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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Thursday, 1 July 2004) . . Page.. 3158 ..

a situation where parents are abusing their children we have got to a very unnatural situation; there has been a level of distress that is so extreme that we have an environment where they hurt, arguably, the people they love the most. So the question really is about acknowledging that people need support, that we need to be really careful about a punitive approach and that we need to have a sense, from the ground up, of what we can do as a community and as a government, or a parliament, to assist families in their struggle.

I was speaking recently at a federal forum on child abuse. I think I have mentioned this before, so I will not go into detail. Basically, the thing that interested me was that there was a long list of what we understand to be the correlating conditions that are easily recognisable around child abuse, substance abuse, mental illness, single parenthood, Aboriginality, et cetera. I think we have got to be really careful about confusing those correlating conditions with fundamental causes, because by doing that you pathologise communities, you stereotype people, you create a situation where profiling can occur, which is certainly not in the interest of any individual—not to mention the stigma that also of course just feeds on the social exclusion that then isolates people, that then creates an environment where there is more likely to be unhappiness and potentially child abuse.

There have been several examples of that in this place on which we have had debates. I remember one really well, where I was lobbying the government to try to support this young woman. She was threatened with eviction from a supported accommodation service. She was apparently not meeting all the guidelines and tough love that was being dealt out. She was successfully recovering from a heroin addiction, something that, in my view, deserves a medal in itself. She was supporting two small children. She was not able to use a car. It was 40 degrees outside. The public telephone was quite a way away. She was desperately trying to find accommodation. Recorded messages were mostly what were found at the end of the line. When there was a human answering, they were not able to assist.

I took on her situation and I, from an air-conditioned office, spent several hours trying to find her somewhere to live. My blood pressure was going up very high as I realised the total blockage there was in trying to assist this family. That woman deserved support in that situation. She was struggling with an addiction; she was struggling with a difficult family situation; she was threatened with being homeless as well as, in the end, losing her children.

I have to ask the question: what is it that we are doing as a community and what was our service response to that situation in terms of our actually going to assist that family and prevent a mother losing her cool with those children or losing her children and causing in itself an abuse of the children by removing them from a home where really this woman was trying to do the best for her kids? She needed support, not the kind of obstruction that she was getting.

On the question of homelessness I have to say this: Mrs Burke, you are talking about these issues—you look at the Vardon report. There is a whole section on homelessness in it. One of the recommendations says:

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