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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Thursday, 1 July 2004) . . Page.. 3161 ..

Mr Pratt: “Taking something” or “on something”, Mr Speaker?

Mrs Burke: The Minister knows what she said. She can live with that, that’s all right.

MS GALLAGHER: Yes, I can live with it.

MR SPEAKER: I’ll look at the transcript and make a decision on it later.

MS GALLAGHER: Thank you, Mr Speaker. There is a significant reform process going on in family services at the moment. The new Office for Children, Youth and Family Support is working around the areas that the Vardon report identified as areas for reform. There were, I guess, the key areas around children and young people, their support needs and their participation; services for indigenous families and indigenous children and young people; service and sector development; prevention and early intervention services; accountability in governance frameworks; and workload, staffing and training.

There have been six working parties set up to progress all of those issues—six reference groups. They are focusing their energies around those key areas of implementation. The chief executive of the Chief Minister’s Department is leading the implementation team and working in a very collaborative approach with a whole range of organisations, including all the out-of-home-care agencies, the Children’s Services Council, the CREATE Foundation, the foster care associations, the Official Visitor, the Community Advocate.

I must use this opportunity to extend my thanks to all those organisations who are volunteering their time and who see this as a fantastic opportunity to reform the system and the processes to make sure that we are providing the best service that we can to children and young people who need the care and protection of the territory. And many of those organisations, of course, are non-government agencies that are providing it in addition to the services they already provide. It is invaluable that we have that support.

Of course the additional money will help. I do not know that you can just say chucking money at something will not help; it will help. One of the major areas that have been identified has been the lack of resourcing for this area since self-government. I think it is fair to say that, when you look back, it has never been resourced to the point it should have been. I do not know, if you look back to when the Commonwealth ran it, whether it was properly and adequately resourced then. But we are going through an exercise and we are having a look at what it actually costs to provide the level of support that we have to—and, indeed, anything that we have to provide on top of a minimum level of support—and it shows that the office has not been adequately resourced and that has in turn led to services not being of the standard that they should be.

Some of the immediate areas that expenditure will be paying for are, again, looking for more child protection workers; strengthening prevention; early intervention and family support services; importantly, looking at alternative accommodation options, a key finding of the Vardon report that there just are not enough accommodation options for children and young people, particularly those who are difficult to place; more staff and services for indigenous children, young people and their families; and more opportunity

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