Page 2568 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 June 2012
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be ongoing reviews. Those reviews, which will come at three, six and 12 months, will publicly update how the changes are progressing and what areas are in need of more attention.
This is one of the critical differences to the processes that have previously occurred in this area of work. The Greens will continue to monitor and scrutinise the progress of the implementation of these recommendations. We will do this by talking to the advocates in the area, the carers, the families, the young people and children—all of those who continue to work so hard to make positive change.
The amendment I propose to move to this motion today calls on the government to urgently act on all of the recommendations of the final report of the ACT Public Advocate in her review of the emergency response strategy for children in crisis in the ACT entitled Who is looking out for the territory’s children? and also to publicly release the milestone reviews. This is going to be incredibly important. I am pleased that the minister has agreed that she will be publicly releasing those milestone reviews. This is where we can ensure that the momentum that has started to build does not stop and that we see real changes.
We have to acknowledge that this is really hard work, incredibly hard work, and therefore we need to support the workers far better than the system has been supporting them. We need debriefing, we need supervision and we need policies and procedures so everybody understands how they roll out. I do not want to see in all of this work an updated policies and procedures manual but no plan of how you are going to get everybody up to speed so they understand how those policies and procedures need to roll out.
There is talk in the Public Advocate’s report about professional development and training. If we are to have an ongoing improvement in practice, we need to ensure that workers have the capacity to step outside their jobs and attend training and that they can sit and talk about practice and what is found to be the best in certain situations. We also need to do far better as far as our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people are concerned. We know that there is an overrepresentation in the care and protection system. The Children and Young People Act very clearly sets out the principles that should be applied to children from an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background. This needs far more focus than has occurred in recent times.
The Public Advocate talks about a reactive and defensive environment within care and protection and within the directorate. We need to change this culture. That is incredibly important. I believe that having an inquiry into the system under the Inquiries Act is not the right way to go at the moment. We have had reviews done by the Public Advocate. We have an investigation currently underway by the Auditor-General. We need to be looking at these and putting the recommendations in place. The system is already under a lot of pressure and workers obviously have felt that pressure.
Issues around the care and protection system have been raised in the Assembly a number of times. We need to be mindful of the front-line workers and the impact on
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