Page 4160 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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We continued to lobby for a full inquiry. An inquiry was set up that Mr Hargreaves in fact was involved with. That was the inquiry into the interests, rights and wellbeing of children and young people. The position was finally revealed. The minister at the time, Katy Gallagher, to her credit, took it on and just went out and said, “Right, we need to do a full inquiry because things are not right with our system.” That was a thorough inquiry, a very thorough inquiry. It looked at all of the cases involving children and where they were. We knew from the first get-go that the government and the department were not able to guarantee the safety of all children in the system because they did not know where all those children were. That is where we were early on in that inquiry.
There were many recommendations that came out of that inquiry and there was a community-government type of group that was put together to oversee the implementation of the Vardon recommendations. Many of them were put in place. What was also recognised was that this was a system under pressure. These were workers that needed a heck of a lot more support than they were getting from management. We also knew that there were increasing numbers of children coming into the system. We needed to ensure that we matched workers with that demand. We also matched professional development and, as I said, debriefing and support.
I was interested to hear the minister say in here yesterday that workers in the system have talked about it being a very tough job. It is. None of us should underestimate what a tough job it is. The minister said that the workforce had said to her that they wanted a debriefing, they wanted that professional supervision and so forth. I hope that that is in place and what the minister was meaning was that it will be, that they will be increasing that resource. That is very much something that has been known for many years. If you want to retain the workforce and keep a healthy workforce, you need to put in place the sorts of debriefing and professional supervision around that workforce to keep them well and to keep them safe.
We also know that what came out of that Vardon inquiry was an incredible amount of money that went into the system. It was justified and we still need to make sure that we properly resource that system. We also knew that, as I said, we did not have enough workers. We could not source those workers locally and we could not source those workers across Australia. Over several years the government, through the department, has been going overseas to do massive recruitment drives. Many workers have come from the UK into Canberra and have joined that system.
One of the things that I picked up along the way was that because of these numbers of new workers and so forth coming in, they do not know all of the systems. They do not know all of the checking processes, admin processes and so forth. Massive recruitment drives are now part of our care and protection system in order to be able to maintain this workforce.
We should not see this as a strange thing that happens once in a decade. This is now going to be a regular part of how we have to build and maintain that workforce. Therefore, we need to set the whole system up to ensure that that regular wave of new workers coming in are given the proper support and time to be able to get right on top
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