Page 2888 - Week 08 - Thursday, 17 August 2017
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other courts there are already a number of independent and external systems in place that offer external scrutiny of decisions at different points within the child protection process. These include the Human Rights Commission, specifically the Children and Young People Commissioner and the Public Advocate, and the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal for some administrative decisions.
In the ACT the Public Advocate has the ability to be heard and become party to Children’s Court proceedings should they have contrary views to those presented by child and youth protection services. This represents a significant level of scrutiny of child and youth protection services decision-making that is not present in many other jurisdictions. All the external bodies I mentioned have well-established legislative avenues in place to review decisions and can assist parties to have access to all of the available information with the interests of children and young people at the centre of the decision-making. These established avenues are available to parties who seek to dispute decisions.
In addition to this, the ACT government has commenced the review of decisions made by child and youth protection services. As recommended in recommendation 12 of Glanfield, this work is being led by the Justice and Community Safety Directorate. I am pleased to inform the Assembly that representatives from the Justice and Community Safety Directorate and the Community Services Directorate, including the Office of the Coordinator-General for Family Safety, have met four times since December 2016 to consider which decisions made by child and youth protection services should be subject to either internal or external review, as recommended by Mr Glanfield.
As part of this work, the Justice and Community Safety Directorate has prepared an overview of reviewable decisions under the Children and Young People Act 2008, together with an overview of reviewable decisions in other jurisdictions, to inform the review. Stakeholder feedback has been sought and decisions around contact were identified as those that caused the most concern in relation to review rights. Therefore this is an area that has the most potential for changes in the decision-making review. The Community Services Directorate has mapped particular types of contact decisions and the group is considering the most appropriate review mechanisms within broader policies around these kinds of decisions. I look forward to this work progressing under the leadership of the Justice and Community Safety Directorate, in collaboration with the Office of the Coordinator-General for Family Safety and child and youth protection services.
In response to the findings of Glanfield and other reviews of the ACT service system response to family violence, the 2016-17 ACT budget included the $21.4 million safer families package to drive reform in whole-of-government, community-backed responses to family violence. This package included $2.47 million over four years for enhanced child protection case management and coordination. Part of this funding was for the development and delivery of quality assurance through independent case analysis. This investment forms a direct response by the ACT government to recommendation 13 of Glanfield. In developing the methodology for case analysis the ACT drew on expertise from New South Wales and Victoria, ensuring that the ACT
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