcoming us here today and I would also like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people and pay my respects to their elders both past and present.

It is my pleasure to welcome you, our speakers and invited guests, to this wonderful venue today. I would like to thank each of you for making the time to join us to share your ideas and experiences.

Purpose

The purpose of today is to start a discussion to explore ways we can engage better with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, with a view to ensuring that problems they experience with government programs and services are properly identified, acknowledged and addressed.

We hope that by bringing you all together today and by facilitating the sharing of ideas and experiences, we will start the process towards improving our complaint and feedback systems for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Agency Complaint Handling

Last year, my office conducted an own motion investigation into complaint management by government agencies, through which we surveyed government agencies about their complaint-management processes. One of my key recommendations following that investigation, was that agencies need to ensure their complaint systems meet the needs of vulnerable people.

People who face challenges such as remoteness, a lack of literacy, disability, or homelessness are more likely to have problems with government because it is more difficult for them to access government services through mainstream channels. Unfortunately, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people fall within this group.

The natural tendency these days, is for public sector organisations, with limited resources, to focus their attention towards solutions for the greatest number. This means that vulnerable people, who require more intensive servicing, often fall through the cracks.

The role of a good complaints system is to act as a safety net for these people, to put them carefully back into the system, to ensure that they are able to access government services in the same way as everyone else.

It is therefore critical that agencies ensure that their complaint systems are accessible by vulnerable groups, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and that they are flexible enough to cater to their specific needs.

Complaint systems

When we talk about complaint and feedback systems, we don’t just mean dealing with complaints. This is particularly the case when working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who may be reluctant to “complain” in the formal sense for a variety of reasons, including:

Language barriers and inability to access an interpreter
Not knowing how to complain or who to complaint to
A historical lack of cultural understanding from government staff, or the belief that nothing will change
Fear of reprisals or victimisation
Shame, embarrassment, lack of confidence
Lack of knowledge about government programs and systems
Lack of access to services like computers and telephones

We cannot conclude that few complaints from Indigenous people means there are no problems.

Rather, we need to take extra steps to make sure we are doing what we can to seek feedback from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander customers about programs and services that affect them.

Winangali research

In 2010, my office commissioned some research by independent Indigenous research company, Winangali. Indigenous participants in the research study said that some of the things that would make the complaint process easier for them were:

Having someone they know and trust to go to or call, preferably an Indigenous person who understands their issues
Being able to talk face to face, not via email, phone or the Internet
Having written correspondence as a record of their complaint
Being able to complain in a location they feel safe and confident
Having confidence in the impartiality of the person they are complaining to
Having confidence that making a complaint will make a difference

Now, we know that in the current climate of decreasing resources, it may not be feasible for government agencies and departments to have a face to face contact point in every community. However, if we cannot do this, then we need to think of alternative ways to obtain the valuable feedback and data that we are likely missing out on.

We need to think creatively about how we can seek this information, and when we get it, we need to recognise it, capture it and feed it back into the right part of the system, to ensure that this information can be used to improve service delivery for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Systemic improvement

Systemic improvement to public administration in one area that has the potential to improve public administration generally, including for Indigenous people. While my office and other Ombudsmen regularly focus on identifying and addressing systemic issues through our complaint investigations, this is something that all government agencies and departments’ should also be doing. Some of the best data about potential systemic problems can be obtained from people working on the ground, in communities. Government departments and oversight agencies should recognise this and utilise it to their advantage.

Today’s Themes

Based on some initial feedback we have received from community and government stakeholders and agencies over the past few months, my office has identified three consistent themes, which we think present key focus areas for discussion, and on which we have based our sessions today:

Complaint culture - adapting the way we view, collect and store complaints and feedback from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
Communication - improving the way we communicate with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people,
and Coordination - exploring how we can better coordinate our work with other people and organisations working in the same or similar areas

My office accepts that we don’t have all the answers when it comes to improving our complaint handling systems for Indigenous people. However, today we have with us a fantastic breadth of people from urban and remote regions, government and non-government, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Each person brings with them their own unique experiences and ideas based on their life and work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

We hope that you will join with us today in putting our heads together to consider what works, and what doesn’t work, in the hope that we might be able to come up with some creative solutions for making our complaint and feedback systems accessible and better catered towards meeting the needs of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

I look forward to continuing to work with all of you into the future to achieve this end.

Thank you.