Page 3675 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 21 November 2006
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MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Minister for Health, Minister for Disability and Community Services and Minister for Women) (11.50), in reply: I thank members for their support for this bill. As members who have contributed to the debate have said, this bill essentially seeks to remove two sunset clauses relating to provisions under the current Children and Young People Act. One relates to the Quamby detention centre and the other one relates to the exemption of work experience from the employment chapter. This removal is required because of some of the delays in progressing the major review and rewrite of the Children and Young People Act.
As members have said, an exposure draft of legislation will be ready towards the end of this year. That bill, which has been the subject of extensive consultation and which contains several hundred pages, is certainly going take up a lot of the Assembly’s time next year. Members will be working through the issues raised through that review to make sure that we have a very robust and modern piece of legislation that governs everything to do with children and young people in the territory.
The bill that we are discussing today seeks to remove the sunset clause relating to the power to make standing orders for the youth detention centre. The existing standing orders at Quamby have been reviewed in light of contemporary procedures and human rights requirements. I note that Mr Stefaniak linked the bill to the Human Rights Act. That is only one of the areas that are being considered in the review of the standing orders. In consultation with a leading human rights law expert, the standing orders have been reviewed against national and international standards for juvenile detention because they are out of date from that point of view as well. Those standing orders, which are currently with me, are very detailed pieces of work and they will be presented shortly to the ACT Legislative Assembly as disallowable instruments. So the Assembly can certainly still take part of that discussion.
Dr Foskey said that she had not seen the standing orders. However, they will all come before the Assembly—I think 11 in the first instance and then there will be a further two. The Assembly will certainly be able to consider them through that process. The removal of the sunset clause will enable the existing standing order regime to stay in place at the Quamby Youth Detention Centre and allow sufficient time for adequate legislative provisions to be established for the new youth detention centre in 2008.
Proposed legislative amendments for the new youth detention centre will be part of a bill that will rewrite the Children and Young People Act and will be presented as an exposure draft for consultation in December 2006. Failure to pass this clause today will mean that the standing order regime will expire on 1 December and there will be no authority to administer the youth detention centre.
In relation to the second sunset clause, the Children and Young People Amendment Bill 2006 exempts work experience arrangements from the employment provisions until 30 December 2006. This is to allow for more detailed work to occur. This work will be presented as part of the larger piece of work through the exposure draft of the bill that will rewrite the complete act which, as I have said, is due for release in December this year. Failure to pass this clause would mean that work experience for young people aged under 15 years would fall within the definition of employment on 30 December 2006. These work experience programs would then need to comply with the provisions of the
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