Page 4757 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 10 November 2009
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piece of work has been going on for about three years; so I am pleased that it has finally come to a point where it can be launched because it is incredibly important to have that charter of rights that children and young people in care can look to to ensure that their human rights are being protected.
They are some main points that I would like to bring up in today’s MPI. I just reiterate that the care and protection of our children is a whole-of-community responsibility, and we all need to be part of ensuring that children here in the ACT have the best opportunity to have a happy and healthy childhood.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (3.50): Madam Assistant Speaker Le Couteur, I would like to thank you for bringing on this important matter relating to tackling child abuse and child neglect. I would like to congratulate you on moving on from the matters of natural burial and cage-egg production to the children of the ACT. I think it is about time.
One of the most important things we have to do in the territory and in this place is to ensure that we have the government structures and the support structures in place that will support those children who cannot appropriately be cared for in the homes into which they were born. The figures in relation to the children who are in the care of the chief executive are ones that should give us considerable pause. Around 500 children—it comes and goes, it rises and falls—at any one time are in the care of the chief executive, and that means that those children are in a situation where, either temporarily or permanently, it has become untenable for them to be raised by their parents. That is an important issue for how we structure our society and what we do in our society to support those children, most importantly, and to find for them the best and most secure environment that they can live in when the thing that we take for granted—the capacity to raise children in a happy and secure household—is taken from them. It may be that those children may, with time and care, be able to be returned to their parents. It may be entirely inappropriate, and sometimes we have to make, as a community, that very difficult decision about when you cut your losses for the benefit of the child.
We have in the past year or so amended the children and young people legislation and the various things that hang off the children and young people legislation to really reinforce that the decisions that we make in relation to care and protection and support of our children first and foremost must be about the benefit of the child. There are a number of matters which have been touched on in the discussion of the matter of public importance so far. But I think the most important thing that we need to do is recognise that, as a result of the Vardon inquiry, the territory as parent inquiry and the Murray-Mackie report that resulted from that, it is quite clear that the territory has come a long way in addressing the bureaucratic structures which had fallen down in the ACT, although possibly not to the extent that they had fallen down in other jurisdictions. In a sense—this is a credit to the minister at the time—we were in the vanguard of improving the administration of care and protection. With respect to inquiries conducted in other jurisdictions, particularly the Wood royal commission in New South Wales, it was clear that many of the recommendations Mr Wood made in relation to DOCS had already been anticipated and acted upon in the ACT.
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