Grievance Debate

CHILD PROTECTION INQUIRY

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:27): The extensive list of coronial findings, autopsy reports, medical assessments, judicial determinations, witness statements, victim and offender testimonies, royal commissions and the like with respect to child protection cases only serves to remind us of the diverse and cruel methods of maltreatment of children that have been inflicted by others. They are heart wrenching and disturbing.

There is another list of inquiries, reports, reviews, royal commissions and the like that have considered the failure of personnel, departments, agencies and governments to provide adequate protection and support to children, certainly in many instances less graphic but equally disturbing. My concern is whether South Australians can in fact trust the Premier's response to these reports and recommendations, evidenced again this week.

The most recent of these reports is undertaken by the Hon. Bruce Debelle providing his report on the independent education inquiry released on 1 July 2013, and I thank him for his extensive work and advice. In 2002, the then new government announced the Robyn Layton QC inquiry into child protection. This was widely welcomed and the report ultimately widely applauded.

Since that time, in 2004, the government established the child deaths and serious injury review committee. Subsequent to that, the guardian for children of young people was appointed, and then the council for the care of children, all consistent with Ms Layton's recommendations. On 6 May 2004, the Premier, the then minister for families and communities, stated this to the parliament:

I accept my responsibilities for the children in my care, and we are taking steps to address those very issues. Indeed, at a public forum just a few days ago, I admitted that the child protection system is in crisis, and it is.

He went on to say:

Frankly, despite two substantial responses to the Layton report—the first tranche involving expenditure of $58.6 million over four years and a further tranche of reforms involving the recruitment of an additional 73 staff costing $3.6 million each year—there remain deep and systemic problems within our system of child protection. But one of the important things we have done is change the culture of the system. There has been a culture at the very top...there is an important piece of information that members of this house should be aware of and it concerns the culture that has been endemic within these agencies that deal with child protection. A culture has existed among people at the most senior levels of government—and I am talking now of a period prior to our term of office—where they simply did not want to hear the truth about child protection and they went to extraordinary lengths to prevent themselves being told the truth.

I interjected, in fact, and he went on to say:

The member for Bragg invites me to name them. I say that senior members of the advisory body sought to communicate to the previous government that this system was in crisis and, in fact, emissaries were sent by the previous government to tell them that they should not use inflammatory remarks to describe the child protection system. Indeed, they went further. (The member for Finniss knows this and he should sit forward and listen to it.) They set up structures to ensure that those agencies could not get the message through. That is the way the previous government dealt with child protection—cover-ups and lies. They created a culture of bullying and cover-up.

Those statements were made to this house by the now Premier, the then minister for families and communities, in which he confirmed, firstly, that there was a problem—indeed, a 'crisis', he described—some nine years ago. Secondly, that there was a cultural problem that he appears to have remedied. Thirdly, that there was a cover-up in the previous administration at the highest level of those in the department authorities responsible for this.

Here is a Premier who during the lifetime of this government has sat in the cabinet and has undertaken the roles and responsibilities of minister for education, minister for families and communities, and the minister responsible for the Housing Trust and Housing SA services in this state. It is a disgrace that he should now say to us that he cares to ensure that our children are protected—they clearly are not.