Page 1008 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 21 April 2021
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Last year hurt—bushfires, hail and an ongoing pandemic. Often overlooked was a fourth disaster—a dramatic increase in the rates of domestic and family violence. COVID increased the amount of time everyone spent at home, and for some this meant more time living with an abuser with fewer opportunities for respite or escape. Victim Support ACT saw a 130 per cent increase in new family violence matters in June 2020 compared to the previous year.
The ACT government responded with a one-off injection of extra funding for specialist homelessness and domestic violence services. But this funding has proved to be a small patch on an already wide and ever-widening hole in our front-line services. For example, I know of at least one service that at any one time supports up to 80 children who have fled homes impacted by violence. For the past two years this service has been begging the ACT government for funding support to provide skilled trauma counsellors for these children. These requests have gone unfulfilled.
Just last week a diverse group of community services stakeholders met in my office. They unitedly raised their concerns about this government’s spending priorities when it comes to the safer families levy. Everyone believes in prevention—I certainly do. And everyone believes it is important to train front-line workers. But diverting large portions of the safer families levy to the ACT Public Service when front-line service providers cannot adequately address the trauma of children who have fled violence is ignoring one of the most important facets of prevention.
Children fleeing violence are not the only ones I deeply worry about. This budget sees modest spending increases for child protection and youth justice but, as I noted two years ago, the central question is what exactly Canberrans are getting in return. Both areas are certainly ripe with major reforms, but four years after I first moved a motion calling on Labor and the Greens to introduce some form of external merits review for important child protection decisions, we learned in budget estimates hearings that they are now finally ready to put out a tender for a consultant to propose a design that may actually be implemented at some point in the future. As a major stakeholder pointed out last week, other Australian states implemented external review without outside assistance.
Setting that matter aside, why on earth has it taken four years to get to this point? It has been two years since the territory’s Human Rights Commission issued a statement declaring that our child protection system is not human rights compliant without external merits review. But here we are two full years later still violating the basic human rights of children and families in this territory. How do those opposite sleep at night knowing this? I will tell you why—they simply do not have a caring bone in their bodies.
On that point, I find it revealing that ANU academic Valerie Braithwaite’s paper published just last week in the International Journal on Child Maltreatment relies heavily on research conducted in the ACT to “explain resistance to reform in terms of longstanding institutional oppression”. The paper points out that the needed reforms would reduce cost and improve outcomes for child protection authorities. Instead, we are left with a broken system characterised by what Braithwaite labels the consistent
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