Policy Position - Tasmania’s Digital Harm Minimisation Policy for Aged Care, Disability and Child Services

Tasmania’s commitment to becoming a digitally mature and inclusive society must include proactive protections for those most at risk of harm: our children, people living with disability, and older Tasmanians. Drawing on the state’s Our Digital Future strategy and the Tasmanian Liquor and Gaming Commission’s report into harm minimisation technologies, this policy sets out a framework to adapt proven tools to the critical sectors of care and support, ensuring safety is designed into systems, not just delivered after the fact.

At the heart of this policy is the recognition that harm prevention must be embedded in digital system architecture from the outset. Just as facial recognition and player-card technologies are being introduced to mitigate gambling harm, comparable mechanisms must be implemented across aged care, disability, and child services. These include verified identity systems for service delivery personnel and pre-commitment style settings that allow users or their guardians, to set engagement limits, be they on service hours, spending, or digital interactions.

Transparency is essential. Digital platforms used in service delivery should include real-time dashboards that clearly summarise key engagement data. These interfaces must be accessible and comprehensible to users, families, guardians, and advocates, supporting independent and supported decision-making. With informed consent, authorised professionals or family members should be able to review trends and intervene early where risk patterns suggest neglect, manipulation, or exploitation.

A key innovation proposed is the integration of active monitoring and flagging systems, designed to detect early signals of harm, such as missed welfare checks, prolonged digital disengagement, or inconsistent service delivery. When thresholds are crossed, the system should raise soft or hard flags, prompting automated messages or follow-up by human support staff. This ensures a protective intervention occurs before harm becomes entrenched or irreversible.

To ensure ethical design and evidence-led policy development, Tasmania should formalise a partnership with the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA). BETA brings deep expertise in behavioural insights, digital risk profiling, and the ethical design of interventions that work in real-world settings. A collaboration would see BETA support the design and pilot testing of non-invasive, consent-based harm minimisation tools within Tasmanian services. All research and systems would adhere to ethical oversight through appropriate bodies such as the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee. The partnership would also enable Tasmania to become a national pilot site for digitally enabled, behaviourally-informed safety architecture within care systems.

To complement this, Tasmania should also incorporate WorkRight23, a platform originally developed to detect unsafe power dynamics and work environment red flags, into WorkSafe Tasmania’s digital ecosystem. This tool, once adapted for use within human services—can assist in identifying environments where coercive control, staff misconduct, or service failure may be occurring undetected. By embedding WorkRight23 into WorkSafe's risk profiling, whistleblowing, and compliance frameworks, Tasmania can create an intelligent, responsive layer of system-level protection—particularly in residential care, out-of-home care, and disability housing contexts.

Oversight of this digital harm minimisation policy would be led by a multi-sector governance body composed of digital experts, ethics and legal advisors, community representatives, and frontline practitioners. This body would be responsible for managing cross-agency coordination, ensuring adherence to human rights and privacy standards, and advising on the phased implementation of harm prevention tools across services.

The workforce must be supported to deliver on this vision. Digital harm minimisation tools and protocols should be embedded into induction and ongoing professional training for all relevant staff. Concurrently, community digital literacy programs—especially for people with cognitive impairments or communication barriers—should be expanded via Libraries Tasmania and service provider partners, ensuring users are confident and informed digital participants.

Robust accountability is essential. Annual public reporting should disclose key metrics such as flagged risks, intervention outcomes, service uptake, and user feedback. This transparency will foster trust, inform continuous improvement, and enable the government to adjust technical thresholds or workflows based on lived experience and real-world performance. A standing technology roadmap—reviewed biannually—will ensure systems evolve alongside emerging risks and innovations in digital health, safeguarding, and behavioural science.

This policy framework positions Tasmania as a national leader in ethical, technology-enabled protection of vulnerable people. By adapting harm minimisation strategies from gambling to human services, partnering with BETA to lead evidence-based innovation, and embedding digital detection tools like WorkRight23 into the state’s regulatory infrastructure, the government can move from reactive child and adult protection to proactive, systems-level prevention. This is what it means to build digital maturity—not just for convenience, but for care.

The failure to proactively detect and disrupt predatory behaviour has left Tasmania vulnerable to repeated abuses of power across multiple sectors—what can only be described as a sustained and neglected predator space.

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Tasmania harbours a deeply embedded predator space across key institutions, where individuals in positions of trust have exploited systemic weaknesses to inflict harm on the most vulnerable. In one harrowing case, a 12-year-old girl was pimped to over 120 men, including former Tasmanian MP Terry Martin, by her mother and convicted offender Gary Devine, exposing catastrophic failures in interagency detection and intervention.

At the Ashley Youth Detention Centre, more than 129 former detainees have shared in a $75 million class-action settlement after suffering sexual, physical, and psychological abuse spanning six decades. The recent charging of a former Ashley staff member with multiple rapes underscores the continuation of unchecked abuse under state supervision.

This predator space is not the result of isolated bad actors, but of sustained governance failure. To end it, Tasmania must urgently adopt embedded, technology-enabled harm minimisation tools: identity verification systems for care workers, real-time behavioural flagging, independent oversight dashboards, and integrated risk profiling models informed by behavioural economics. These tools can provide early warning signs, before abuse occurs. The days of silence, disbelief, and delayed accountability must end. No more Tasmanians should be left to suffer behind closed doors.