Page 1808 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 April 2009
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delivering—delivering stronger early intervention and prevention initiatives; delivering access to 15 hours of preschool each week for four-year-olds, starting in our early childhood schools; delivering nearly $2.5 million over four years to improve services for vulnerable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.
We must get on with the job now but we also must plan for the future. Much has been achieved since this government started reforming child and family services in 2004. I am very fortunate to follow my colleague the Deputy Chief Minister, Katy Gallagher, in this portfolio. The long-term plans she put in place have guided a substantial reform in the territory over the last four years, culminating in the new Children and Young People Act 2008. And those plans have helped the ACT avoid the systemic problems that have plagued children and youth policy, especially child protection, in other jurisdictions.
But my task is to look to the future again; so we are busy developing a new young people’s plan and a new children’s plan. The children’s plan and the young people’s plan are important guides for the government as a whole. They articulate the government’s commitment to children and families. As well as providing a common policy framework for the provision of services, they set guidelines for the practical implementation of services across government, non-government agencies and throughout the community.
All young people contribute to our community and the plans will reflect the diversity of the community and young people’s lives. I hope young people will have an active say about the new plan; so I will be asking the Youth Advisory Council to play a central role in guiding the plan’s development, along with other youth work bodies, including the Youth Coalition of the ACT.
We will take our time to get these plans right—looking at lots of evidence and listening to lots of people. And I have an open mind on where that research and consultation will lead. I hope new issues arise which I, as minister, might never have thought of—not just listening to young people but learning from them.
I can set out some key markers. I do want the children’s plan to set clear benchmarks for success and how we know we are improving the health and wellbeing of children and young people. These will include birth weight and life expectancy at birth; reading, writing and numeracy, along with educational achievements; and levels of family support.
I want the new young people’s plan to say more about life transitions, especially post-school transitions. There will be better guidance on wellbeing and safety and a greater focus on sustainable jobs and living. And I will be seeking a stronger alignment between the children’s and young people’s plans, with a focus on transition points in children and young people’s lives. This alignment of policy planning will, in turn, help us cut duplication between services and identify gaps—long-term plans so that a year of action becomes a decade of achievement.
I have been talking about the important things the government is doing in children and youth—a year of action, listening, investing, delivering and a year of planning for the
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