Page 4758 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 10 November 2009
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The tendency to bureaucratise care and protection has been, as much as possible, resisted in the ACT. A large amount of responsibility has been farmed out to community service organisations in relation to care and protection. There are some things which must necessarily be the responsibility of officials, because they relate to the making of orders, the implementation of orders and the supervision of those orders, and final responsibility for those must rightly lie with the ACT public service, because they are statutory responsibilities.
It is fortuitous—I do not know whether it was planned this way by the Greens—that we are dealing with this issue on the day that we have a new minister for children and young people. She is not only occupying her seat in the Assembly as a minister for the first time, but this is her first day as the minister for children and young people. Although I have said that the ACT is in a good place—because I think that the legislation is there, and there is substantial goodwill in this Assembly to ensure that care and protection issues are dealt with appropriately and sensitively—I think that the challenges for the minister are substantial. Of the 500 children in the care of the chief executive that Ms Hunter alluded to, about one-fifth of those are Indigenous children. That disproportionately large number of Indigenous children is a matter that should be of considerable concern to us here in the ACT.
There is the challenge of finding the best way of ensuring that these children have the sort of stable life that they have not experienced hitherto and that other children take for granted. There is the challenge of addressing the disproportionate number of Indigenous children in foster care. There is the challenge of reducing the number of children in the ACT who are sleeping rough. There is the challenge of addressing violence in schools, which may perpetuate the violence that children experience at home. There is the challenge of kids living in an environment of drugs, crime and antisocial behaviour with their parents. There is the challenge of kids living in an environment of vulnerability, with parents facing financial difficulties, living in the cold, with insufficient food and clothing. There is the challenge of the rising cost of health care, of childcare, of care and protection. These are substantial challenges for the new minister. I hope that the new minister is up to the task of tackling the subject of child abuse and child neglect, and I wish her well.
MS PORTER (Ginninderra) (3.58): I also want to thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker Le Couteur, for bringing on this matter of public importance today—that is, the tackling of child abuse and neglect. I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak to this matter. This is a serious social issue, and I look forward to supporting the government’s agenda for action in this important area. No-one would deny that child abuse and neglect is a serious and complex problem, and that the number of children subject to child abuse and neglect remains unacceptably high. According to the Australian government’s 2007-08 discussion paper, Australia’s children: safe and well—a national framework for protecting Australian children, there were 55,120 substantiated reports of child abuse and neglect in Australia. These are alarming figures, to say the least. We must always remember that these are not merely numbers in a report; they are children denied the safety and support that is their most basic human right.
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