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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Thursday, 12 February 2004) . . Page.. 320 ..

While the Committee is not recommending, at this stage, an inquiry into ACT Family Services or an inquiry solely on care and protection, it does believe it is necessary for the Government to report back to the community on the implementation of the Committee’s recommendations…

They go on to say that they will be seeking regular updates.

Mr Deputy Speaker, there are a number of triggers in those two or three pages that should have sent alarm bells ringing amongst people who knew what they were about. At this stage, the minister says, in her defence, that it was ambiguous. I am concerned about ambiguity because, although, as the minister has explained, this issue is complex, while being very complex it is also very simple.

Ministers and people in government departments are charged in this instance with protecting our most vulnerable. It seems that a lot can be said in a grandstanding way about whether laws were broken, what was going on at particular times and who did what to whom. A lot has been said in previous assemblies about the breaking of laws. There was the overnight loan which, according to the Chief Minister, was the breaking of a law because of which heads had to roll.

When we were talking about a broken law over Bruce Stadium, we were talking about the quality and the colour of grass. We were talking about money. What Mrs Burke has been talking about for the past month or so is not money, and it is not the colour of grass. It is our children, it is our heritage, it is what we leave behind. We cannot now hide behind words like “ambiguity”. When you put the evidence before you, alarm bells should have been ringing long before a fax arrived.

MR HARGREAVES (4.02): I want to put on the record one of the major reasons why the committee raised the issue. Certainly, it had concerns about the safety of children. We all have them, and for anybody to suggest that we do not is absolute nonsense. We were concerned because we understood from the OCA and from a number of other sources that for years and years the statutory obligation had not been discharged.

We tried to satisfy ourselves on our committee that, whether kids were safe or not, we were talking about the rights, interests and wellbeing of children. Of course, the issue in our report goes to whether somebody had discharged a statutory obligation or not. I quote from a letter of 23 January this year from the OCA to the Chief Minister. She gives a chronology of some events that are salient to this debate.

On 30 April 1996 the then Attorney-General Bill Stefaniak wrote to me, the OCA, ensuring me that I would be informed of all reports of abuse in care. This followed extensive lobbying of Family Services on the part of the OCA, as abuse in care had always been a key concern.

In 1996 in April the then Attorney-General Bill Stefaniak said he would do that. What happened? Nothing. In May 2000 the new Children and Young People Act commenced. This act required the chief executive to provide to the Community Advocate records of reports made about children for whom she has parental responsibility. The election was in October 2001. Between May 2000 and October 2001, what did the minister for family services do? Nothing. Was there a report to the OCA? No. There was, however, a stream

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