2016-11-10
The Greens will be supporting this bill. The Child Wellbeing and Safety Amendment (Child Safety Standards) Act 2015 provided a set of minimum standards across the board to help drive organisational change within both professional and community organisations. I thank Ms Crozier for her contribution, given her extensive work as the chair of the committee that did the inquiry and produced the Betrayal of Trust report. It is very enriching to hear the detail that she can offer a debate like this because she knows the material so well. That was a groundbreaking report, and I think her contribution has continued to enrich the debate in that way. I am not going to go into too much of the minute detail, because I think Ms Crozier has adequately summed that up.
The enforcement and oversight powers for the Commission for Children and Young People included in this bill will continue the process of bolstering those standards and facilitating much-needed organisational change as community groups develop and implement these strategies, and that is a very good thing. The bill is the fulfilment of the minister's assurances last year that suitable legislation would be introduced to establish appropriate oversight and monitoring mechanisms.
As I have said previously, I have been astonished by the extent to which the department does not collect data relating to its operations. The Cummins report in 2012 recommended that regulation and oversight of community service organisations should be improved by comprehensive annual reporting to the department and collection of data regarding incident reports and information about abuse in care, investigations and outcomes.
While this bill does have provisions for better data reporting by the Commission for Children and Young People, it requires very minimal incident reporting and shifts the data reporting requirement onto the commission rather than the department.
While the Greens support this bill, we would like to use this as an opportunity to inquire as to the lack of apparent plans to introduce the outstanding reforms which have come out of recent inquiries, and we will do so later in the committee of the whole — and those that I am referring to are in addition to the Betrayal of Trust report that Ms Crozier has spoken so much about.
I also have some questions that I think are probably outside the scope of this bill, so I will allude to them now. In recommendation 9 of its … as a good parent would … report of August 2015 the Commission for Children and Young People advocated for the introduction of child safe practices to be accompanied by measures to ensure that children understand their legal rights and to whom they can complain if they feel unsafe. Another gap that is repeatedly identified is that children do not have a direct hotline to an independent complaint body such as the children's commission, and at this stage there does not seem to be any indication that this bill will facilitate that.
The report recommended that the department's quality-of-care systems and investigations be delegated to an independent body with a separate funding source. These reforms would complement the regulatory mechanisms in this bill and create a positive system which would empower and protect children.
Lastly, Andrew Jackomos's recent Always was, always will be Koori children report recommended reviewing and strengthening cultural competency requirements within the Department of Health and Human Services standards.
In summing up, the Greens do support this bill. It is an important addition to the child safety standards. The oversight and enforcement powers are an important step in driving cultural change within organisations. However, if we are serious about protecting children, the current set of reforms is only a fraction of what is necessary. I will have some more questions in the committee of the whole.