Page 4504 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011
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charge of care and protection systems read about all the time. We read about families who are traumatised. We read about children who are removed in emergency situations. We read about parents who do not accept that. We read about the care and protection workers that often have to go in with police to visit these families and who have to tear children out of the arms of families and loved ones. We read about all those. They are traumatising and they are distressing, not just for us, who read it on a bit of paper, but to those people. Imagine the situation that that puts those children in.
But I also remind members of what happens when care and protection workers do not remove children. Let us remember the lecturing we got from Mrs Dunne when a family in Ainslie, exposed in the national media, actually were not removed for a variety of reasons. Care and protection workers made the decision that it was in the best interests of those children to leave them with their mother at that time. And let us remember the judgements passed in this place on the care and protection workers who made those decisions, with good reasons, whenever I spoke to them. But a view expressed in this place was that that was not adequate, that the children were not removed. Now those same workers are being judged because they made a different decision in the interests of what they thought at that hour of that day was the right thing to do for those children.
Yes, it now appears, running the ruler over it and analysing those decisions, that there were deficiencies in the decision making. But let us remember for a moment how those decisions are taken and the stress of the environment in which they are taken. Nobody wants to bring children into Moore Street. In fact, I know that it does not occur for the majority of children. But when there is difficulty in placing children—those children have been removed in an emergency situation—sometimes there is nowhere else for those children to go. Nobody wants them in Moore Street, and arrangements are made as soon as possible to get them somewhere more appropriate. But again, let us remember the timing and the speed with which some of these decisions are taken.
There is no perfect care and protection system. There will never be a perfect care and protection system. My very strong belief is that every review that you call into care and protection systems will find some area of failure, and that will not be through anyone’s wilful or dysfunctional—to use Mrs Dunne’s outrageous language this morning—actions on behalf of staff working for the directorate. I do not know who Mrs Dunne believes is working in our care and protection system that she describes them in such an atrocious way as she has this morning, but these are staff who come in every day to manage the hundreds of children that the rest of our community do not care a lot about. And that is the reality of care and protection systems. They are human systems. They are not perfect. They are under enormous stress.
For a minister, there are different responsibilities. The legislative responsibilities under the Children and Young People Act are clear. The territory parent has statutory responsibilities for children taken into the care of the territory. The minister’s job, as some have pointed out, is to administer the directorate. I believe, from the discussions that I have had with Ms Burch and from the paperwork that I have read, that she did exactly what a minister was required to do. When provided with information from her department in not a clear way, I would say, in not as clear a way as I would expect
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