State Government has no idea if it is enforcing its own policy on rehabilitation after bureaucratic mix up
AUTHORITIES have no idea if any violent abusers have been made to pay for skipping court-ordered rehab.
AUTHORITIES have no idea if any violent abusers have been made to pay for skipping court-ordered rehabilitation under a toughened policy, because of a bureaucratic bungle.
The State Government promised at the 2014 election to enable magistrates to order domestic violence offenders to pay up to $1300 if they failed to complete rehab courses.
MPs approved an update to the law in 2015 to mandate the change.
But The Advertiser can reveal, following six months of inquiries, that no one in the court system has been tracking the policy.
Neither ministers nor departmental or court officials can say if anyone has been made to pay, or how much.
The extra revenue collected as a result of the policy was supposed to be spent on more rehabilitation courses in regional South Australia but it is unclear if this has happened.
There is scope to collect significant revenue as Government figures show less than half of abusers enrolled in rehabilitation courses complete their program.
Anti-violence campaigner Arman Abrahimzadeh was surprised by the bureaucratic oversight, adding that government departments had a responsibility to track outcomes.
“How are you going to evaluate if what you’ve put in place is actually working if you don’t track it?” he said.
“If people are being made to pay (for dropping out), has it made a difference? And if it hasn’t made a difference then why bother doing it?”
A spokesman for the Courts Administration Authority said staff could not tell if a person had been made to pay “without checking each court record manually” and this was “too labour intensive”.
“Numbers and amounts of repayments cannot be determined without significant additional work being undertaken,” he said.
“Courts are not proposing to manually check files.”
Acting Attorney-General Kyam Maher said the Government had only recently become aware of the problem, despite queries from The Advertiser dating back to July.
“It is disappointing that information on the effectiveness of this change is not readily available,” he said.
“We will work with the courts to rectify this issue as a matter of priority.”
However, it is not known how, or even if, the courts IT system can be changed to more easily collate the information.
It is also unclear if the State Government can force court staff to begin analysing the data.
The failure to collect data via the courts also means the Government has not delivered on its 2014 election promise to “improve” record-keeping on domestic violence assaults and related deaths.