Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Our children are coagulated hope. Our children are our hope coagulated. They are the future distilled. They are all our tomorrows right here, right now. I say this as somebody who has two young children but for 39 long years of my life I had no children. For a long while my lifelong partner and I began to contemplate a life without children, that is not to say we were contemplating a life without hope—and I do not wish for a minute to offend the many Australian couples and singles who live without offspring. In our circumstances it merely would have been a reprioritising of aspirations and dreams of our future together. It would have been Paris rather than the playground; London rather than Lego; more riding rather than the Wiggles. I am not arguing about those options or whether they were better or worse—although I do think of Paris a little bit—but they are just choices that we make when we have children. Just different options, I guess.

I have many close friends who will be travelling down life’s road without any little voices in the back seat asking, ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’ Sometimes fate, or God, or time, or geography, or our genes just happen to roll the dice that way. Sometimes people recklessly roll the dice that way, and sometimes people carefully and deliberately roll the dice that way. Having teetered between all of these roles I know that casual words—be they concerned or careless, such as, ‘Do you have any kids?’—can sometimes cut like a knife.

I have friends who have dropped my wife and I as a couple basically because we had children, maybe because of their own poignant circumstances, maybe because they voted Liberal—who knows?—and I will certainly never ask. As any parent knows, your kids are like a friendship recruiting agency. ‘Your kid likes Thomas the Tank Engine? Hey, mine too. Let’s be friends.’ ‘Your kids like yelling loudly and chucking tantrums at public events whenever his father is just about to speak? Hey, mine too. Let’s be friends.’

I make these introductory comments about children because I want to clearly place on the record what I believe is children’s crucial place in the centre of a strong society. Unfortunately, not all Australians have the same view of children. In fact, if all of my fellow Australians had exactly the same view and acted the same way towards children as I do, then my wife would be unemployed. I say that, and by way of explanation I refer to a press release from the Queensland Minister for Child Safety and Minister for Women, the Hon. Margaret Keech, on Thursday, 11 September 2008. The press release is headed: 20 Year Hero Honoured at Child Protection Week Awardsand this is about my wife.

After nearly 20 years on the front-line protecting Queensland’s abused and neglected children, Moorooka’s Leanne Scoines is being officially recognised as a community hero.

Child Safety Minister Margaret Keech today announced Ms Scoines has won the Child Protection Week Public Sector Award for her decades on the front-line and now at the after hours service centre.

I will not read the whole release, but it goes on to say:

Ms Scoines and her colleagues at the after hours centre assess risks to children, monitor families, arrange support for children and carers and ensure vulnerable children are protected—around the clock.

Armed with three university degrees, and working on her fourth, in law—

she has an exam next week, so good luck—

Ms Scoines sees her future in working with people who need her help.

And her husband is easily the best husband in Australia and does more than his fair share around the house. Actually, that was not in the release; I did add that last bit.

The reason I refer to that press release is that Lea has been a child protection worker for 20 years, and I have been with her for 18 of those 20 years. Therefore I have a little bit of understanding. She obviously has a lengthy understanding and the knowledge, skills, expertise and compassion, and through osmosis and observation I have only a little bit of understanding, but it has given me a bit of an understanding, I guess. I also have an understanding from my time as a union organiser in private schools, when I was working on the blue card discussions. For those people not from Queensland, the blue card is basically the Queensland equivalent of this legislation. I went through that same process, looking at the police records of teachers, when I was working for the Queensland Independent Education Union at the start of the decade.

On 29 November 2008 the Council of Australian Governments, COAG, endorsed recommendations for the interjurisdictional exchange of criminal history information for people working with children, including information about pardoned, quashed and spent convictions. So we have a bill before the House called theCrimes Amendment (Working With Children—Criminal History) Bill 2009. This would not include people who have been questioned and not charged or even necessarily those who were charged but whose charges were later dropped. However, I do point out that once a red flag is raised the information pertaining to whether somebody had been pardoned, had their conviction quashed or had spent convictions would be assessed and only acted on if it is relevant and deemed to be of risk.

After the November 2008 COAG meeting, the states and territories agreed to prepare, introduce and seek the passage of legislative amendments within nine months of the COAG agreement. Jurisdictions also agreed to remove any legislative or administrative barriers to formally supplying criminal history information, including information on spent, quashed and pardoned convictions, to other jurisdictions for the purpose of child related employment screening.

