Page 2502 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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I am also, along with the minister, concerned about the falling numbers of qualified staff in care and protection. When the numbers drop, the caseload of the people that are left behind increases and there is often not only a downward spiral of morale and the like but also a downward spiral of quality care because you cannot spread people too thinly. I note today that many of us are waiting for the third report on consultation from the review of the Children and Young People Act. This is taking an awfully long time. I have reservations about the size of the legislation, and there may be better and more efficient ways of putting the legislation together.
Perhaps it is appropriate for us to just split it up between ministerial responsibilities, with a care and protection area and a compliance and enforcement area split between the Attorney-General and the Minister for Children, Youth and Family Services. I think that there are other ways of doing it. I am very concerned about the size of the legislation, but mostly I am concerned about its non-appearance. The minister said that it would be with us in a very few weeks. That was back in June. I had expected to see it in this sitting period. We do not see it, and that means that we do not have any likelihood of seeing it until September.
I also want to place on the record that, when we do see it, I do not want it to be railroaded through this place on the ground that there has been lots of consultation and “don’t you worry about it, members of the Assembly; we are from the government and we are here to help you”. The legislative review functions of our committee system are important, and this will be an occasion when it will be necessary—in fact, imperative—for members of the Assembly to be involved in the legislative review. I think that there should at least be some reference to a committee to look at this piece of legislation. I am quite happy to facilitate that happening and making sure that it happens expeditiously. I think it is something that must happen.
One of the sleeper issues that came to the Assembly’s attention in the course of the estimates inquiries is what I consider to be the alarmingly large number of indigenous children who are in the care of the territory. Of the 505 children in the care of the chief executive, 101, or one-fifth—20 per cent exactly—are indigenous. I think that there was a reluctance by the minister and the department to delve into why that might be and what measures we are taking to address that number. In this day and age there seems to be a reluctance to talk about these issues, but we will not find any solutions to them until we are prepared to talk about why 20 per cent of the children in our care are indigenous when they represent perhaps six per cent of the population of nought to 19. This is an alarming matter.
I want to mention a couple of other issues. There has been pretty much bipartisan support for the Audrey Fagan scholarship, but it was entirely unclear during estimates how the scholarship will operate. I am a little concerned that there might be the grand gesture at the time, saying that we need to mark the contribution of this woman who died in tragic circumstances with little or no thought about how the scholarship might operate, whether there will be scope for endowments to contribute to the scholarship and whether there will eventually be a pool of money that will be self-generating with the scholarships funded out of the interest on that pool of money.
There is also very little guidance coming from the government about how that money will be allocated, to whom and to what sorts of people. Whilst I am not wanting to
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