Page 1727 - Week 06 - Thursday, 30 July 2020
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I will speak briefly about a number of issues. One of the things that I find utterly disheartening about the care and protection system is the myriad of inquiries that we have had into the care and protection system. We have had Vardon 1.0 and Vardon 2.0. There were a range of other inquiries, the most recent of which, before this committee inquiry, was the Glanfield inquiry, which came down with a report in April 2016 that is essentially about domestic and family violence and the interaction with the care and protection system. The Glanfield inquiry made a myriad of recommendations in relation to the care and protection and system and principally made recommendations in relation to access to information and access to internal review in the care and protection system.
It is extraordinarily disappointing for this committee to see that it took this government three years after the tabling of the Glanfield inquiry report to get around to looking at implementing some of those recommendations and another year to report on some of those recommendations. In fact, not all those recommendations have been implemented and many, many contributors to this inquiry have spoken adversely about what I would call an unconscionable delay in implementing the recommendations of the Glanfield inquiry.
This is why, at recommendation 37, the committee specifically and explicitly calls for the minister, before the end of this term of the Legislative Assembly, to account for progress on the implementation of the recommendations of the Glanfield inquiry, including a summary of action to date, either completed or in progress, and the proposed action, including a timetable, for the implementation of things which have not been actioned. I think that this is most important.
This committee of inquiry makes 44 recommendations in relation to care and protection. At least 16 of them relate to specific advice in relation to specific amendments to the Children and Young People Act. They cross a myriad of areas. They cover things like internal review, external review and external merits review.
The most important one from my point of view, and the one where the committee decided that it should make this recommendation in this report—even though it had made it in its interim report on part 1—because we think it is probably the most important thing that we could do to create transparency in the care and protection act, is recommendation 7, which would explore codifying the Children and Young People Act so that all children have a legal entitlement to family group conferencing before child and youth protection services can intervene and before a matter is referred to the ACT Childrens Court in care and protection matters.
There is very strong support for this in the community, there is a very strong restorative community in the ACT who are passionately advocating for this and there is very strong evidence from many places in the world that this is a mechanism that works in favour of maintaining transparency, openness and the sharing of information. The processes also ensure that, as much as possible, we can keep children in their families, nurture them in their families, and not have them on the spiral of disadvantage of putting children in the care and protection system.
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