Children's Protection (Guardianship) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 29 September 2016.)

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (11:01): I rise to give full-throated support to this bill introduced by the member for Bragg in relation to Other Person Guardianship. The family unit is one of the central building blocks of our community. As a parliament, we need to be doing everything we can to strengthen families because the work that we do in helping to protect and preserve the family unit is hugely preventative when it comes to the work that government has to ultimately undertake when there is a breakdown in those relationships.

We know that when we have a breakdown in the family relationship, children have adverse outcomes. Conversely, we know that when children grow up in a stable family with a loving mother and father, they have better outcomes and a better chance of fully developing, and this leads to better outcomes later in life. There are better outcomes in terms of health, educational attainment, future earnings potential and in a whole series of other ways.

The work that we could do in that area would potentially save a huge amount of heartache and pain for families, for the children involved in those families as well as the parents, and for family and friends who surround those families, but it would also help to reduce the need for government to interfere in people's lives and, in most cases, to necessarily interfere in people's lives when things do not go the right way. Can I say that we should never move our focus away from prevention in this way, and we must do more in this area. I think it is a huge failing of this Labor government, the results of which we are seeing in the awful outcomes that they give to children who have to enter into their child protection system.

I am not naive. I know that we are never going to be able to prevent all the issues that exist when families break down. We are not going to be able to fix all of those problems. Indeed, there is an immediate need when family breakdown has occurred, and we must do what we can in those situations as well. We all understand in this place the extremely difficult decision that the state makes to take children away from their parents. These decisions are difficult, they are fraught and they are often subjective. I have a huge amount of sympathy and respect for those who have to make that choice, as that is an awful choice.

The department, the minister and the chief executive need to decide to take away a child from less than ideal circumstances, and in some cases absolutely awful circumstances, but what they are seeking to take that child into is not necessarily going to give them the best chances in life either. We know that children who go into the child protection system often have adverse outcomes, and that is potentially because there is a cohort of children and young people who, because of their circumstances, may be more prone to having issues. Having said that, we know that there have been huge issues within the child protection system. Many of them were failings of the government, but many of them were a result of the circumstances that existed.

In all decisions, we need to look at what is best for the children, what is going to deliver the best outcomes for children. I know that in an earlier amendment to a bill in this place we sought to change the object of the act away from keeping families together, which is of itself a noble ideal, towards thinking about what is in the best interests of the child. I think that is a hugely important step, and governments around the world are grappling with this growing problem that we have come to realise.

As much as changing a name from Families SA to the Department for Child Protection is symbolic, if it does in any way represent a shift in the thinking of the way we look at these issues, then I think that can be positive. In thinking about what is in the best interests of the child, and given that sometimes home life for children is not appropriate, we should have a child protection system that tries, to the greatest extent that it can, to mimic what I talked about at the beginning, that is, providing a stable, loving family for these children.

We are debating a bill on adoption in this place, and I will reserve my comments on adoption for that but, given that the department has a predisposition against adoption—in fact, I am fairly sure that it is the one recommendation from Coroner Johns' recommendations that the government did not take up—we need to look at other mechanisms by which we can provide stability for children, and one of those is Other Person Guardianship. Some great comments came out of Justice Nyland's report, where she very succinctly states the case for Other Person Guardianship. She states:

Stability of care relationships for children is an important precondition to their development. Adoption is one way of securing that stability. Some members of the community hold the view that adoption of children from care solves the problem of the shortage of suitable home-based placements. However, the Commission is not persuaded that an increased emphasis on making children in care available for adoption is necessarily appropriate, when fundamental considerations of the child’s best interests are brought into account. That is not to exclude the possibility of adoption of children in care when it is genuinely in their best interests.

The commissioner goes on to say:

However, children can gain additional feelings of security within a loving family through Other Person Guardianship where guardianship responsibilities and powers are shifted in certain circumstances from the Minister to the carer of the child under the Children’s Protection Act. It can bring a greater sense of stability, certainty and normalcy to a child's life, including placing important decision making in the hands of the adults who know the child best.

She goes on to say that Other Person Guardianship has been underutilised in South Australia and that the agency has retained decision-making powers. She then makes a number of other comments about the fact that we need a better and easier procedure for Other Person Guardianship to be a legitimate form of out-of-home care. I agree 100 per cent with what Justice Nyland has said, and I am extremely proud that I am a member of a Liberal Party that, through the member for Bragg, has brought this bill to this place, because it is extremely necessary.

Indeed, I was lucky enough to have a briefing from the education and child development department last year exploring this very issue. It was something that the department at that time was expressing a view that should happen more often. The statistics they gave me at the time were that over 3,000 children were under the guardianship of the minister, and there are a number of different forms that that takes, but that only 114 children at that stage had access to the Other Person Guardianship system. That provides for a child to be able to change their name to, I assume, the guardianship family name, but there is still that failsafe that if something does go wrong in that situation the department, through the court, can overturn that order and bring that child back under the full responsibilities of the minister.

In the member for Bragg's second reading speech, she talks about the fact that there are a couple of blocks to accessing this process more, and the first of those is that it can be quite expensive, and that can stop families from accessing it. She also goes on to say:

...the most significant deterrent against people making an application is the fact that they are then met with the parent or parents who take them through the process, ring them through the courts and make it an expensive process, because the applicant, foster carer or relative has to go through the arduous task of establishing that the parent or parents are unfit to provide for these children.

Justice Nyland has said that we need to find an easier way to make this process more available. The act of doing that happens to be solved in part (and, hopefully, more than just in part) by the member for Bragg's Child Protection (Guardianship) Amendment Bill.

This is an extremely important step forward in a child protection system that sees children being moved from place to place, in a child protection system that has been shown not to give the best opportunities for children to develop in the best way they can in the way that children who are lucky enough to exist in more stable families can. This provides a mechanism whereby they can have greater certainty and greater stability. Hopefully, through that, they can develop and become more fulsomely connected and contributors to society.

This could be a very good mechanism for us to prevent some of the issues that occur when children are not inside a stable and loving family relationship. It could also have good, positive consequences down the track for the way in which governments interact with families. So, I commend this bill wholeheartedly to the house. I hope beyond hope that the government see this as a worthy way forward, that they enact what Justice Nyland wants us to enact and that we as an entire parliament can take ownership of helping some of our most vulnerable children in South Australia to have a better future.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Odenwalder.