Page 5863 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 7 December 2011
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strategies are and where we need to target our attention. That is very much the intent of this motion today—to draw out the information and enable the Assembly to have a well-informed discussion about an issue that, as the data shows, is clearly very significant here in the ACT.
Those figures on the number of incidents seen in the ACT public service are unacceptable. It is a matter that this Assembly needs to turn its mind to. We need to think about what steps we might take at this level to assist in reducing that number, and hopefully reducing it dramatically, and provide the means for industries and individual workplaces, perhaps at the coalface, to take the steps that they need to take so that in the end we see those numbers dropping over coming years. I commend the motion to the Assembly.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (5.20): The Canberra Liberals will support in principle the motion put forward by Mr Rattenbury today. I had drafted and circulated some significant amendments to his paragraph (2), which I note that the Chief Minister has subsumed almost entirely into her proposed amendments, so I will not be moving my amendments but will instead be supporting the Chief Minister’s proposed amendments to Mr Rattenbury’s motion.
Over a very long period of time, much has been said in the Assembly by the Canberra Liberals on the subject of bullying and assault. In more recent times we have seen concerns about assaults at Bimberi—assaults on staff and assaults on residents of Bimberi. And we have seen that, through the persistence of pursuing these issues, the Canberra Liberals have managed to achieve some improvement at Bimberi Youth Justice Centre and a long-term commitment to turning around the operation of the Bimberi Youth Justice Centre. That has been because of persistence in the face of denial by the minister.
There has been much said about bullying in the context of health and hospital systems. My colleague Mr Hanson will speak about that. It is useful to note that when much was being said by the Canberra Liberals and much was being called for by the Canberra Liberals in this area, the Greens were strangely silent on the subject.
I go back to at least my second term as a member of the Legislative Assembly when I started to raise issues in the context of schools in relation to bullying—not just the bullying of children, but the bullying of staff. I recall, when Ms Gallagher was the minister for education, asking her a question in question time one day about a bullying incident at a school which I did not name. It turned out that coincidentally there were a number of high school teachers in the chamber for that question time; they were on some study unit in the Legislative Assembly. Text messages went all through the education system that afternoon that Mrs Dunne was asking questions about “insert name of high school here”. It was a poorly kept secret. By asking one simple question in this place, all the teachers present knew about it and knew what I was talking about.
We have seen spectacular form from this government in relation to whistleblowers, most recently the issues highlighted in the department of urban services where we have seen people basically hounded out of their job, put through hell and put through huge expense so that they have had to sell their home and move out of town. They
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