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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 11 Hansard (19 October) . . Page.. 3331 ..
MS TUCKER (continuing):
(3) The Minister must present a report of the review to the Legislative Assembly not later than the first sitting day after a 3 month consideration period commencing on the first day after the end of the review period.
(4) The report must include the reportable information for the review period.
(5) In this section, the following is reportable information for the review period:
(a) the number of children or young people who received therapeutic protection and the age and sex of each;
(b) the length of each period of therapeutic protection for each child or young person, including whether the child or young person has received therapeutic protection before;
(c) the kind of therapeutic protection provided for each child or young person, whether the provision has been successful and an explanation of why the provision has or has not been successful;
(d) an assessment of the adequacy of resources provided for therapeutic protection orders;
(e) whether there has been any unmet need in relation to the provision of therapeutic protection.".
This amendment is about ensuring that there is a review of the therapeutic protection orders after 12 months, in light of the fact that I was not successful with my other amendment. This, at least, is some mechanism put into the legislation to give us the opportunity to look at what has resulted from this piece of the legislation.
MR STEFANIAK (Minister for Education) (6.14): The Government will be opposing this, Mr Speaker. I draw members' attention again to new section 414 and the fact that members will be watching this legislation very carefully, as will the Government. This is a rather strange piece of drafting to put into legislation. I can see what Ms Tucker wants to do. It would be entirely appropriate she do that as a member of the Assembly or even in terms of chair of a committee which has an interest in this. It is obviously something that Mr Wood indicated he has got an interest in looking at, too, as anyone with responsibility in this area would. In terms of a set of ideas and principles of what members should look for, maybe it is not unreasonable. But to put it in legislation is incredibly difficult because in legislation it is up to a court to interpret it. There are some grave difficulties there. For example, subclause (2) states:
The review must include consideration of relevant feedback received from the community ...
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