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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4708 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

The Education Union and the children at risk unit at the hospital both raised considerable concerns about services for young people or children. They suggested that in some cases intervention may be necessary when a child is as young as one or that a child may need assistance, programs and therapy from the time they start school at four or five years of age. If we fail to recognise the problems and behaviours that begin to manifest themselves at that time and to resolve them, as the Education Union submission said, the problems do not go away; they merely get bigger.

This seems to be part of the attitude that you wait until some disaster or crisis hits before you take any action. A number of recommendations in our report on violence in schools emphasised the importance of early intervention. Most of those recommendations have been ignored. No consideration is given to the needs of young children starting school and in the early years of schooling, to ensure that issues that may arise from family problems are corrected and addressed at that time. It is foolish to sit and wait until they come under the umbrella of juvenile justice before we start to look at resolving them.

A section of the report is devoted to services for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. I recommend that all members read it and consider the issues raised. In the time I have been in the Assembly, we have had a number of discussions about reconciliation and other issues in relation to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. But a lot of it is talk. The report on deaths in custody was a lot of words, but it is not leading to any action to change the way we deal with that community and the way we negotiate with that community to get the best services that are responsive to their cultural needs.

There has been discussion in the government service about Aboriginal identified positions in Family Services. My understanding is that they have still not been filled. They have been talked about for months and months, but there does not seem to be any will or commitment to fill them. As I have mentioned before, we have failed to recognise Aboriginal child placement principles in dealing with the fostering and adoption of Aboriginal children at risk. There are a considerable number of these children in the system at any time. I am surprised that this still has not been addressed. I realise that it will be addressed under the children's services review that is currently going on, but this is surely something that should have been given a much higher priority. It is very disappointing that we talk about reconciliation but take little action to ensure that it happens in a meaningful way.

Earlier I made some comments about the timing of this review, but it was important to have an overall review of children and young people's services in the ACT. It pulled together the various strands that have come through in the other inquiries the Social Policy Committee has undertaken. The recommendations about a lack of data need to be addressed by the next Assembly and the next government.

Mrs Littlewood, in her additional comments, suggested a review in relation to illicit drugs. For a number of young people in the ACT, illicit drugs are the least of their problems. I think other issues should be looked at well before that issue. One in particular that features strongly in the additional comments is housing. Although housing was only a small part of one of the areas we looked at, 11/2 pages are devoted to it in

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