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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3484 ..

response down, and it is a positive response. It has acted incisively, quickly and with resources. You merely stood up in the public arena and frightened the public. Congratulations to you. Your, and everybody’s, actions here are deplorable.

I am not sure whether it was the Chief Minister or Ms Tucker who said it earlier, but it is a very good point: we the Assembly should share the responsibility for this; none of us read these annual reports often enough. I think that is correct.

MS DUNDAS (11.06): I thank the minister for tabling a supplementary response to the community services and social equity report, The rights, interests and wellbeing of children and young people. When we were doing the inquiry, a lot of issues were raised, and one that the committee was keen to stress was that we did not want The rights, interests and wellbeing of children and young people to be just another report that would sit on a shelf. We wanted to see real action, which is why we were committed to the recommendations that we put forward.

The question was posed: how many reports does the government need to start moving forward to change how we deal with children and young people? The initial response from the government in relation to the inquiry was quite light on, and concerns were raised initially that the government had seemed to be dismissive of some of the concerns raised and some of the recommendations made by the committee. So it is quite pleasing to see the supplementary response.

A number of key recommendations that were noted have now been changed to recommendations that have been agreed. Recommendations 13, 14, 29 and 39—to name a few—which talk about how to deal with mandatory reporting and what kind of information and statistics we need on children and young people in care so that we will think things are progressing, have been upgraded from “noted” to “agreed”.

It is a very positive step that the government has changed its attitude to some of these recommendations; it is a disappointing thing that it had to take three more reports in the meantime to get the government to this point. One of things that are spattered through this new supplementary response is talk of the Vardon inquiry and talk of the review into the Children and Young People Act and how a lot of what the committee recommended in August 2003 was echoed by the Vardon inquiry when it was tabled. It appears the government was more willing to listen to recommendations coming from outside than recommendations that were initially put to them in August 2003.

That being said, it appears that we now have movement forward in a number of areas. It is now up to the Assembly to maintain that scrutiny and ensure that these recommendations are implemented—as the government has said that they will be. One of the key components of that will be the ongoing review of the Children and Young People Act of 1999. That is an incredibly important review, and the government has indicated through its supplementary response that significant changes will be considered in relation to that review, partly because of the work of the Standing Committee on Community Services and Social Equity and partly because of the work of Vardon.

When the community services committee tabled its report in August 2003, I noted that the inquiry was not sparked by deaths or allegations of corruption and did not just have a focus on care and protection, as did inquiries that had happened in New South Wales and

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