Page 2558 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 June 2012
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Let me take just one example of that emptiness, Mr Speaker. A major element of recommendation 6.2 of the Vardon report was to establish a child death review program. Quite some work had already been done in this area but more was needed. In its response the government made a number of commitments to review, report, analyse, consider and recommend.
One element of the recommendation was to embark on a project to research and create a registry of past child deaths, to analyse the deaths and to identify any emerging trends. The government responded:
The scope and methodology of the project will be carefully drafted in the coming months.
Mr Speaker, that response was nothing more than public service jargon for “we’ll put it in the bottom drawer and forget about it”. Nonetheless, six years later, in 2010, a bill was introduced to establish a child death review team. But it was not the government’s bill. It was a bill that was introduced by the Greens, and the bill that finally passed was the work of the Greens.
When this bill was introduced, there was an extraordinary and bizarre chain of events. The government wriggled, squirmed, lobbied, amended, negotiated and pleaded until finally the legislation was passed. During the many meetings to discuss this bill, it was revealed that there would be quite some initial work required to gather and analyse past data. Thus it underscored the public service jargon I mentioned earlier.
This example also goes to the central theme of the Vardon report—that is, the culture of government. Before any reform can bring tangible outcomes and benefits for children and young people in care, there needs to be a change in the culture of the government and the minister, and how the minister inspires and leads the bureaucracy responsible for that change. But the culture was not entrenched, and so the problems highlighted in 2004 persist today.
During the course of the Seventh Assembly we have seen story after story of this government’s failure to care for and protect vulnerable children and young people in our community. It started with the government’s failure to deliver its 2008 election promise to grandparents and kinship carers. We have seen, at two successive estimates hearings, representatives of kindred and foster carers describe the work of care and protection services as institutionalised abuse of them and the children that they care for.
And we have seen the horrifying case of children in the care and protection program being put with an organisation not approved by the directorate as a suitable entity and that entity being told to take children to a house where there was no electricity, heating, hot water or bedding and where there was broken glass on the floor in the middle of winter. That, Mr Speaker, is the most serious indictment of all of this government.
And with this serious indictment of the government it puts this most important and urgent problem in the bottom drawer and forgets about it. It is a most serious
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