Page 1170 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009
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processes. This attitude has also been reflected in the Wood royal commission into care and protection services in New South Wales, where it was quite openly stated that it is not the job principally of care and protection services to look after our vulnerable children and it is not the job just of government: it is the job of the whole of the community.
Ms Tucker, when she was in this place, was fond of quoting the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. That is the attitude that we are starting to see in the development of our thinking around looking after vulnerable young children and their vulnerable mothers. What we have seen here in the report of the standing committee on health and disabilities and the government response is a move along that way, but I have to echo some of the words of Ms Hunter: I am concerned about the government response, which for the most part is a partial response. Although it says in many places that it supports in principle, it then goes on simply to enumerate what is already being done. Some of that is substantial, but at this stage there does not seem to be the capacity to look beyond what is already being done.
Ms Hunter raised questions about the number of programs and the lack of qualitative information about how we report on programs conducted by child and family centres and other agencies. This is where we need to go and this is where we need to develop to ensure that we are doing the best we possibly can to contact and intervene with vulnerable families as soon as possible so that we do not have to escalate that intervention.
The notion of fear of care and protection—that if you do not look out the welfare will come for your children—is something that we must work against as a community. By building up a range of programs, we must work to increase the confidence of members of the community to approach agencies, whether they be government or non-government agencies, to seek assistance. The involvement of non-government agencies in a range of services across the ACT will help to do that, but we need to encourage people to seek assistance before everything turns to putty and people are confronted with having their children removed in either the short term or the long term.
This, of course, is easy to say but often very difficult to do. It requires a high level of cooperation between agencies, between the parties in this place and between the government and the non-government sectors. There is a high level of goodwill that we should progress along this path, and we need to do everything we can to ensure that we do not have a repetition of events where one agency is working against another—where we are having complaints that there is not enough communication between agencies when issues arise—and that there is a high level of commitment to working together for the benefit of the whole community. In that way, over time, we will see a diminution of the number of children formally in care and protection, formally in the care of the territory, and we will see families who are much more resilient and much more able to look after their own children.
I welcome the government response, but I put the minister on notice that this is not the end of the process. He can laugh all he likes, but this is not the end of the process. Tabling a government response is not the end of the process. It is incumbent upon me
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