Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to speak again without closing the debate.

Leave granted.

I would like to begin by thanking the members of the committee, including Mr Quick, who has just spoken so passionately, and by acknowledging that the majority of the committee who worked on this report are speaking to it. It is a report that is full of some of the saddest stories I have ever heard.

The secretariat have worked very hard on this. I think the report we have produced is one that is going to have a long life, because it has truly exposed issues that I think governments themselves would not necessarily raise. During a committee meeting this morning, we heard Mr Quick’s words, but also those of Mr Cadman, the member for Mitchell, who said that perhaps part of the value of the work of these committees is that we tackle issues which governments and oppositions might like to leave behind, and we put the spotlight on areas which are, indeed, very upsetting to individuals but which, nonetheless, must be addressed.

I would like to begin by reading an extract from one piece of evidence given to us. Many of the other members who have spoken have quoted what witnesses have told us, because no-one can tell their story better than they can. This one begins:

She started doing ice and the effect of the psychotic drugs over the past three years has been devastating. Paranoia, delusions, madness. I wasn’t living too far from the Cross then and I’d be [walking] in the street and there would be my daughter, my daughter in this crazy out of her head state digging in a park. With a shovel digging for buried treasure …

That is a daughter who has been lost to a mother. In the evidence to the committee, the strains put on the families of drug users came up again and again. What we found is that much of the drug debate up to this point has put the accent on the drug user, the drug addict, without properly assessing the impact and the collateral damage to families and, particularly, to small children.

We heard evidence in Western Australia which Mr Quick mentioned. We heard that out of 5,000 births in that particular hospital 350 children were born to drug addicted parents. We heard that something like 120 of them were heroin addicts and were fed methadone through the course of the pregnancy. So when the children were born they were addicted to methadone—25 of those children did not go home with their parents and another 30 of them were taken back three months later. But there is no longitudinal study to see what the impact on those children is. Nobody knows what has happened to them. I will quote again from Anne Bressington, who gave evidence to us. She said:

... five years ago I took over the care of a little boy who was born addicted to drugs. His mother was a chronic drug addict and prostitute ... She came to me knowing she was unable to care for this child. ... He is now five years old and the first nine months of his life were absolute hell, absolute hell. We do not hear about how many babies are born addicted in this country. Now he was not just a heroin baby; he was a methamphetamine baby, a methadone baby, a dope baby, a pill baby. God knows how he turned out normal. ... He is five now and twice a year now he still wakes up with his sweaty little hands and feet and he does not feel well: his appetite changes, his behaviour changes and do you know what? He has learned to manage that. He says to me, ‘This is not one of my good days.’ At five!

There is evidence from the United States that we really need to get access and circulate here that these children are genetically changed, that their DNA now is different. They will not have the opportunity of their parents to muck around with these drugs for a little while before they become addicted; they are born addicted. They live with that central nervous system disorder. If he has one cone when he is 12, 13 or 14, he is gone. If he has one drink, he is gone. If he has one shot of heroin, he is gone. What are we creating?

We heard stories of children who come home not knowing whether they are going to eat, whether they are going to be fed—stories of children who go to foster parents and the foster parents have to teach those children that it is normal to have three meals a day, to eat at a table and to have a shower once a day. There are children who knew none of this. We heard of the child who would come home and look after its parent who was a drug addict and of children who are forced back to those drug addict parents because within the bureaucracy there is an aversion to adoption and there is this ‘biology first’ principle that somehow children must be forced back into these circumstances.

We took evidence from one foster carer of some 24 years experience who is foster caring for two little children who have disabilities. These are two of six children born to a drug addicted mother, with five fathers. The eldest child is 15; the youngest is one. They are cousins because two of the fathers were brothers. One of the children is dead—the mother fed it methadone. The court said there was sufficient evidence to prosecute but no prosecution came. In November that mother will reapply to get those two children back because the magistrate has the power to grant it. The fact of the matter is that these two children have been in and out of care—to and from the mother—any number of times. It is always the children who suffer.

When those children were last put into care, through the network of foster carers the foster carers who have them now sought to find them because they wanted continuity in the children’s lives, and they managed to get those two children, to foster them again. She told of seven children who are in foster care where the foster care parents want to adopt them. There is a caseworker in the department who is very sympathetic and who is going to try and let that happen, but she knows she will come up against this bureaucratic attitude that adoption is bad, that biological parenting is the best. It is not.

When we were doing our inquiry into overseas adoptions, we took evidence about what was the case in the United States in some states, where, if it was shown on the best evidence available that the parent was never going to be able to parent their child properly, the child was surrendered for adoption. So we have recommended that, where a child is so identified by child protection agencies, there should be a default position, which is that the child should be surrendered for adoption—unless the protection agencies can come up with a plan which can be shown to give a better outcome for the child. In other words, we really need a policy which is in the best interests of the child.

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