Page 5995 - Week 18 - Thursday, 12 December 1991
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What comes out of the report most strongly is the stress on early intervention. We came across that time and time again. It is no good waiting for the bandaids, the remedial measures, for the 14-, 15-, 16-year-olds. You have to have those remedial measures - you cannot do without them - but what you must have is a society that begins to deal with these problems of behavioural disturbance in the cradle and then in preschool and kindergarten. It is that area to which the report devotes a considerable amount of attention. Again, I cannot agree with Mrs Nolan that attention is not given there. I would have thought it was one of the main areas of the report.
Another area of the report I was very conscious of was that we had not time to deal with particular social problems - for example, the problem of alcohol. Committee members soon realised the huge impact those alcohol problems had on the kinds of general problems we were dealing with, but we were not able to deal with them. That was one reason why some of us asked that an inquiry into alcohol be undertaken separately by the Assembly as a whole or by the Government or by an independent inquiry - any or all of those. That was not passing the buck. It was recognising a very special dilemma out of which many of the problems came.
I am very pleased to say that the report is based on careful evidence. I regard it as a scholarly piece of work, not in every respect but certainly in most respects. It is based on written, oral and field trip evidence of a considerable range, both in the range of places where the written material comes from and the range of places to which we went to take evidence.
The willingness of people to come to give evidence before this inquiry was most heartening, including some people for whom it must have been very painful indeed. Their evidence is somewhat disguised in the report. The committee members had a good understanding of the issues, especially as a result of direct contact with professionals, including a varied range of students who could be called behaviourally disturbed. I want to stress the benefit of the direct contact with professionals, whether in South Australia, Sydney, or on the way to Sydney at Tallong, or in the ACT. There is just so much time available and there is just so much evidence you can take. I agree and disagree with Mrs Nolan's comments about working with students, and I will come to that later.
I think the report is very detailed, as anyone who reads it can see. I think we should be proud of it and pleased that we have been able to pass this advice on to the Government. I recognise the wish list element in the report, as Mrs Grassby recognised; but it was not our business to cost everything. It was our business to say, "Look at these problems about youth suicide, early intervention and the teenage years, and make appropriate recommendations". That is what we did.
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