Page 85 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 10 February 2015
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opposition should not have a no-confidence motion in Ms Burch because she is of more value to us in government. Her mistakes and errors of judgement are the gift that keeps on giving.
I will start with child care in the ACT, an area of Minister Burch’s responsibility that shows her failings. The recent report on government services shows that once again the ACT has the highest childcare costs in Australia. Canberra families using long day care services had the greatest out-of-pocket expenses in Australia, shelling out on average $80 more than the national average. These costs add to the spiralling cost of living expenses for average Canberra families, doubling over the past six years.
There has been no improvement to the costs of child care in the ACT, with the 2014 report on government services also showing that Canberrans are paying the highest childcare costs in Australia.
Minister Burch was quoted in the Canberra Times recently as saying the ACT government was committed to first-class early childhood education with the ongoing implementation of the national quality framework. Unfortunately, Minister Burch is not living up to this commitment. The ROGS shows that, in relation to ACT childcare workers, Canberra is behind the other Australian jurisdictions, with only 50.6 per cent of primary contact childcare workers in Canberra having a relevant formal qualification at or above certificate III. This is significantly lower than the national average, sitting at 74.1 per cent. Canberra ranks as the lowest of all Australian states and territories.
I ask the question, Madam Deputy Speaker: why are Canberrans paying more in childcare costs than the national average, when the qualifications of childcare workers are well below the national average?
We then move to Care and Protection Services, a department that is responsible for the care of our most vulnerable citizens—children who are at risk in our society. I am not the first, and nor will I be the last, to say that child protection in the ACT has failed many children in the past. There was a systemic culture of cover-up and bandaid fixes that allowed the service which protects our children to fail.
The Public Advocate’s interim report into the emergency response strategy for children in crisis in the ACT was released in October 2011 under this minister. This report made recommendations to address the organisational and systemic changes in response to what were considered the deficiencies which existed within Care and Protection Services. Given the narrow scope of this initial review, it was assumed by most that the report did not paint a true picture of Care and Protection Services but was simply an aberration. But then the Public Advocate came out and said:
My investigations revealed that there may be many more cases of systemic deficiencies and practice failures than I dare to think.
This was back in 2011. Then there was the release of the full Public Advocate report in May 2012, when we saw the full extent of the issues within the care and protection service. The full report stated:
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