Page 4489 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011
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24 times. The directorate breached a law that was supposed to protect the most vulnerable people in our community—children who have been subject to abuse and neglect. The community advocate describes an organisation which is completely dysfunctional—so dysfunctional that it breached the law 24 times. This is an organisation that is so dysfunctional that, despite the trauma of the 2004 Vardon inquiry, which made 47 recommendations on care and protection, it has not updated its policies and procedures. The Public Advocate says on page 14:
It is interesting to note that the current Policy/Procedure on Placements is dated 2004, and does not reflect current practice.
Elsewhere the Public Advocate says that she “has been unsuccessful, despite repeated requests, in obtaining a copy of the current policy and procedure manual since early 2008”. For three years the Public Advocate has been asking for policies and procedures which this agency cannot produce.
This is an organisation that is so dysfunctional that the only recourse it has for children taken into care in an emergency is to take them and have them sit around in the office while CPS staff try and make arrangements for them. There is no special facility for traumatised children to be cared for while arrangements are being made for their housing. Can you believe it, Mr Speaker?
This is an organisation that is so dysfunctional that in the case of family A, a case study in the Public Advocate’s report, we have a situation where a migrant mother of three who is pregnant again, abandoned by her husband, afraid of his friends and with a poor command of English, had her children taken from her. She was so confused about what was happening that when the children were put into a car she got into the car with them because she did not understand what was going on. The children, who had been abandoned by their father and seen their mother sick and distraught, were further traumatised by being sent to a property on the Barton Highway with no beds, no bedding, no heating and broken glass on the floor. They slept on the floor. As the Public Advocate put it, the conditions that the agency found in a Canberra winter were intolerable. She later said:
… children should never have been placed in such conditions … Neither should staff be required to work in unsafe conditions.
The Public Advocate went on to say that the family received no early intervention and “experienced 19 days of trauma, including having to sleep on the floor of a freezing house, for what it seems was no good reason”. Perhaps this is part of the treatment that Marion Le AM had in mind when she spoke in the estimates committees, in both 2010 and 2011, of the institutionalised abuse by care and protection services.
When we speak of Marion Le, let us look at what this report says about the way the community treats grandparent carers. The Public Advocate in the report tells of family B, with a grandmother looking after six children who collectively have been the subject of 43 individual child concern reports. According to the Public Advocate, with this dysfunctional directorate, presided over by an incompetent minister, there was no early intervention and no support for this family. For those of us in this place who
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