Page 1729 - Week 06 - Thursday, 30 July 2020
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overshadowed by the experience, for some reason, of suddenly being on the CYPS radar and being summoned to a meeting to discuss their parenting skills when, in fact, what they have done is spent the previous months putting in place all the supports and services that they need to ensure that that child is well supported. It can be a … disturbing and heartbreaking experience for people.
I would like to highlight the word “suddenly”. People, mothers, are losing babies in hospitals, it seems, for no apparent reason. Of course, it is not just newborns. Clearly, there are other examples of conscious and unconscious bias in the system about the capability of the family to look after children. This is one of the most important issues that needs to be resolved within the CYP system.
Throughout the inquiry, there were many references to the power imbalance between the government and children, parents and families. Possibly fortunately for committee members’ workload, the inquiry did not cover the whole question of how our CYP system works; it only covered information provision. Despite this very limited remit, the committee made 44 recommendations. As was the case with the other members, I will not discuss them all. The situation was so obviously unsatisfactory that we did make recommendations about non-information things, such as recommendation 3, which states:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government amend the Children and Young People Act 2008 to specify an express requirement for the court to be satisfied that all reasonable steps have been taken to provide the services necessary to support family unity prior to making an actual care and protection order …
I must admit that I find it hard to understand why we even needed to make a recommendation like that. Why is CYPS support to families so limited? I guess it comes back to the point that I made before—that the CYP system in some cases does not see a family as being capable of looking after their child or children, and they do this without really looking into the family’s situation. For this reason, as Mrs Dunne highlighted, we made a recommendation to enshrine family group conferencing as an early component of the CYPS response. We also received this evidence from Dr Helen Watchirs, the ACT Human Rights Commissioner:
As a human rights jurisdiction, the starting point should be, naturally, the Human Rights Act. However, the underlying legislative framework, the Children and Young People Act 2008, falls well short of compatibility with the Human Rights Act by lacking safeguards.
We also heard about other inquiries in this area that have not, as yet, led to improvement. In particular, as Mrs Dunne also mentioned, submitters noted the recommendations of the Glanfield report which still need to be acted upon.
Looking at the part of the terms of reference relating to information sharing, it is abundantly clear that the system does not work. The committee found consensus among submitters about the need to improve transparency and accountability in the child protection system. The lack of both personal and systemic information, combined with the inherent power imbalance in the system, creates a situation where
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