Page 1516 - Week 05 - Thursday, 12 May 1994
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ADJOURNMENT
Motion (by Ms Follett) proposed:
That the Assembly do now adjourn.
Family Services Branch
MR CORNWELL (5.07): Madam Speaker, this is the International Year of the Family, a year in which governments all over the world are supporting the family unit as the best possible environment for children. Meantime, in Canberra we have a rapidly expanding section of the bureaucracy called the Family Services Branch about which I have huge concerns. To explain my concerns I ask you to consider the case of a 12-year-old girl who ran away from home in Canberra, where she had been living with her father, now divorced from her mother. After being reported as missing, it took a week to locate her. Finally, the police found the girl and advised the father that she was in a safety house and to contact the Family Services Branch. He did so and Family Services would not give him any information about his daughter.
The little girl's mother then came to Canberra from West Wyalong, where she lives, to try to find her daughter. Family Services would not give her any information about her daughter's whereabouts either, so the mother followed the same lead that her ex-husband had given to the police. She found her 12-year-old daughter dossing down in the Bega Flats with two 16-year-olds and their six-month-old baby, in the company of sundry other slightly older men. She had been told by Family Services that her daughter was in a place of safety under responsible care. They told her that the law says that a child over eight years can do as he or she pleases. They quoted section 102 of the Children's Services Act as their proof, and also as their reason for not being able to advise parents of their children's whereabouts. Like this little girl's mother, I do not consider that a 12-year-old child in the care of two 16-year-olds in the Bega Flats is in a place of safety. Neither does this Government because, only recently, it announced a program of attempting to increase the security and safety of those very flats.
Family Services did not entertain at any time the option of encouraging the girl to move into either of the homes offered by family members - either a home with her mother and stepfather or a home with her older sister and her sister's husband. At no stage was the girl's family trying to force her to return to the situation from which she had run. Luckily, and exactly as her mother had told Family Services, the relationship between mother and child was good. Having found her child, despite Family Services' best efforts to keep them apart, the mother suggested that the little girl should contact her sister and take up her offer of a place to live. Happily, the child has now travelled to a new home out of the ACT, thank heaven, to live with the family. You would think that a family reunion would make Family Services happy. Well, think again, because the girl's mother has since received an abusive phone call from Family Services for having the hide to remove her daughter from the Bega Flats without their permission.
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