Page 2675 - Week 09 - Thursday, 9 August 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
maintenance and strengthening of the family. The support that families offer is a role which governments simply cannot replace, and without support for families I think we would find our problems in this area infinitely more serious, infinitely more incapable of solution.
I think that there is some debate about whether the emphasis should be on families, at a time when families are facing unprecedented pressures and there is increasing argument about whether the emphasis on families is still appropriate, given that families do, in an increasingly large number of cases, shield cases of child abuse - sexual and physical abuse. In my view the emphasis on families is still appropriate. In my view, the pressures on families of many sorts, including financial, have led to the sorts of problems which are now being faced in this report. This is not to say that families should not still be the main focus, the principal focus for a solution to these problems. I think that financial pressures, in particular, have placed great pressures on families to break up and it is difficult to see how in many cases governments can avoid that, except by reducing that pressure on families. This comes to a much wider debate about the role of governments in mitigating the effects of high interest rates and things like that on Australian families.
I think that issues such as child abuse have probably increased in importance, both because of the increasing incidence of such things - and I do believe there is evidence of an increasing incidence of such things - and because of issues such as financial problems. There is also an obvious preparedness for these issues to be openly discussed and debated. Certainly more reporting of these problems occurs in this particular period of our history.
The response to the Burdekin report also makes reference to a community focus for accommodation for youth in crisis. I think that is also very welcome because it extends the emphasis on families that I have just referred to. The Government has to be aware that it is not capable of answering all these problems by itself, and that the establishment of a safety net sometimes causes as many problems as it solves. We have to be sensitive to the ways in which we integrate these sorts of safety nets with the capacity of the community itself to provide solutions.
In the report tabled in the last session there is a reference to moving away from the opening of new crisis refuges and towards providing support for longer term solutions. That has been a response, in part, to the problem of refuge hopping, where young people who need accommodation for extended periods - and unfortunately, the periods are becoming more extended all the time - tend to move from one refuge to another or one supported accommodation service to another. That exacerbates problems and makes it difficult to assess the nature of them and to deal with them in a consistent fashion. As the report indicates, crisis services are an important first
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .