Page 4513 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011
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They can weasel all they like and try and shift and say, “Mrs Dunne and the opposition are being rude to the staff.” But go and read the report. I endorse what is in the report. I have reservations about some recommendations in the report, about which I think that there should be discussions. But what we see is a system that does not work. Staff deserve to have policies and procedures that they can follow. Staff do not deserve to have outdated policies and procedures that they cannot refer to. Staff deserve to have a proper place to take children—not an office where they can run riot. Staff deserve to work in safe conditions. They do not deserve to be asked to take children where there is no heating, no hot water, no beds, no bedding in a Canberra winter. This is not a Third World country; this is the capital of a G20 nation, and this is what we hear.
This has not come out of the blue. Mr Seselja and Mr Smyth have gone back to the Vardon report. We have known about this. We should be vigilant. We know that we have had problems in the past. The Chief Minister, when she was responsible for this area, was lied to by her officials. She came in here and made a statement and then she got a fax from them that said, “By the way, the statement that you just made in the Assembly was not true,” When that happened, what did she do? She did the right thing. She and the Chief Minister at the time instituted an inquiry. Do you not think that after that had happened you might be just a little bit vigilant about what is going on in the care and protection system, that you might have been a little bit burnt, that you might have been just watching a bit?
When Minister Burch first became the minister, one of the first groups of people who came to see me were the grandparent and kinship carers, and they said to me, “Vicki, we think that the minister has been lied to by her department in an answer to a question on notice.” I wrote to the minister and I said: “I have serious concerns about the veracity of the answer. I am not going to make a fuss about it because you are new in the job. Why don’t you look into it?” And she came back and said, “Nothing to see here.”
Then Marion Le and Jean Smith came to the estimates hearing last year and talked about institutionalised abuse, and Minister Burch said: “How dare you say such terrible things about our officials? There is nothing to see here.” What has Marion Le got to say today? Mr Hanson read it out. One of Marion Le’s contacts in the grandparent and kinship carers group has said:
They appear incapable of acting truly in the interests of children and those who are their volunteer carers. Their processes are slap-happy, often outside their legal powers …
This is what we are talking about. These people have been proved by the Public Advocate to act outside their legal powers, and the grandparent and kinship carers highlight that again today.
There is one other issue going back to the Vardon report. Vardon asked: “How many children are there? Where are they? How are they? Can these questions be answered?” When she was inquiring, they could not. When the Public Advocate looked at these
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