Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to speak further tonight about an issue I have raised a number of times in this place, including earlier this week—that is, the continuing crisis with child abuse and neglect and the continuing crisis in most child protection agencies around Australia. I raise this not to score political points against the relevant state governments trying to administer these issues but more to highlight just how enormous and intransigent a problem it is and to repeat my plea, a plea that was validated—I guess that is the right word—by a Senate resolution a couple of months ago urging the federal government and all state governments to make child protection issues a national priority. I know the federal government has been doing some things in this area—I acknowledge that. I also acknowledge that, in general terms, the responsibility in a jurisdictional sense rests predominantly with state governments. But it is clear that this is a national issue. And it is clear that it will take concerted national action and a national priority to really start to see some improvement.

I note a couple more stories this week. The Tasmanian government tabled a report. Their local Minister for Health and Human Services, Lara Giddings, announced a 12-point reform of the Tasmanian child welfare system based on 143 recommendations contained in the report on child protection services. There will also be 20 additional staff employed to reduce the unallocated case load, which has increased by 1,000 per cent since 2003. The report noted that the child protection service in Tasmania received over 13,000 notifications of suspected child abuse and neglect in 2005-06. Of those, 1,452—over 10 per cent—remained unallocated for investigation. They were not only uninvestigated but unallocated for investigation. That is a reflection of the huge increase in demand because of the huge increase in notifications of suspected child abuse and neglect.

It is reasonable to assume that part of the huge increase in notifications is a growing awareness amongst the community—and that is certainly a positive thing—and a growing willingness amongst the community to report suspected child abuse and neglect. And of course not all of those 13,000 notifications would involve genuine cases of child abuse and neglect, but a substantial proportion do. The report that the minister tabled detailed the circumstances of a child who had died because of serious system failures. The government ordered investigations into a further nine children who had died in the past two years who had been known to the service during their lives. Their circumstances have not been fully investigated yet. Again, some of those may have innocent circumstances surrounding their deaths. I am not singling these figures out to take a shot at Tasmania. It is just that they are the latest, frankly, in a long line—indeed, they are one of the few states that I did not mention the last couple of times that I spoke on this issue, because we have had major reports released in Western Australia, major problems in Victoria, major problems reported in New South Wales, problems in the ACT and problems in Queensland. It is a nationwide problem, which is why we need a national approach.

Increasing staff to handle the unallocated case load is of course essential. I would note also that this week the new Minister for Child Safety in the Queensland government, Desley Boyle, announced 15 scholarships to assist Queenslanders interested in working in child protection. The number of staff in the child protection and child safety area has increased by more than 75 per cent to over 2,200 people over the last couple of years. I am sure somebody could query and quibble about some of the specifics of those precise statistics—I am sure they are tweaked in a way to make them look as good as possible—but the fact is that it is a lot of people. There are a lot of people working in this area and they are still overloaded. We need more people. It is a simple fact that the problem is so enormous that we do need more people in there. I congratulate the Queensland government on their extra scholarships and, apart from anything else, on trying to encourage people into this area by making it more attractive and making people think about working as a child safety officer as a career option.

Just getting more and more people to deal with the consequences of child abuse and neglect is essential in the short term, but it is not really going to break the back of this problem. We are just continually picking up the pieces at the end. I know there are resources going into early intervention. It is an impossible balancing act as to where you put the resources when you have so many unallocated cases, so many reports that have not been probably investigated, the inability to find foster parents and the inability to properly follow through on individual cases, and then you are trying to work at the early intervention end at the same time. It is an impossible task. That is why I again bring it back to the need for national leadership and making it a national priority. I am not talking about pouring in bucketloads of money—though some extra funds would be important—but taking national leadership in addressing this issue and changing social attitudes.

The more I look at this, the more I come to the conclusion that, if you have an increasing number of reports and verified instances of serious child abuse and neglect and an increasing number of people needing to be recruited to try and deal with this, what all these figures reflect, frankly, is a real sickness within our society. What sort of society do we have that has such rampant abuse and neglect of its children? There is a lot of talk—and appropriate talk—about the problem of violence and neglect in Indigenous communities, and certainly that needs to be recognised and addressed as well, but we should not kid ourselves that there is not a very, very serious problem with child abuse and neglect in most parts of the Australian community, among people of all cultural backgrounds, in large cities and small.

A lot of that is not acknowledged. A lot of it is unrecognised. A lot of it is literally in-house. Until we confront that extremely unpleasant reality and start asking ourselves why it is that so many Australians so badly abuse their own children and the children they live with, then we are really not going to get to the bottom of the problem. That is not saying we should not be putting more resources into dealing with the consequences, but we will be doing that forever unless we really start tackling the prevention end.

I think there are a lot of good ideas out there. People who work in the child protection area are continually impressed by the material brought forward by NAPCAN, for example, the National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. As their name suggests, they are focused on prevention and there really is not enough being put into that. Nobody has all the answers, of course, and we can never eliminate this abomination completely, but we are really not taking it seriously enough. We are treating it as a continuing scandal at the end of the process. There are continuing reports of terrible examples of awful experiences that children are subjected to that are reported almost as some smut type videos or smutty instances of real-life perversion that we can all look at and tut-tut about.

We just assume it is dealing with people who are not like us. They are people like us and they are people who live in our cities and our neighbourhoods. I am not even wishing solely to demonise those people, because they are the product of our society. We probably all have different ideas about why that is, but I guess that is why we need a stronger national debate and more national leadership and priority given to it. I am certain that it is an issue all senators from all sides of politics would agree is a major problem and a terrible problem. I think we need to move beyond that to looking at what more we can do at a national level to actually get it addressed.