Page 2559 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 June 2012
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indictment of a minister who is so incompetent as to allow this to continually be put in the bottom drawer, so that when we had the Public Advocate’s interim report last October we had the startling revelation that we had 24 breaches—24 potential breaches—of the law.
What was the government’s response to that? The government’s response to that was to bring out the attack dogs, to have the Government Solicitor put forward a legal opinion to say that when the Public Advocate said that she believed the law had been breached 24 times—to have a contrary opinion put out and then have this minister savage the Public Advocate to a point where people came to me and expressed to me the concern that this government was bullying the Public Advocate into submission. The feedback that I have received second-hand from the Public Advocate is that she felt bullied. She would never be so unprofessional as to say this directly to anyone, but I know from people who are close to her that she felt bullied by this.
The reassurance that we saw last week, when the Public Advocate brought down her second report, Who is looking out for the territory’s children?, was that people in the care and protection system said that even though Minister Burch used the Government Solicitor to go after the Public Advocate, they were pleased that she had not been cowed. They were pleased that she had the courage to stand up for the failings in the emergency system, the emergency response to children in care.
We have to come now and look at the final report, the report brought down by the Public Advocate last week. Just a few snippets from this report highlight to you, Mr Speaker, and to members of the Assembly, just how incompetent this minister is, just how strong the failings are over eight years.
This is the minister who for two years—more than two years now—has been the responsible minister for the care and protection system. After all that time—after eight years, after commitments from Jon Stanhope, after commitments from Katy Gallagher, after the ministerial supervision of Andrew Barr and after the current tutelage from Joy Burch—we still hear this, from page 17 of the report:
… this Review unfortunately found that elements of the Vardon Report remain relevant today.
And from page 7:
It is disappointing to have to report that this Review of the authorities and arrangements for children coming into the Care and Protection Service (C&PS) over the past three years … were not an aberration.
The Public Advocate looked at 100 emergency responses over three years. What she found was appalling. She found that in many cases—30, 40, 50 per cent of cases—there was not appropriate record keeping. Only 65 per cent of those sampled contained information pertaining to the consequences of the risk and harm recorded. When you read the Public Advocate’s report, some of it sounds like teaching grandma how to suck eggs. There are comments in there about how meeting reports should be written up and what sort of headings should be in it. “A meeting between Mary Smith and Joe Jones and Mary O’Flahoola in relation to Jimmy Brown, date of birth such
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