Page 445 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 18 February 2015
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The revised explanatory statement further states:
A rigorous and transparent background check and risk assessment process will enable appropriate and defensible decision making. Background checking and risk assessment will complement an organisation’s recruitment practices and other policies to create safe working places for clients, employers, employees and volunteers.
I will not continue reading from the explanatory statement, which talks about past and future behaviour, as I concur with Minister Burch: it would appear that the person in question in this matter has worked hard to turn their life around. This is indeed to be celebrated.
However, the question at hand is: how was someone with a criminal record allowed into ACT schools? It is not how many times they went but that they went at all, because patently they would not have been eligible for a working with vulnerable people card under the guidelines. Whether they went seven times or 10 times is immaterial, because I presume that this person would have been rejected if they had applied for a working with vulnerable people card.
So I repeat: this is about protecting vulnerable people in our community, the schoolchildren in our ACT schools. Children in our community have the right to be safe and their parents have the right to be informed. Our community has the right to know that the government ensures that the laws it enacts are fully complied with. Alarmingly, it appears that this was not the case in this instance. How was a person without the appropriate documentation allowed into schools in our community?
The previous chair of the community organisation reported this breach of law when he found out. A number of school principals have made it clear that they would not have exposed schoolchildren to the individual concerned if they had known. It could have been any individual with a criminal record who was allowed into our schools.
We over here, and the ACT community at large, would want an independent inquiry regardless of the person concerned. If it were Joe Bloggs from Calwell, that would be enough to warrant investigation. The parents of schoolchildren and staff at schools deserve answers. The safety of our children is paramount and that is the rationale for having a working with vulnerable people card in the first place. As a result of these events, schoolchildren have been exposed to a convicted criminal, in direct contravention of the working with vulnerable people legislation. Both the community organisation concerned and school principals have said it was not only inappropriate but unlawful.
The Chief Minister must always put the safety of schoolchildren as a priority on his agenda. Minister Barr should conduct an independent inquiry into the circumstances surrounding this affair to rectify damage to the community organisation’s reputation and to reassure parents that the Minister for Education and Training has not acted improperly; to reassure parents that the education department has the correct procedures in place to monitor those people who come to schools to speak with children, who are defined as vulnerable people in our legislation; and to check if this
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