Page 2491 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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Family Affairs appear to be becoming worse despite considerable expenditure in this area. The government has previously gone to considerable expense to import staff from overseas for this office. In answer to a question on notice, the minister revealed that the department had spent $377,000 on advertising and relocation allowances to recruit staff from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Some three years after this recruitment began, a quarter of these staff have moved on from the department. According to the minister’s explanation at estimates, the department is currently understaffed and is currently going through another recruitment process. We all remember the fanfare and the television reports when these people were brought here. A serious question has to arise as to why that recruitment program has collapsed and why the government has to go back to the well to find more. It begs the question as to what are the factors that have led to this being an exercise that has not been well implemented and has led to such a large number of departures.
In estimates committee on 28 June, it emerged that there had been 369 allegations of abuse of children in the care of the chief executive. The minister stated that some of these allegations of child abuse had been substantiated, though she did not give a figure. Another worrying revelation that arose from the hearings was the high rate of abuse of Aboriginal children in the ACT, with the government revealing that 101 of the 505 children in care were Aboriginal children. To put this figure in perspective, ABS data from the newly released census tells us that the total number of Aboriginal children in the ACT—that is, up to the age of 18—is 1,739. This tells us that over five per cent of these children are in the care of the Office of Children, Youth and Family Services. This is a poor outcome for a government that has been strident in its criticisms of measures aimed at preventing abuse to Aboriginal children in other jurisdictions. There are worrying signs for child protection administration in the ACT, and I sincerely hope we will see a turnaround in the problems with this office.
Another area of interest is the youth detention centre. Despite spending on a new youth detention centre, the budget targets do not indicate any targeted reduction in recidivism rates for young people in custody in any of the four years. In estimates committee hearings on 28 June my colleague Mr Seselja made the point that our own Attorney-General, Mr Corbell, is on record as saying that the whole point of providing for a model prison is to reduce recidivist behaviour. The government’s response to this point was inadequate. The Director of Child and Adolescent Services at the Office of Children, Youth and Family Services pointed to the difficulty of measuring recidivism and the fact that there is no nationally agreed measure. Frankly, this objection is irrelevant. The government obviously has established some measure if it is reporting on this item at all, and this measure is surely consistent with itself from year to year.
The director also explained that the small number of youth in custody meant that they are “at the pointy end of the justice system.” He stated that “we would hope that we would have some impact over time, but it will take some time.” If this is the case, I ask why there is nothing in the budget papers to explain the inadequacy of this indicator or to give any indication of the longer-term target in this area. It is no use giving an indicator for the forward years and then writing it off as too unreliable and too short term. We have seen it in several other areas. In any case, we are still left
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