Page 2809 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 16 August 2017
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MS BERRY (Ginninderra—Deputy Chief Minister, Minister for Education and Early Childhood Development, Minister for Housing and Suburban Development, Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence, Minister for Women and Minister for Sport and Recreation) (4.03): I want to take this chance to remind members about some of the opportunities to be involved in conversations across portfolios that I am responsible for that have been kicked off this year. The family safety hub is a very important project that is going through a co-design process, having hundreds of conversations, importantly, with the experts in the sector that deliver services to women and children and with others who are experiencing domestic and family violence.
This is occurring right now. Members of this place have been invited to come along and have a walk through the work that has been happening so far with the co-design of that hub. It is such an important part of the design of the hub to ensure that the voices of victims and survivors, as well as support workers, are very much engaged in how the family safety hub will operate once this co-design process is completed.
I hope that members in this place will take the chance to come along and find out what is going on, because it is a very important project. Domestic and family violence is a very important issue. For the ACT government, for the first time, to have a minister for the prevention of domestic and family violence and to develop the family safety hub is nation leading. We will do everything that we can to stop this kind of violence happening in our community. But, importantly, it is a conversation that is happening within our community to prevent what is unacceptable from happening.
The future of education consultation was kicked off earlier this year. There have already been thousands of conversations with young people in kindergarten, early childhood educators, teachers, support workers, parents and others all across our community. They are being involved in this conversation. As far as I am aware, this is the first time a conversation as big as this one, to develop a strategy for Canberra on education, has ever occurred. It is a very important conversation. In addition, in the early childhood education and care space there is funding for the development of a strategy. It is also being done with very detailed and careful conversations with the workers in the sector, with the operators that provide the services and with the parents, children and young people who access those services.
Having the voices of young people in all of these conversations has been important to me, to make sure that the children are involved every step of the way so that we can get the best advice and stories from more than just academics, although academics’ advice is always very carefully considered. The people who are actually using these services, who are in our schools—Catholic, independent, public, early childhood education centres—are all involved in these conversations to develop strategies that will take our city into the future.
In addition, I recently launched the affordable housing strategy. We have a conversation leading up to a summit on 17 October. We have so many different opportunities for people—more than just the experts—to be engaged in that
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