Page 1897 - Week 06 - Thursday, 9 June 2016
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The Ombudsman will also be able to scrutinise the systems within employer organisations for preventing reportable conduct by their employees, and this is important for the way they handle, report and respond to reportable allegations. This scrutiny will ensure that the community can be confident that organisations are equipped to deal with these allegations and they simply cannot be swept under a rug or pushed away.
The bill also gives the Ombudsman broader powers to investigate matters of their own initiative. This means the Ombudsman may investigate a matter if they believe the employer investigation has been or would be conducted negligently or improperly and will ensure that all allegations are properly and consistently investigated.
Under the scheme the Ombudsman will maintain a database containing information from all notifications its office receives, regardless of the outcome of the investigation. I am afraid the reality of child sexual abuse makes this retention of information necessary in this instance. Several inquiries into child sexual abuse have found that in many cases allegations go unproved for a variety of reasons. A great many survivors of sexual abuse find it difficult to speak out, and these difficulties are compounded for children. Their abusers are often trusted adults, and some children simply lack the vocabulary to express the terrible things that have been done to them. Therefore, it is absolutely critical that we manage this risk pre-emptively.
We know that abuse of children is rarely solely a crime of opportunity but rather a pattern of behaviour. Keeping information which could help identify these patterns will enable identification of those staff whose behaviour may pose a risk to children and mean that we can manage that risk before children and young people are harmed.
It is also critical that information can be shared more effectively than it is at present. The ACT is not alone in this. Information regarding allegations of reportable conduct by its very nature is likely to be protected or sensitive. At present this information only can be provided to and requested from the Director-General of the Community Services Directorate. This is an arrangement that is reflected in Victoria and that used to be in place in New South Wales. However, these longstanding models of information management are now changing.
In 2009 the Wood Special Commission Inquiry into Child Protection Services in New South Wales highlighted the shortcomings of this model and recommended that legislation be amended to allow that government and non-government agencies be free to exchange information for the purposes of the safety, welfare and wellbeing of a child or young person. That same year the New South Wales parliament passed an amendment which allows this transfer of information to occur.
The New South Wales Ombudsman’s office has, on many occasions now, stressed the importance of these provisions to the effective operation of the Reportable Conduct Scheme in that jurisdiction. More recently, the Royal Commission into Family Violence in Victoria has made a similar recommendation.
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