Child Protection

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (14:39): My question is to the Minister for Education and Child Development. How many recommendations from the royal commission has the government rejected?

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Justice Reform, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Child Protection Reform, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for Consumer and Business Services, Minister for the City of Adelaide) (14:39): In terms of recommendations, we are working through them. As the commissioner said, we should be working thoroughly and taking things in an orderly way so that we don't make errors and trip over ourselves.

We are not, at the present time, excluding recommendations. What we are doing is picking off as many recommendations as are reasonably clear that we can and will agree to achieve. Some of them require further work and investigation, and in respect of those there is no decision at present one way or the other.

Some of the recommendations—for example, the ones in relation to a children's commissioner, screening and data sharing—we have already acted on. Some of them are in the nature of administrative or departmental changes which relate to changes in the way the department goes about its work, and they are matters that my ministerial colleague and her chief executive have been working on.

The short answer to the question about how many things we have excluded is that at the moment we haven't excluded anything. But we are going to have to look at the remaining 220-odd recommendations, work our way through them and see whether we accept all of them or some of them, and whether they are accepted in whole or in part. That's a work in progress. That's actually something that we committed to putting a team of experienced public servants together to achieve that work, and they are busily working at it.