There are important privacy considerations and public good benefits that must be balanced, but it is obviously very important that we get the balance just right.

One safeguard included in the Bill is that the criminal history information received may only be used for the limited purpose of assessing the risk that a person may pose in working with children. The information may not be used for the purpose of a general probity or employment suitability check.

…            …            …

… a person or body will only be prescribed for the purpose of enabling them to receive conviction information if the person or body:

• is authorised by the government of the State or Territory in which it operates
• has a legislative basis for screening that prohibits further release or use of the information (except for legislated child protection functions in exceptional circumstances)
• complies with applicable privacy, human rights and records management legislation
• reflects principles of natural justice, and
• has risk assessment frameworks and appropriately skilled staff to assess risks to children’s safety.

The bill before the House also requires the Minister for Home Affairs to review these new provisions after an initial trial period.

These government initiatives might well dissuade a couple of creeps from seeking to work with children, and that is obviously a good thing, we would all agree. However, I could not in good faith talk about child abuse, child protection and hope without touching on a couple of home truths about the real dangers that face most children. It is a horrible truth that our children are most likely to be harmed by the people they know, not by the paedophiles on the front page of the newspapers. Unfortunately it will usually be by their parents or somebody in the parent role and in their home environment. That is the truth. Leaving aside the mob hysteria and the Dennis Fergusons of the world, that is the reality.

The rates of sexual abuse are actually lower than the rates of other forms of harm. What is more likely to occur is emotional abuse. Sadly it is often due to domestic violence. The next most likely form of abuse is neglect. More often than not, this neglect stems from parental drug abuse issues. People who have addiction problems tend to focus their resources on their habits rather than on their children. Anyone of my age who has seen the movie Trainspotting would have seen some of the horrors of that. The second last most likely form of abuse is physical abuse. Last of all is sexual abuse. The rates are relatively low—from memory, only about eight per cent.

It is with much sadness that I repeat the fact that the sexual abuse is most likely to come from somebody acting in the nurturing role, usually the parent. Our newspapers and A Current Affair and Today Tonight would have us believe that abuse only occurs at the hands of strangers and opportunistic paedophiles such as Dennis Ferguson. I am not criticising ‘stranger danger’ programs and safety houses and the like. They are good, important things—and the bill before the House to bring in federal child safety legislation is also a good thing. However, for most children the opportunities for a stranger to have access to them are actually quite limited. Most parents keep a reasonably close watch on their children. The harm is more likely to come from a trusted person who has regular access.

I know that grooming does occur. That might have been Dennis Ferguson’s modus operandi—I do not know if that is what he did, and that will be the last time I mention that guy’s name. I just wanted to say this because I do not want anybody who is listening to or reading this to build a false sense of security about our legislation or, in Queensland’s case, the blue card. I have got my blue card here. As teachers in Queensland, we did not initially have to have it, but I subsequently got one as a politician on the board of a local community group.

We need to remember that legislative nets like the legislation before the House can only catch those who have been convicted. People who have experienced abuse, especially sexual abuse, will not disclose this experience easily. They are not likely to disclose it at the time. There is still a lot of shame associated with this trauma, especially for young boys. Often it is disclosed later, when the victim is in their 30s or 40s. The legislation before the House would not catch those perpetrators, because obviously they have not been charged or convicted.

Paedophiles will target kids who are vulnerable. Unfortunately such people normally get into a position of trust and present as fantastic saints. It is only later that we find out that they are actually horrible sinners. We need to teach kids and parents to recognise the telltale signs of abuse. We need to train our children to protect themselves—from strangers, sure, but also from their parents or the people in the parenting role. We also need to fund protective behaviour courses for children. These are real steps that will help us protect our hope.

A blue card like this is not a shield. It is just another weapon in the armoury. But the best weapon of all is to keep our children close and love them to bits. To paraphrase the singer Paul Kelly, from a song that I listened to carefully when I was younger, before I had children: I know sometimes that I’ve been careless, sometimes I’ve lost my tenderness. I’ve been careless and I sometimes take bad care of them. I can do better. I dare say that every parent can do better. Every Australian can do a little bit better, and this legislation before the House helps too. I commend the bill to the House.

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