Bills

Child Sex Offenders Registration (Public Register) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

The Hon. K.A. HILDYARD (Reynell—Minister for Child Protection, Minister for Women and the Prevention of Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence, Minister for Recreation, Sport and Racing) (12:00): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Today, I am pleased to introduce to this house the Child Sex Offenders Registration (Public Register) Amendment Bill 2024, fulfilling the commitment made by the government prior to the 2022 election, as part of the justice for victims comprehensive suite of commitments—commitments that we rightly made to the South Australian community to take firm action in relation to those awful predators who perpetrate child sex abuse.

I am absolutely sure that everyone in this house would wholeheartedly agree that this is a bill that we wish our community did not need, but sadly it absolutely does. This particular commitment, now expressed through this bill, creates a three-tiered scheme for public access to information on the child sex offenders register. This scheme is based on the Western Australian disclosure model. That model operates as a limited public disclosure scheme and has three tiers:

Tier 1 relates to a website providing photographs and personal details of reportable offenders, who have either failed to comply with their reporting obligations or provided false or misleading information to police and whose location or whereabouts is not known to police.

Tier 2 means that upon application, photographs of dangerous and high-risk offenders in the applicant's locality may be published.

Tier 3 focuses on a community protection disclosure scheme, allowing a parent or guardian of a child to inquire about a specific person who has regular contact with their child or children.

The South Australian disclosure scheme follows the Western Australian model and is established via amendments to the Child Sex Offenders Registration Act 2006.

In relation to tier 1 of the model, the publication of the photographs and information on registrable offenders, who have not fulfilled their reporting requirements and whose location is unknown, is already available under the Child Sex Offenders Registration Act.

Part 5B of the existing act provides that the commissioner may publish on a website, which is maintained by the commissioner, any or all personal details of a registrable offender—other than a registrable offender who is a child—if the commissioner is satisfied that the registrable offender has failed to comply with his or her reporting obligations or has provided false or misleading information and the registrable offender's whereabouts are unknown.

The purpose of the publication of the information is rightly to find the wanted registrable offender and to keep our community informed. As these existing conditions effectively replicate tier 1 of the Western Australian model, it was determined that no further legislative amendments were required to our existing act to implement tier 1.

The amendments implementing tier 2 will rightly allow SAPOL, subject to an approved application, to provide those photographs of dangerous and high-risk offenders in an applicant's suburb or surrounding area. Again, this is consistent with the operation of tier 2 of the Western Australian disclosure model and it is focused on improving public awareness and community safety. Locality is also defined the same as it is in the Western Australian legislation, meaning the general locality—for instance, the town or suburb or region—in which the person resides is described.

Applications are restricted to offenders in the locality of the applicant's residential premises, meaning an applicant cannot request broader searches about places beyond. The ability to request information on registrable offenders in tier 2 will be restricted to certain categories of offender. Information may be released where the registrable offender, other than an offender who is a child:

(a) after becoming a registrable offender the registrable offender commits and is found guilty of a further—

(i) class 1 or 2 offence;

or

(iii) other sexual offence committed against a child; or

(b) the registrable offender—

(i) has committed and been found guilty of a prescribed offence; and

(ii) is subject to an extended supervision order under the Criminal Law (High Risk Offenders) Act 2015, noting that this does not apply to a registrable offender if a court has ordered that the registrable offender's image is not to be distributed; or

(c) the commissioner is satisfied that the offender poses a risk to the lives or sexual safety of one or more persons.

Tier 3 will establish a parental disclosure scheme whereby the commissioner may provide a parent or a guardian with information about a specific person who has regular unsupervised contact with their child or children. This aims rightly to enable the parent or guardian to take appropriate steps to safeguard their children as necessary. I know that all of us in this house and so many in our community share deep worries about the safety of our children, and I deeply hope that this particular provision coming into existence through the passage of this important legislation, fulfilling a crucial commitment, provides some level of comfort to those parents and guardians in our state.

In relation to a tier 3 disclosure, a person may apply to the commissioner to be informed about whether or not a person specified in the application, other than a person who is a child, is a registrable offender. If satisfied that the specified person has regular unsupervised contact with their child, the commissioner may inform the applicant about whether or not the person is a registrable offender.

The parent or guardian making the application will need to provide their and their child's full details, the identity of the person of interest and the level of contact that person has with the child in order for the commissioner to be satisfied that the specified person does indeed have regular unsupervised contact with their child or children. This is intended to operate in addition to existing provisions of the act that require registrable offenders to notify parents, guardians or other responsible adults of their registrable offender status. Serious penalties rightly apply for any breach of these provisions.

There are offences included in this bill that prohibit persons from publishing or distributing information obtained through a tier 2 or tier 3 application for information. That is a really important part of this bill that is aimed at discouraging vigilantism or the targeting of registrable offenders. People who have concerns about the safety of a child or children should always contact police rather than ever taking the law into their own hands.

Our police are extraordinary. I am so incredibly grateful to every single one of them. I reflect particularly today on those officers who work in JACET and in other roles across SAPOL where they have to confront on a daily basis the horror of child sex abuse. These officers are so dedicated and they are so knowledgeable about how to deal with this terrible scourge. It is always the best and the right thing that we leave this crucial work to them.

