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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Thursday, 1 July 2004) . . Page.. 3164 ..

problems in reporting—that is without a doubt—but there is still support there for those children and there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure that that support works.

I would like to quote then from the Vardon report itself. There was research done into actually hearing the voices of young people. Ms Vardon picked up on the fact that children suggested that they lived in fear of their parents and that they often felt they were not believed when they expressed such concerns to family services workers. It is of great concern that, when a young person comes up and says, “I’m in fear of my parents, I’m in fear of my life in this home,” they felt they were not being believed. That is a major problem that needs to be addressed. It is not just a systemic one about reporting; it is one about attitudes in this community to young people and hearing young people’s voices and valuing young people’s voices.

This echoed concerns that the community services committee had heard when we ourselves went out and spoke to young people. Again and again, we heard from young people that they felt that their voices were not being heard and, when they were being heard, they were not being believed.

This is something broader than just child protection; this goes across the entire community and is something that we all need to think about: why we do not hear children’s voices enough and why there is continual disrespect for young people. We think that young people, because they have not lived long enough, do not have enough life experience to contribute to our society. That attitude is continually perpetrated and needs to be stopped. It flows into child protection and flows outside child protection as well. We need to respect young people to be able to articulate their concerns about what is happening to them in a way that is relevant to them. And then we need to encourage young people to do this, support them to do it and then work with them to address their problems. I think that is something that we all need to do a little bit better.

I would like to conclude by referring to the government’s response to the annual reports that were tabled today. There were some serious concerns raised, specifically in the Standing Committee on Education’s report—and I think this flows into the Vardon report—that annual reports were not providing full and frank information not only in relation to judicial decisions from coroners but also on the actual work of the department and how this was impacting on accurate record-keeping and how it was impacting on this Assembly’s oversight role.

I guess I am very disappointed that the government’s response to these serious concerns was one line and that we may never actually know what the department of education thought in response to coroners’ inquiries about the deaths of young people in this community. So I ask the government to respond more fully. We did not get that information through the annual reports; we have not seen that information in any other sense. It is not in the government’s response to the committee’s concerns about the annual reports. So hopefully there will be more information forthcoming on not just how the department of education acted in the past but how the things that came out of the coroners’ inquiries into the relationships of young people known to family services will be used to inform how the new Office of Children, Youth and Family Support actually operates.

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