Page 2592 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 June 2005
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and the service that they have offered me has made my life and, I suspect, the life of other members very much easier. It showed an openness and a willingness to talk that I had not hitherto experienced in dealing with the Office for Children, Youth and Family Support. I commend the minister for that and I hope that we will see a significant growth in that across the area.
At the same time, whilst being very high in my praise of the service that I have received from the office, there are considerable concerns. I think that level of generosity is not always extended to the client base. I am still dealing with people who have substantial concerns about their treatment, and I am concerned about their treatment. There are a lot of people who come through members’ doors and who have a tale of woe about their dealings with areas of the bureaucracy. When I am dealing with children, I am very circumspect. I know that I am never told the whole story by a constituent. There is always a bit more to be found out.
But when you look at that, letter after letter and exchange of correspondence this way and that, sometimes there is still a very cavalier and high-handed approach. There is a bit of “We are from the government; we are here to help you; and we know better than you.” I know that the office’s first priority is the safety and wellbeing of children, but I think that sometimes they could come up with a better way of expressing that and dealing with those issues.
I think that there is a lot to be said—and I am very mindful of the concerns of the Community Advocate—in relation to dealing with children and involving children in the decision making about their placement and care. It is often a difficult thing to do. Knowing when and how much to involve children, depending on their age and their maturity, I think, is an area which is still lacking in the Office for Children, Youth and Family Support, and I encourage the minister to encourage her staff to be more mindful of incorporating the desires of children and taking that into consideration when dealing with some of the really troublesome and troubling cases that they have to deal with.
There has been, as I have said, considerable improvement there, and the minister likes to trumpet just how successful she has been with gaining money for, say, Quamby. As she listed yesterday, it was $6 million, then it was $8 million, it became $20 million and then it became $40 million. It is, on the surface of it, testimony to a tenacious minister, but I am wondering just how wisely that money is being spent. In addition to that $40 million, there is, I think, $4 million for immediate upgrades to Quamby to make it minimally compliant because of those problems that Mr Seselja, the Canberra Times, and other people have pointed out.
I was very alarmed, in the course of perusing what was said in estimates about the Office for Children Youth and Family Support and Quamby, at the question that Mr Stefaniak asked yesterday about the demountable building. Two or three people said to me in the course of the last day, “Are they seriously going to spend $50,000 a truck to truck to Canberra a building that was slated for demolition?” $1.5 million, 30 trucks, that is $50,000 a truck to transport bits of a building from Brisbane.
The minister stood here and said, “There is no cheaper way of doing it.” I think that we really need to revisit this. I hope that the government has not inextricably committed itself to this expenditure, because $1.5 million to transport a temporary building—
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