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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 11 Hansard (19 October) . . Page.. 3305 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

vary from year to year and the funding has been adapted to meet the particular needs of children and young people as they arise. That is something that will continue and that is something that not only members but also the Government will be monitoring to see what needs to be done in terms of funding. The Government has shown a real appreciation of the needs of the area and the vulnerability of the young people concerned by increasing the funding for this area in difficult times.

Mr Speaker, I will now move on to some of the other matters in the Bill. The Children's Services Act is currently limited to short statements allowing for the court and the Director of Family Services to do such things as they may properly do for the care and protection of children and to assist those with responsibilities for children to carry out those responsibilities. Of course, it is impossible to say what all those responsibilities are, but this Bill clarifies the situation by methodically identifying that primary responsibility for the care and protection of children and young people rests with families and parents. In that regard, high priority should be given to supporting them on a voluntary basis, but when they are unable or unwilling to act government has a duty to step in and assist vulnerable children and young people.

There is significant new terminology which reflects a conceptual shift in traditional thinking about this area. Whilst all people under 18 years of age will continue to attract the protection of the law, the Bill uses "children" or "young persons" throughout to reflect its application to those people as they develop from infancy to increasingly independent adolescence. Of course, it leaves the way open for "child" under other laws to continue to mean any person under 18 years. Someone made recent reference to that.

The general concept of parental responsibility has been introduced to replace concepts of custody, guardianship and wardship. This Bill also aligns court and other decision-making outcomes with developments in child welfare law in other States and with family law in Australia and overseas.

I have mentioned child care. The Bill attempts to describe inclusively rather than exhaustively the types of matters which may constitute responsibility for the day-to-day and long-term care, development and welfare of a child or young person, which is further explained in the explanatory memorandum.

We have introduced the concept of family conferencing, which I think will go quite a way towards overcoming some of the problems that Mr Wood alluded to in terms of a particular case that he mentioned, quite properly. He mentioned group conferencing and I think that the new dispute resolution concept may well have been in its formalised way a much better option in that case and we might have had a much more satisfactory result than the one that Mr Wood indicated. The Bill, and Mr Rugendyke's amendments thereto, provides for considerable improvements in relation to foster carers and their role in the system, too.

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