Page 4492 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011
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MR SPEAKER: One moment, Ms Burch. Stop the clocks, thank you. Mrs Dunne was heard in silence, and I expect Ms Burch to be extended the same courtesy. Ms Burch.
MS BURCH: Thank you. She draws my attention to Ross Solly, and Mrs Dunne was also on Ross Solly. When she was asked this morning several times what she would do to fix the problems facing our care and protection workers and the shortage of foster carers, it was quite interesting that all she could come up with in her response, her solution—and she was pressed quite significantly on this—was to empower people, whatever that means, and to get rid of the paperwork and to talk about it. “So let’s talk about it. Let’s get rid of the paperwork. Let’s empower people.” That is Mrs Dunne’s solution to improving the work in care and protection. As usual, she has no solutions, and she never has.
My greatest fear is that this misguided political attack will not affect me but that it will, more so, affect front-line childcare protection workers who do a great job to protect the children who are subject to abuse and neglect and are brought into the territory’s care. I hear today that Mrs Dunne describes the directorate as dysfunctional, calls them ignorant or wilful. She implies that they deliberately and wilfully put children at risk. That is an appalling statement to make about the care and protection workers who come to the front line in the most vulnerable and distressing human service that any community can face, and that is in care and protection. So, Mrs Dunne, I will go and speak to the workers and I will assure them that I do not think that they wilfully—wilfully—put children in harm’s way.
On becoming aware of the directorate’s potential breach in relation to emergency placements, I acted to ensure that we had an independent review. I wrote through the Director-General of Community Services to seek an independent review to look at the emergency residential placements of children with an agency, engagement and subsequent suspension of the agency, and compliance with the Children and Young People Act in relation to the above matters. Lastly, and most importantly, I asked the Public Advocate to review the authorities and arrangements of children and young people currently in our out-of-home care for whom the director-general has parental responsibility.
That work is yet to start. The Public Advocate has provided an interim report that was circulated on Friday, and it has made a number of concerning findings. There is no doubt about that. The findings, in many ways, justify the decision I took to undertake a review. I share the Public Advocate’s concern about the safety and wellbeing of children in care and the importance of minimising trauma for them, and I welcome the recommendations, many of them, and I will work with my colleagues and the Public Advocate in responding to them.
But let us just be very mindful that these placements are emergency placements, and the single most important thinking of care and protection workers is how they remove children that are at risk. There was no alternative but to leave them there. They had to remove them. That is what the workers in care and protection have done in the best interests of the children. They were removed to an organisation known to these
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