Mr. Raymond Byrne:

No doubt that this committee has a very important role because it covers the question of health and social care that is incredibly important in terms of policy development and legislation. However, as Senator Conway said, are other issues fall outside of that area. The commission is working through the questions that were raised by ourselves in the issues paper and we have got a lot of help from people who have made written submissions to us. I cannot say that we have come up yet with a final conclusion as to whether there should be a single regulatory body or a collaborative arrangement between existing bodies but in the final report we will certainly make as far as we can a conclusive and practical recommendation on that. We are conscious that health and social care are vital component parts of the overall picture but there are other issues, such as financial abuse. We are also conscious that there are new forms of abuse arising continuously. Covid-19 has indicated the kind of online scams as opposed to maybe traditional offline analogue scams. We are conscious that this is an evolving area as well and we need to have practical solutions that reflect that.