Page 31 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 25 February 2014
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among other things. So from this we can see that this minister has led us to a situation where we have the most expensive child care, coupled with some of the lowest standards in the country.
Then, Madam Speaker, I move on to Care and Protection Services, a department that is responsible for the care and protection of our most vulnerable citizens, the children who are at risk in our society. I am not the first, nor would I be the last, to say that child protection in the ACT has failed many and needs drastic improvements. The systemic culture of cover-up and bandaid fixes has allowed the service, which is supposed to protect our children, to fail time after time.
Madam Speaker, as you know all too well, the Public Advocate’s interim report into the emergency response strategy for children in crisis in the ACT was released in October 2011. This report made recommendations to address the organisational and systemic changes in response to what was considered the deficiencies which existed in the care and protection service. The Public Advocate said:
My investigations revealed that there may be many more cases of systemic deficiencies and practice failures than I dare to think.
This was back in 2011. Then we had the release of the full Public Advocate’s report in May 2012, which stated that the problems are exacerbated by the broader systemic deficiencies within the care and protection service. The disastrous state of the child protection service in the ACT became known to everyone. It became clear that the hardworking and dedicated front-line staff within care and protection continued to battle against a system that failed to support them, despite their efforts.
In March 2013, we saw the release of the Auditor-General’s report into the Care and Protection Services. It became public knowledge that this minister did not even have suitable records for the children she was responsible for. According to the Auditor-General, Minister Burch’s department could not tell you on any given day where the children were that were in their care. Who would have thought that would be too much to ask?
The Auditor-General stated that the records being kept by Care and Protection Services were poor, inaccurate and out of date. In fact, it came to light that some children who were put into long-term care by Care and Protection Services would potentially never—that is, never—receive a visit from a case worker. There was no follow-up at all. The actions and whereabouts of the children were unknown to officials—they were not checked on at all—and no-one would have known if they were being treated correctly.
I have not even mentioned the ACT Children and Young People Death Review Committee report which was released late last year. The statistics in that report showed that 20 per cent of the children that died in the ACT over the five-year period were either known themselves to Care and Protection Services or one of their siblings was. That is the potential for one in every five child deaths to be avoided. They were known to authorities and action could have been taken.
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