Page 3983 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 9 November 1994
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Madam Speaker, in recommending that there not be an immediate proceeding with the provisions for mandatory reporting of child abuse, the majority of the committee recommended a three-stage process. It said that there should be a phased response to the problem. The first phase should be targeted education without mandatory reporting. The second stage should be limited mandatory reporting for certain categories of occupation. The third stage should be full mandatory reporting. It noted at paragraph 220 of the report:
Three groups in the ACT - welfare workers, the police and doctors - were shown to be under-reporting as compared with other jurisdictions. In response to these findings the majority believes that it is preferable to pursue an education program encouraging voluntary reporting and targeted in particular at those groups ... Only if and when it can be demonstrated that the low reporting groups will not respond positively to such education campaigns should there be a move to introduce more coercive measures -
bear in mind what we are talking about today -
in the form of a limited version of mandatory reporting (phase 2 below) or full mandatory reporting (phase 3 below), as long as the system is capable of providing adequate protective and follow-up services.
Madam Speaker, that report was tabled 11 months ago. The Minister made a tabling statement at the time. That Minister was Mr Connolly. As far as I am aware, there has not been a Government response to those recommendations; so we do not formally know whether the Government proposes to accept the majority report or the minority report of the Community Law Reform Committee. We do know, however, that the majority felt that that education program must occur before mandatory reporting takes place.
All that we are being asked to do today in the Statutory Law Revision (Penalties) Bill is to increase the penalty for failure to report child abuse fivefold, from $1,000 to 50 penalty units, which is $5,000. I accept that that would be appropriate if we were in phase 2 or phase 3 of what the Community Law Reform Committee recommended; but, as far as I am aware, we are, at best, somewhere in phase one, or perhaps not even at the beginning of phase one. Mr Connolly assures me that there has been a program of educating, targeting the particular professions that were referred to in that report; that is, welfare workers, the police and doctors. I, personally, am not aware of what that campaign has done or what form it has taken. As far as I am aware, it has not been a mass media kind of education program. It must have been a special targeted education program. It is worth noting that the committee again makes it very clear that we should not proceed to impose mandatory reporting until we have evidence of the failure of that education program and, therefore, the need arises to actually proceed to that stage. I must confess, Madam Speaker, that I am loath to take on the process of quintupling the penalties for this offence when we have not yet seen the process gone through which that majority report recommended.
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