Page 1032 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 19 March 2013
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We work very strongly with the handful—dozen, seven—foster care agencies in town. That is core placements. So we need to work very closely with them to make sure that that placement is optimal. It is about stability of placement as well. The fewer placements a child has, the better the outcome. If you look through the ROGS data, we fare quite well here in the ACT on the number of placements for children. That is critical. That gives them that stability.
Some of these children are coming from such traumatic circumstances and carry such trauma that it is a world apart from us hosting one of our children’s friends for a week or something over holidays. These kids often come with quite severe trauma. So we have to support the child, the young person, but we also seriously need to put significant investment and care around the carer arrangements as well.
MADAM ACTING SPEAKER: Mr Hanson, a supplementary.
MR HANSON: Minister, why do we have a situation where there are still so many serious deficiencies in the care of children and young people nine years after the Vardon report?
MS BURCH: Certainly there has been the Vardon report, the Public Advocate’s report and the Auditor-General’s report. If we reflect back to the Public Advocate’s report, we agreed to a suite of reforms, and we are putting them in place. If you look at the Auditor-General’s report, we have agreed in the main—it is just the mechanics of a couple of them—and we will put them in place. I have no doubt that we will implement them and in two or three years time if we came back with a forensic analysis, we would still find work to do. As in any system in any state, if you go to any of your state colleagues that have gone through a similar process of review, they would say the same—that this is hard, complex work and you put the best effort in and the best process in place. If you want to bring a microscope back in two or three years time, you will find more work to do. In many ways that is the nature of the business, because it is always about doing the best you can for these most vulnerable kids.
Land—Denman Prospect
MR GENTLEMAN: My question is to the Minister for Economic Development. Could the minister update the Assembly on the land release at Denman Prospect?
MR BARR: I thank Mr Gentleman for his question. Members may be aware that the suburb of Denman Prospect is the first development of the second stage of the Molonglo valley development. Denman Prospect will be delivered through a mix of LDA estates, sales to private developers via englobo sales and land sales for multi-unit sites.
The first land sale to a private developer will be Denman Prospect englobo 1, which is a 109 hectare parcel of land that will deliver a maximum of 1,700 dwellings. The first component will contain around 550 dwellings and the second the balance of the development.
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