Page 3636 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 24 November 2021
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Our frontline child protection workers deserve to be supported with really good systems, and this budget includes $6.49 million over four years for the Child and Youth Record Information System, CYRIS. CYRIS ensures that high-quality and accessible information is available to comprehensively assess the risk experienced by vulnerable children and young people. This funding provides for a permanent team, licence and vendor costs to further develop CYRIS. The funding also provides for system technical upgrades, management of security obligations and supports.
The funding will ensure that the CYRIS system remains current, secure and stable, and that improvements can be made quickly to respond to new requirements. This funding will also allow work to continue on CYRIS project deliverables on an online reporting portal, building application program interfaces with other built business systems, including with the Education Directorate for information exchange about vulnerable children, as well as carer and young people portals.
I want to acknowledge the incredibly hardworking team behind the CYRIS project. I have said it before at committee hearings, but you do not often hear about government IT projects that are delivered pretty much on time and with a pretty tight budget being adhered to. This team has delivered a phenomenal product that has been absolutely welcomed by the frontline workforce because they have done it in partnership with the workforce. So I want to pay particular credit to that team, and I am really pleased that we have been able to secure ongoing funding to keep up this great work and ensure that it is able to be maintained in the long term.
Hundreds of recommendations have been made over the years about Child and Youth Protection Services and the broader child protection out-of-home care, and child and family services system. Many of those recommendations have gone to matters that are reflected in the Children and Young People Act. In this budget, we have committed $1.975 million over three years to modernise the Children and Young People Act. The CYP Act has been regularly amended over recent years, but holistically reviewing and modernising the act will ensure that it is easy for frontline workers to use and that it is accessible for the community to understand and navigate.
Child protection and youth justice, which are covered in the Children and Young People Act, will always be complex areas of policy, and I am not going to pretend that we can have a two-page act that will cover everything and be really simple. But it is time—this act was first developed in 2008 and it was, at that time, a rewrite—to do this work again and to do it in partnership with the community, taking into account everything that we have heard for years, particularly since the Glanfield inquiry in 2016, but also from the Legislative Assembly inquiry into CYPS last year and everything that we have heard from people in further developing the next stage of Step Up For Our Kids. It is important that we reflect that in a modern CYP Act that will build on evidence-based frameworks and decision-making tools for improving the achievement of positive child protection outcomes in our community.
The government’s significant reform agenda in this space will likely require a series of amendments to the CYP Act, and will, of course, reflect the work that was spoken about earlier today to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility and the
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