Page 4923 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
In closing, I would like to commend Minister Burch and Minister Corbell, as well as their directorates, for producing this innovative legislation, which not only protects vulnerable people from abuse and neglect but supports employers, employees and volunteers to feel confident in providing activities and services to vulnerable people. The bill has been developed in consultation with the ACT community and reflects the community’s desire to protect the vulnerable members of our community. The replacement of the current ad hoc checking processes by a centralised and procedurally fair checking system, supported by statutory risk assessment guidelines, means that those who work with vulnerable people will be subject to the same screening processes regardless of where they work.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.48): As I indicated earlier this year during the in-principle debate, the Canberra Liberals will be supporting this bill and we will be supporting the government’s amendments today. In doing so, it is worth making a couple of general observations about this bill. This bill has been a long time coming. In principle, there is nothing wrong with that, because many people had much to say about it and it has been through a lengthy consultation process. These elements are good and it is encouraging that the government has at long last seen the value of consultation and has responded to it.
But I fear—and so do others—that this bill is biting off more than it can chew. We have seen that in one of the government’s amendments. It will now be phased in over a six-year period, with the first year devoted to background checks for people dealing with children. However, the first year’s operation will not commence for another year.
This is the aspect about this bill that I am most concerned about, and it was touched on in passing, I suppose, in the community advocate’s report of the week before last where she called for vulnerable children’s checks in the ACT. The thing that motivated this was the belief and the understanding that we needed to have vulnerable children’s checks but that it would be more than two years from the introduction of this bill to when we start to have vulnerable children’s checks, and another five years after that before we actually have the full scheme up and operating.
When Jon Stanhope was here he liked to always talk about world’s first or world’s best or world leading or whatever. We spent so much time worrying about whether we would be the first in the world to do this or whether we would have the best in the world that we did not concentrate on actually getting it right. The lengthy process of consultation that we have seen since the introduction of this bill last year in 2010 is a result of the fact that we were so intent upon being the world’s first that we actually did not have the best that we could possibly have.
As a result of that, the ACT has gone for another year without vulnerable children’s checks in any formalised way. That is borne out in some of the discussion in the Public Advocate’s report. We could have had vulnerable children’s checks in and operating now if we had just bitten off that sector of the thing and said, “Well, let’s do vulnerable children’s checks and move on.” We would not have been reinventing the wheel; we would not have been doing anything too flash because it has already been up and operating fairly effectively in Queensland for some time.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video