In April 2012 two months [i]before[/i] Barry Greenberry came to Tasmania the Director of Corrections, Mr Robert Williams appeared before a Parliamentary Committee inquiring into high overtime and sick leave payments to staff at Risdon Prison.
Mr Williams told the Committee of the difficulties with getting suitable prison staff.
Mr WILLIAMS: [i]‘We have had the wrong people in the service in the past. … We stood down TPS [officers] because management thought they were not doing what we wanted them to do [in February 2011]. … That was a line in the sand for us because it was a shock to the staff that we were prepared to go that far and that we felt that strongly about what we were doing.’[/i]
Mr Michael GAFFNEY, MLC: [i]‘I was very pleased to hear that you had mentioned, Mr Williams, that you have been providing a greater of scrutiny of people coming into the service and moving the key offenders* out. I think the KPMG report mentioned 10 key offenders whose profile you needed to look at.[/i]
[*Mr Gaffney was referring to offending TPS staff.]
Mr WILLIAMS: [i]‘With sick leave… some … who are doing the wrong thing, typically young men taking Mondays and Fridays off … we are expecting to have a harder conversation with people who are, say, recalcitrant sick leave users . …basically the system now [is] where you ring up that you are sick, and you are one in 252 people … ‘ [/i]
Ms Adriana TAYLOR, MLC: [i]‘Do you not do annual performance reviews with your staff … with your management staff at least and set Key Performance Indicators for them? That is fairly normal business practice; we’re not talking about something extraordinary here.’[/i]
Mr WILLIAMS: [i]‘We have not had a set of KPIs that has been strictly adhered to and we have not had our performance discussions around those obviously because they have not been there. That has been identified as one of the things that we need to implement.’[/i]
Mrs TAYLOR: [i]‘So you are confident that we’re not going to sit here in 12 months’ time [April 2013] and if we asked you to come back in 12 months’ time that you would be giving us the same answers as you are giving us today?’[/i]
Mr WILLIAMS: [i]‘Yes.’[/i]
Mr Ivan DEAN, MLC for Windermere: [i]‘The 2010 KPMG report … refers to the sick leave that was taken and it averages out at 118.79 hours per FTE [Full Time Equivalent] per annum – it works out to be about 15 days for each and every employee within the prison service. Then if you look at the amount of overtime per FTE per annum, it’s 212.25 hours [per FTE per annum], which calculates to be about 26 days or thereabouts … together it’s an extremely high figure.’[/i]
Mr WILLIAMS: [i]‘There is certainly a small cohort of people who are very high overtime users and there’s certainly a cohort of very high sick leave users.[/i]
Mr DEAN: [i]‘A lot of this problem [in Risdon Prison] is probably because of the culture and attitude of senior management within the organisation. In other words, that they’ve been accepting of this behaviour over a long period of time and they’ve never really queried it. A comment [from the KPMG Report] here is:’[/i]
[b]This issue appears to be culturally embedded as acceptance by staff, which has been contributed to by historical practice, isolated acceptance by management over time and a lack of confidence in being protected under the available whistleblower legislation avenues.[/b]
[i]’There was a comment on the lack of confidence in being protected under the availability of the whistleblowing legislation; is that creating issues for you as well? It was in that report. In other words, your staff don’t have the confidence in which to be able to report issues and bring issues forward with some protection.[/i]
