Communications went off track: Jay’s former office manager
Premier Jay Weatherill’s office manager when he was Education Minister has admitted that communication processes in the department weren’t up to scratch.
Pat Jarrett told a parliamentary committee looking into matters surrounding the Debelle Royal Commission’s report into sexual abuse at a western suburbs school that she raised concerns about the way “critical incidents” at schools were communicated to the minister.
Weatherill was appointed Education Minister in March 2010.
Under the previous Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith every single “critical incident report” was seen by a ministerial staffer – hundreds per day, many very minor.
As Weatherill stepped into the portfolio the reporting process was in the midst of change, with the Department keen to limit the flow of incident reports to the minister to the most serious.
When Weatherill came into the portfolio “the critical incident report was not quite set in stone at that stage”, Jarrett told the committee.
“Every time a new minister comes in, there’s always a settling in period. Critical incidents are categorized depending on their severity.
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“That database at one stage was accessible by the minister’s office and then that changed; the department preferred to keep it in house, so they didn’t have access to that. But they undertook to provide us with constant updates.”
However, that process wasn’t working well, Jarrett said.
“Because of the new minister maybe a little bit of the communication about this had changed and we needed to bring it back on track.
“It actually started when Jen [Emery] came into me and mentioned she thought there was a lack of communication since the election.”
Emery, the former director of the Office of the Chief Executive of the Education Department, told the inquiry two weeks ago that Weatherill’s office had wanted less detail about incidents than Lomax-Smith.
Former Supreme Court justice Bruce Debelle produced a scathing report about the department’s behaviour following the 2010 arrest of an after school hours worker for the sexual assault of a child at a western suburbs school. Parents weren’t told about the man’s arrest, trial and conviction until October last year – a delay which sparked the Royal Commission.
Debelle found that the department had written an email to then Education Minister Weatherill’s staff, including chief of staff Simon Blewett, informing them of the man’s arrest. Debelle found that Weatherill’s staff failed to pass on the information to the Minister.
Today, Jarrett said the Department should have copied her or a ministerial liaison officer into the email about the incident.
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“It’s okay to say we’re going to send that to Simon, but if that was going to get registered as an incident I think it should have been copied into me,” she said.
“If anything fell off was that it didn’t come down to me.”
However, she said the previous process of sending all critical incidents to ministerial staffers was not a good one.
“It became an onerous task. They were wading through a lot of critical incidents that were pretty minor.”
As part of the change from one minister to another, there was a very large turnover of staff – which Jarrett said may have effected continuity of processes. Only three workers in the office out of 12 were retained by Weatherill.
“Minister Weatherill brought all his staff with him, so there was no continuity… there was a lot of drop off of continuity of processes, even correspondence.”
In October 2010 Jarrett held a meeting with education department bureaucrat Jennifer Emery, according to Justice Debelle’s report.
A note written by Jarrett from the meeting records attempts to improve the process by which the education minister was informed about critical incidents at schools.
The note reads: “Pat mentioned that the process of monitoring all critical incident reports within the Minister’s Office had ‘dropped off’ since the election and she had organised a meeting with Lucille Lord to have the name of an MLO on the database so that we could pick up the previous procedures.”
In the same section, justice Debelle found: “While there was a practice of briefing the Minister in relation to serious critical incidents at schools, the practice was not consistently followed.”
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