Page 3469 - Week 08 - Thursday, 18 August 2011
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the letters that have been written by the Canberra Liberals in relation to Bimberi to Ms Burch and her predecessor, Mr Barr. I am not going to table them but I will just show the members here the number of questions, the number of times this matter has been raised by my colleagues and me in this place. And quite frankly, our list of contributions on the issue of Bimberi is much larger than what Ms Burch tried to demonstrate yesterday. We have a long and proud history of standing up for the young people who are sentenced to Bimberi and the people who look after them.
The ACT is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The quote from the young person subjected to segregation highlights a breach. It highlights the fundamental failures of this minister. I could quote many submissions from the report which highlight breaches, but I feel that it is time to move forward, and this report gives us the opportunity to move forward.
In addressing the recommendations of the report, the highest priority should be given to improving the culture, the working conditions and the practices of staff at Bimberi. We must improve the lives of the young people so that they have an opportunity to use their time at Bimberi to improve their lives, to reflect on why they are there and how they can become better citizens.
For those of us who have pored over this report, there are many responsibilities which are placed upon us all. And I endorse many of the recommendations and the tenor of the recommendations in this report. I think the underlying and single most important recommendation is that any change has to come from the community. Any change has to be driven by the community.
I submit that, as the representatives of the community, people in this Assembly have a very important part to play. There are a number of recommendations in this report that refer directly to the ACT Legislative Assembly. And I think that it is important that now that this report has become available, the ACT Legislative Assembly take ownership of this report.
My intent today in moving this motion referring the report to the Standing Committee on Education, Training and Young People is to ensure that the Legislative Assembly has an ongoing ownership of this report. We must reflect that this report is not a report to the government, it is a report to this place. It is a report from the human rights commissioner and the young people commissioner to this place because we asked for it. And it is now important that, once we have this report, we have ownership of the solution.
My intention in moving this motion today is to ensure that that ownership is clearly stated and is ongoing. I believe, and I envisage by this reference, that the Standing Committee on Education, Training and Young People will have an ongoing brief to oversee the implementation of the recommendations for the life of this Assembly, and I would recommend to an incoming Assembly that that remit be taken up in the next Assembly as well. There are no reporting dates in my recommendation because I envisage that there will be ongoing reporting as the committee saw fit in the course of the Assembly. I see that this is not a closed time frame and that their remit would continue for the life of this Assembly.
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