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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3499 ..

I recall a very lengthy conversation with the Community Advocate when I was Attorney-General back in June or July, when the Gallop inquiry was going. She was very concerned about the way that inquiry was going. I am a pretty open and approachable sort of bloke; I was as a minister and I still am. We probably had a couple of meetings over the Gallop inquiry and she had ample opportunity to tell me her concerns. I was very concerned to hear her concerns about the Gallop inquiry. I remember taking a number of steps and talking to some of my ministerial colleagues. Basically that was that. I am very concerned to see these things, and I might make a few comments to the minister.

I would imagine that, from time to time, issues arise and people complain about things. I certainly hope, Minister, that when that occurs in individual cases you take that up with the department, as indeed I did and as I am sure other ministers did—get the department to do things, if need be, and perhaps even go to court. Might I say that sometimes when that occurred during the time I was minister—and I assume during the time of other ministers—the courts often did not do what we thought might have been in the best interests of the child, but you live with that and you abide by court orders.

Basically, as Mrs Burke has said, if there is a culture there—and there are a number of instances in recent times which clearly indicate that—where the obvious answer or the obvious duty is staring them in the face and people do not do it, something has to happen. If you have people who have had control over those public servants for a long period of time and there are systemic problems, action needs to be taken. We have seen in the past people losing their jobs through not doing the right thing as public servants.

I think of people at the remand centre and I think of people at Quamby who have a great deal of responsibility towards people under their charge—especially in a place like Quamby where you are dealing with troubled young people. In this area I think it is especially important that people do their jobs. It is the role of the senior executive, the minister and the government to ensure that that happens. I believe it is very important to bear that in mind. Mrs Burke is absolutely spot on when she says it is not just money, it is a culture; and those things desperately need to be addressed in the interests of our children.

MRS DUNNE (12.07): There has been a fair amount of scurrying for cover this morning, attributing blame and trying to spread it far and wide, and it has not been very seemly. I think we have to focus on the points made by Mrs Cross in this regard. We are talking about our children; we are talking about a systemic problem that we have known of for a long time. Ms MacDonald likes to interject all the time and ask, “What about Mr Stefaniak?”

Mr Stefaniak has addressed the issue. It has been addressed a number of times and it is addressed in the territory as parent report as well. The Community Advocate went to Mr Stefaniak and said, “Minister, I have a problem that I think needs to be addressed.” As a result of that approach there was a review—read the chronology—and changes were made to the legislation. The changes in the legislation are the problem. What we are debating today is the failure of the implementation of the legislation that was changed. When we changed the legislation and introduced the Children and Young People Act, there were certain issues that had to be complied with. We know definitively that one of

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