Page 4505 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011
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that information to be provided, she followed up with further questions. The information to the minister was not “the department has breached the Children and Young People Act in making these placements”. The advice from the department to the minister was that ad hoc arrangements had been put in place to manage some of the pressures and the demand that the area within care and protection was experiencing.
What did the minister do when she received that brief? She asked for more information from the department about what that meant and the extent of that. And the department, over a period of time, provided her with more information. When the information became clear—and in her mind she had formed a view that there was a problem that existed and that needed to be cleared up for her as minister, acting responsibly—she put in place that action as well. She has done exactly what a minister needs to do. The sad reality here is that, while we continue to play political football with care and protection, the system will remain under the stress that exists now.
Mrs Dunne, you walk over to Moore Street and go and tell those people that you called wilful and dysfunctional this morning just what you think of them and see whether the child protection system holds up under this stress. I am worried, from the level of the sort of political fun that can be had under care and protection, that we actually will not be able to provide the best system that our children in this city deserve. That is something that I have worked on for years. Ms Burch is working on it now. There is some level of cooperation across the Assembly, but it does not exist in the way that it should.
The politics need to be taken out of care and protection. We need to put it aside and we need to work together in the interests of children and young people. Yes, there need to be improvements, but the system has come a long way, and the staff and the minister deserve respect for administering the system that exists. (Time expired.)
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (11.47): I will take up where the Chief Minister left off. She finished by saying that the system has come a long way. The question is: has the system come a long way? We can recite all the data. We can recite the statistics. We can recite what occurs. But you have to ask the question, seven years after the Vardon report: has the system come a long way? And the answer is: clearly not. And you have to ask: who is responsible to this place for that maladministration of the system? And the answer is: the minister.
Has the system come a long way? Can the system possibly have come a long way when the advocate can identify 24 breaches of the law—24 children, 24 occasions where the law has been breached—and a number of those breaches occurred after the minister was informed? The Chief Minister has just said that the minister did exactly what a minister needs to do. Well, did Minister Burch say, “Stop breaching the law”? If she did then she probably has done that. But we have not been told that she did. And, if then the department failed to follow that directive from the minister, action needs to be taken in the upper echelons of the department.
But the minister did not say that. She said she sought assurances. She did not say that she had said, “Stop breaching the law.” She said, “I asked for assurances.” We are not
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