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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3500 ..

the 71 or 73—as the minister informed us during the estimates process—statutory requirements has not been complied with.

I have asked in this place whether the minister is aware if any of the other 70-odd statutory requirements under the Children and Young People Act have not been complied with and the minister has told me that she is confident. I want to place on the record that I am not confident, simply because of the failings we are talking about today—the failings of the territory parent to report about children in the territory parent’s care to the Community Advocate under section 162 (2) of the Children and Young People Act. That is the failure we are talking about. What that means is that, under section 162 (1), somebody in the old department had to generate a report about the danger a person was in. Under section 162 (2) the chief executive essentially had to put that report in an envelope and address it to the Community Advocate. That consistently did not happen from the time this bill was implemented.

We are not talking about what happened before this bill was implemented. We are talking about the systemic failures to implement the Children and Young People Act as it refers to section 162 (2) of the Children and Young People Act. There ain’t nothing else that we are talking about; this is the pivotal point. Members of the government may wish to cloud the issue but this is not an issue that can be clouded. This is what we are talking about here. What brought it about was the Community Advocate saying to the community services committee that she had a problem; the Community Advocate saying, I have to say a very inept way, in her annual reports that there was a failure to comply.

One of the recommendations of the last Estimates Committee was that, when a supervisory body like the Community Advocate becomes aware of a failure of an organisation to meet their statutory responsibilities, they have to report it in an open and transparent way, using a, “Look at this, fellas; something’s going wrong” process. In two successive years it was reported by the Community Advocate in such a way that you had to be out there looking for it before you found it. That is part of the systemic failure. The way the Community Advocate brought it to the attention of the Attorney-General and subsequently to this place was not good enough and is part of the failure. But the failure is about section 162 (2) of the Children and Young People Act. If section 162 (2) was not complied with, I still need to be satisfied that section 162 (1) was complied with.

MS GALLAGHER (Minister for Education and Training, Minister for Children, Youth and Family Support, Minister for Women and Minister for Industrial Relations) (12.12), in reply: I will pick up firstly on what Mrs Dunne said—that we, over here, are scurrying for cover in relation to this child protection issue. I woke up this morning and actually thought about scurrying for cover. I thought how, over the last seven months, this child protection issue has taken its toll on everyone—none more so than the children who are in the care of the territory—but I hardly think this government can be accused of scurrying for cover.

Today we are here to talk about the government’s response to the standing committee’s report on the rights, interests and wellbeing of children and young people in the ACT. We are also here to talk about the supplementary response—a supplementary response that we were not required to provide but one which, on my initiation, after discussions with Ms Tucker, was deemed appropriate considering the information that had come to light following the tabling of this report.

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