Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Crimes Amendment (Working With Children—Criminal History) Bill 2009 before us provides for Commonwealth pardoned, spent or quashed convictions to be disclosed in criminal history information provided by CrimTrac or by the AFP to employers assessing a prospective employee’s suitability through a working with children check. The Australian Greens acknowledge the epidemic of sexual violence against women and children across Australia. The statistics in this country regarding violence against children and women are at horrific levels. The Greens also believe that it is every child’s right to experience the conditions for optimal health, growth and development and protection from violence and abuse.

The work of my colleague Senator Hanson-Young on child care—in particular in driving an inquiry into childcare services in this country and in calling for genuine commitments from the government to safe and affordable child care and adequate resources to provide decent pay and conditions for carers—attests to the value and the effort that the Greens believe our children deserve. Senator Hanson-Young has also called for the appointment of a commissioner for children and young people, with the powers to ensure recognition of their needs, their views and their rights. Much of the work of the Greens is about protecting the welfare and the safety of future generations, and our pillar of non-violence is an absolute commitment for children to be free of violence, safe from sexual violence and safe from molestation.

These views inform my belief that law reform in the area of child protection is too important to compromise or to rush. The inquiry into this bill was carried out very rapidly. The government intended to proceed with the bill without a hearing. It was very useful, however, to have a committee hearing to clarify a number of core issues that had not been communicated clearly in the explanatory memorandum or in the bill itself. As the opposition noted in their additional comments in the committee’s report, the EM for the bill was inadequate and potentially quite misleading. It was particularly useful from my point of view to have the hearing because the views expressed in the submissions were extremely divergent. There is no way the government could say that all the submissions we received on this issue were aligned, because they simply were not. Experts in child protection and legal experts on the significance of the proposed amendments were diametrically opposed on whether the approach set out in this bill is the best way to protect children. In closely examining the bill in question, it remains quite unclear how disclosing all Commonwealth spent, quashed or pardoned convictions can in this instance better protect children’s human rights.

The Bills Digest and various submissions strongly made the case that very little relevant evidence had been provided by the government as to how spent, quashed or pardoned convictions could signify that a person had a propensity to mistreat minors. That really goes to the core of the intention of this bill. Many of the submitters called for more public discussion and further studies to gather evidence on this issue, ‘as the only source of evidence relies on dated studies (only one of which was Australian)’. The government has made a lot of promoting evidence based policy and I would have thought that there was probably no area more important than child protection in which to base public policy on the evidence—certainly on recent evidence from an Australian context. Some submissions provided studies that contradicted the government’s proposition and studies that contended that the most serious and violent criminals did not have previous convictions for violence and did not repeat their offending. So the entire underpinnings for this bill remain ambiguous, despite the valuable work of the committee and the evidence that it received.

It should also be noted that not all jurisdictions are participating in the proposed changes before us. Along with the governments of the ACT and Victoria, the Greens specifically do not support the sharing of information relating to non-convictions, as it would be inconsistent with the principle of innocent until proven guilty and inconsistent with the human rights which Victorian and ACT citizens enjoy through their charters of human rights. I will speak more to the specific purpose and nature of our amendments when we reach the committee stage.