Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Crimes Amendment (Working With Children—Criminal History) Bill 2009. Children, as we all know, depend on adults. Clearly many of us here are parents, and I can say proudly in addition to that I am a grandparent and it is a very special time of life.

Kids actually do require adult supervision, whether it is from family members, family friends, teachers, football coaches, netball coaches, Scout troop and Girl Guide group leaders et cetera. The development in kids of new horizons is going to depend on the quality of adult supervision and interaction. Most of us who are parents, or in my case now as a grandparent, want nothing less for our kids than for them to experience the full range of activities that will enable them to fully develop their adult potential. So we certainly have a vital obligation to look at the issue of protecting our kids. We can no longer simply take for granted that we hold these views and that therefore everyone else holds the same view. I am pleased that this piece of legislation meets with bipartisan support. Why would it not.

There is no question that it involves an intrusion on liberties. Information will be distributed and, as I will go into a little later, will be used for the right purposes. But there is an overall good to be achieved, which is the development of potential in our kids. It will help to protect our kids from things that, when I was growing up, I have to say I certainly did not know all that much about. I suppose the reason for this was that I was heavily protected by my family. Many years back, I discovered that my father, who is now 86, was assaulted when he was young. He was badly beaten by a teacher at a religious school. He was in a coma. He was sent into the far west of Sydney—to a children’s home run, I think, by Barnardos. It was three months, so it was quite a serious assault. So there was probably a very clear reason why I and my brother and sister were protected when we grew up. If that could occur in a religious environment—an environment where people probably did not speak about those things—then no wonder we are seeing now what occurred to so many young people over a long period of time. People like me can say they did not see it when they grew up, but clearly it was there.

This piece of legislation is timely. It comes down in the very week of the apology being made to the forgotten Australians. I will be talking about them a little later on. As a matter of fact, a fellow in my electorate, John Hennessy, recounted to me what was meted out to him physically, emotionally and sexually when he was young. He is no longer young but it is something that has stayed with him all his life. It falls to us in our generation to say that these things simply should not occur and that we will take every step available to us to ensure that we protect the young in our community.

Screening is a vital tool if we are to take this promise seriously. Screening will help prevent people with a known history in violent and abusive behaviour towards children gaining access to them in various organisations. To this end, the development and implementation of a policy of legislation that provides full pre-employment screening of adults or people working as volunteers in child related organisations is an important strategy for creating and maintaining a child safe environment. Currently there is no single national framework setting out the requirements for obtaining checks for people working with children. Whilst I am on that issue, I would like to congratulate the Police Federation of Australia. They have campaigned on a range of different things, but in particular they have very strongly campaigned to have some degree of uniformity in relation to child protection matters.

Each state and territory has worked quite diligently and, no doubt, expertly within their own jurisdiction to protect children. They have procedures which require people who work in various industries that engage with children to go through these checks, but there are differences. It should be known that most states and territories have already introduced, or are in the advanced stages of developing, prescreening checks for people working with children. This legislation identifies broad categories of child related work where employers, employees and volunteers must undergo screening requirements.

There are differences across the jurisdictions regarding the types of screening programs that are in place, what records are checked and what can be transmitted. There are two types of screening programs in the country. Some states have an employee driven system, like New South Wales and South Australia, which makes it mandatory for employers in relevant fields to carry out background checks on prospective employees or volunteers coming within their purview. This system is a point-in-time background check and individuals must undertake screening each time they enter into a child related employment position, a child related position with a voluntary organisation et cetera.

The other type of check—and I congratulate the member for Forrest, who adequately described the position in Western Australia—which actually applies in Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, offers certification of individuals to engage in child related work. These certificates are valid for a period of, I think, three years in Western Australia and provide ongoing monitoring of an individual’s suitability for child related work. That means that, if a relevant criminal offence is committed during the validity of the certificate or if an individual is subject to a relevant work related disciplinary procedure, the administering authority may inform employers of the offence and alter or withdraw the individual’s entitlement to work with children. Individuals can also carry the certification between positions. Again, this was indicated by the member for Forrest. This way they do not have to undergo a repeated check each time they take on a position to work with children.

The Crimes Amendment (Working With Children—Criminal History) Bill 2009 aims to enhance the safety of children in our community by helping prevent people with a criminal history that indicates that they may harm children from working with children. It implements what was agreed at COAG on 29 November last year to facilitate an interjurisdictional exchange of criminal history information for people working with, or seeking to work with, children. Currently the provisions of the Crimes Act prevent disclosure of a person’s full criminal history. This bill will amend the Crimes Act 1914 to enable the disclosure and use of criminal history information about a person’s pardoned, quashed or spent convictions but only for the purpose of child related employment screening.

Essentially to prevent the misuse of information, safeguards have been included in the bill which will prevent the information being used for the purpose of general probity checks, other than in relation to working with children. Another essential safeguard under the COAG arrangement is that this bill limits the release of this information to persons or bodies required or permitted by law to obtain or deal with this information. The disclosure and use of information received under the exchange will be subject to various safeguards and conditions. To reinforce the magnitude of these safeguards, before any person or body receiving the information is approved, the minister himself must be satisfied that they meet all of the safeguards in their jurisdiction.

Finally, given the sensitive nature of the information that will be available under the information exchange, a review of these amendments will be conducted after an initial trial to commence no later than 30 June 2011 and to be completed within three months. As I earlier stated, the object of all these amendments is to protect children from sexual, physical and emotional harm. Much research has been done and, as any parent knows, the abuse of a child is something that they carry with them forever and something that has significant impacts on our community. This week we offered our apology to the forgotten Australians. It is appropriate that this week we commit to this legislation to do whatever we possibly can to protect our children into the future. I commend the bill to the House.

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