Page 4924 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 25 October 2011
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There are members of the community who have been crying out for vulnerable children’s checks—volunteer organisations who find they cannot bring interstate billets and things like that to the ACT because they do not have a blue card. People are coming to expect that people who provide billeting services and volunteer services will have the equivalent of the Queensland blue card. We do not provide it, and it creates problems for organisations like Rotary, for instance, because although they provide checks, they are not recognised in the same way as the Queensland system.
Organisations like that had been wanting this to happen and we have been waiting while the government got all the other fine detail organised, fine detail that will not come into effect for another six years. This is my major concern with this legislation. We are not opposed to the legislation; we are opposed to the ham-fisted way in which this minister has handled it.
We should have introduced the vulnerable children’s checks and then moved on to people with disability and people who have drug and alcohol issues and moved it sequentially like that and had this system in place a year ago rather than passing this legislation today and waiting another year for it to come into place. There is a whole lot of touting about what a great achievement we will have made today by passing this legislation, but we will still have nothing to show for it until next year.
In saying that I think there are concerns and that the government may have bitten off more than they can chew, I am not alone in this. I note the comment from Civil Liberties Australia that similar laws that were set up in the UK some years ago are actually being wound back because they are so draconian and have proved to be unworkable. This is a matter I am concerned about as well. Perhaps if this government had bitten off only what it could chew, we might have seen by now whether or not this works in practice and how we might have expanded it.
Having said that, the other observation I make is that the bill has broad support from the community sector. The sector community has worked hard to make a proactive approach to the government’s proposals, embracing them, but taking the time to develop thoughtful, well considered comments and suggestions. As I said earlier this year, it seemed incongruous that the government brought this bill for debate at that time, given the community sector had been told it would not be brought on until at least the middle of the year. However, I applaud the community sector for the keen interest it has taken in the legislation and its capacity to stick to its principles, despite the management of this by the minister.
I wonder what the business sector thinks about this, because inevitably it will impact on their business operations and their staff. I would be interested to hear what the minister has to say about this and the extent of consultation it has taken outside the community sector.
My next observations come by way of a prediction: I think that the government will be caught by surprise by the reach of this legislation. This is a view shared by Civil Liberties Australia as well. Officials have told me they have assessed the reach of the legislation to be 42,000 Canberrans who will have to apply for registration. Civil
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