Child Protection

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (15:00): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier detail to the house why, despite there being no recommendation in the 2003 Layton review, no recommendation in the Mullighan inquiry or any of the other inquiries that have since taken place, he decided it was in the best interests of child protection to amalgamate the agency with the education department?

An honourable member: Good question.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier) (15:00): It is a good question actually, one of the better questions that have been asked. As it happens, child protection has always been in another agency, even under the previous Liberal government, as it has up until this point until we took the decision to have it in a stand-alone agency. That is largely because of the history of the development of this notion of community welfare which really started back in the 1960s and 1970s.

What we had really was a child protection system that began with what was commonly called 'battered baby syndrome', when we introduced this American notion of mandatory notification. It was designed to actually find out what was happening inside families, which up to that point had been treated as a family matter. So, this was intruding the role of the state in families in a pretty profound way.

Back in those days, the notion of abuse and neglect was a tiny idea about basically sexual or physical abuse, children who ended up with cigarette burns on their arms so that you had doctors who would report that to an agency, it would be investigated and a child would be removed. What has happened in the decades since is the notion of abuse and neglect has expanded in an extraordinary fashion that the notion of abuse and neglect has—

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Well, do you want to hear the answer? You asked me a serious question.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Well, because I am addressing the question. The reason—

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The leader is on two warnings and I will name him if he persists, in which case he won't be here for the debate.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: The notion of abuse and neglect has now extended to cover the psychological and developmental issues of a child, so now abuse and neglect is this wide and, consequently, the number of notifications and the number of people who have notified is this wide. So, a small statutory organisation which was about real risk of harm for children ended up becoming overwhelmed by this mandatory notification system, and so a lot of what we have tried to do in the period since is to try to make changes to cope with that. The 2005 amendments that I promoted that the member for Bragg cooperated in putting through the parliament were disconnected, the relationship between notification from investigation. We wanted to make sure that where a family was going to be protected with mainstream services—

Mr Gardner interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Well, do you want an intelligent answer or do you want to shout at me? And so what we needed to do was to connect up these families who were in trouble with mainstream services. Obviously, a critical agency in that regard was the health agency. Another critical agency was the education agency. What we did is we put elements of services—

Mr Marshall: Who recommended it?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Well, amongst others, Professor Dorothy Scott, and indeed just last night I saw the support for this model from Leah Bromfield, who is the present head of child protection.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Well, you asked the question and I am giving you the answer.

The SPEAKER: If the member for Morialta makes another utterance outside standing orders, he will be named.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: So the point was to manage an agency in a way where there could be a statutory response, so the investigation and removal of children at real risk of harm, but, for those other families, to connect them up with the services that they might find in our children's centres, our 47 children's centres, or indeed our nurse home visiting service, where every newborn child gets a visit from a nurse, and where a family is found to be in trouble they get sustained home visiting service from that healthcare service. So we have brought all of those services into what is now called the Department for Education and Child Development (DECD). I think even the royal commissioner, in her remarks, said that there is still strong support for the original idea, for the original intention.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Well, in her—

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: But she—

The SPEAKER: The time allocated for the answer has now expired.