Page 3732 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 23 November 2022
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government. Additional recommendations followed, during the review, and more recommendations were included in the final report submitted three years ago.
The steering committee insisted on releasing recommendations early specifically so that they could be implemented with urgency to start “influencing change across the child protection system, providing better outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children today and into the future,” to quote the report. Well, we are definitely in the future now, and the committee’s hopes for reform have been dashed. When the review ended, some members of the steering committee shifted to a new committee responsible for overseeing the implementation of these recommendations.
In July this year the Our Booris, Our Way Implementation Oversight Committee publicly stated that members were “tired and frustrated by the lack of progress and feel disappointed that only one recommendation out of the 28 has been fully implemented”. Shame on them. So much for the government implementing early recommendations with urgency to get real change happening.
As the minister recently explained in estimates hearings, there is some disagreement between the oversight committee and the government regarding which recommendations have been implemented. I understand that, for example, once a policy document has been revised, this Labor-Greens government claims that it has done its job whether anything has improved or not.
To give just one example, the Our Booris, Our Way report recommended that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families have universal access to family group conferences to help reduce child removals. In response, the government wrote this recommendation into policy. There is just one problem: internal government documents reveal that the referral rate for family group conferences, rather than being universal, is actually low. How low, no-one knows, apparently not even the government, based on answers to multiple questions on notice.
This raises a very important question: if a policy exists on paper but nothing changes, does this count as successful reform? Heck no! But, as the minister herself said during estimates hearings, some of what the government wants to claim as a success has “not necessarily resulted in a visible and significant change in outcomes”. Go figure—the minister responsible for Aboriginal affairs has admitted this failed process. The last time I checked, the sole purpose of reform is to achieve “a visible and significant change in outcomes”. No wonder so many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people say openly that they are far more interested in outcomes than in more talk.
Dr Paterson was a member of the Select Committee on Estimates, so presumably she heard the minister attempt to explain how the government can claim credit for implementing a reform that creates no discernible change in outcomes. Did she pay attention to this? If so, why is she turning a blind eye to this government’s repeated failures to successfully implement the reforms required to make real, measurable differences in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Canberra?
I note that Dr Paterson wrote something about going beyond the symbolic in her motion. We will know that those opposite genuinely hold that aspiration when we start to see real improvement in outcomes in the areas I have been discussing during
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