Of note is an express provision clarifying that the commissioner is not required to provide any information if it would identify either directly or indirectly a child who is in care. The commissioner must, however, when assessing applications consider whether providing information would identify a victim of the offence. Offender photographs and locality information will also not be provided for a registrable offender who is a child or where a court order stipulates that the registrable offender's details are not to be published. These provisions have been drafted to be consistent with the existing provisions of the act where the commissioner currently exercises their discretion in determining whether information should be provided with consideration of the safety of a child who has been subject to the offence.

As well as establishing this three-tiered scheme, the bill also makes other really important changes to the act to further protect children from predators. Existing section 66M of the act contains a power for police to search the premises and electronic devices located at the premises of serious registrable offenders to ensure that the offenders are complying with their obligations under the act.

It should be noted that police do not currently have the ability to search the electronic devices of offenders away from their residence, nor the ability to use search powers in relation to registrable offenders who do not fall within the definition of 'serious registrable offender'. Again, I am sure everybody would agree that this is a troubling and significant gap in being able to ensure registrable offenders are complying with the act.

Again, we want our outstanding SAPOL officers to have every tool available to them to search devices as they need to and, again, to tackle this horrific scourge. We will rightly amend the law to close this gap to better protect children through ensuring that SAPOL can search an offender's electronic devices wherever they may have those devices and extend the existing search powers to all registrable offenders.

Another amendment contained in the bill is focused on clarifying how reporting requirements apply to registrable offenders from other places. Where the offence they have committed is the equivalent to a class 1 or 2 offence in our jurisdiction, the offender is a registrable offender under the act, and South Australian reporting periods apply. It is common across all other jurisdictions to apply the home jurisdiction's reporting period to offenders. Through this bill, the act will be amended to ensure that is the case here in South Australia.

This bill is really, really important. It is another clear demonstration of our government's rightly tough approach on child sex offenders and will help to ensure the safety and the wellbeing of our precious children. This bill sits alongside our range of legislative responses to child sex offenders. That range of legislative responses includes cracking down on child sex offenders by closing loopholes that allow offenders who possess child pornography or child-like sex dolls to access bigger sentence discounts or bail. I note the work of the Hon. Connie Bonaros in the other place, who has also contributed alongside the Attorney-General to that important piece of legislation.

Other legislative responses to child sex offenders which sit alongside this bill include changing the heading of offences related to 'commercial sexual services' to 'commercial sexual acts' to better reflect the exploitative nature of using children in commercial sexual acts. Other legislative responses that this bill sits amongst include passing reform to ensure that offenders convicted of a second serious child sex offence will be indefinitely jailed and only eligible for release once they satisfy the court that they are willing and able to control their sexual instincts.

It sits alongside legislative measures to increase a range of penalties in relation to child sex offences. Amended section 139A of the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935, or Carly's Law, to ensure that the offence can apply where the unlawful communication is made to a fictitious child—i.e., a police officer posing as a child—can still rightly constitute an offence.

It sits amongst legislation to create a default rule that accused and convicted child sex offenders may not work in businesses that employ children if their employment would involve contact with child employees—a bill that we rightly had a fulsome debate about in this place in recent months. It also sits amongst the provisions in the bill just introduced yesterday, which I certainly will not go into in any detail, to toughen penalties for those who deliberately target children and young people in care.

As a further demonstration of our commitment to deal with these vile predators, last year our parliament passed legislation to change the language around offences in relation to child sexual abuse via the Criminal Law Consolidation (Child Sexual Abuse) Amendment Act. In speaking about that particular piece of legislation, I wholeheartedly again place on record my thanks to the brilliant, extraordinary Grace Tame for her sustained, enduring advocacy for this change, and I thank the Attorney-General for his work toward this important reform.

I know that so many of us in this place and in the other place have been deeply grateful to Grace Tame, Australian of the Year 2021, for her strength, her courage, her voice, her decisive action, her capacity to campaign in that enduring way to drive lasting, important change. I can also say that I know so many of us are all so very grateful to her for her presence in this place as we discussed and moved this legislation. As I said to her on that day, I was absolutely thrilled to meet her. As I said to her, having her here in the chamber as we discussed those laws, I think her strength gave all of us such strength as we talked about why these laws were so important to progress for so many people.

Of course, our comprehensive program of legislative change in relation to child sex abuse, in relation to being much tougher on vile child sex abusers, also sits more broadly amongst our efforts across general sexual assault-related charges. As a government we have rightly made really important reforms to how sexual assault cases are dealt with in court when consent is in issue through expanding the types of jury directions allowed, such as no normal response to sexual assault.

In that vein, we have also conducted a broader review of sexual consent and abuse laws. This review is being undertaken by the South Australian and federal governments. This is something that I moved for in a motion when in opposition and that now is progressing. As is happening all over the world, here in South Australia we are rightly, deeply looking at issues around consent and making sure that we have the best possible understanding and laws in place, laws in place that also help us to build awareness in our community more broadly about consent, what constitutes consent and what absolutely does not.

Our parliament has passed legislation to explicitly criminalise stealthing. Again, I acknowledge the work of the Attorney-General and also the work of the Hon. Connie Bonaros in the other place on this particular piece of legislation. This piece of legislation, the change that we made through this legislation, put beyond doubt that stealthing, whereby a person deliberately and without consent does not use, damages or removes a condom before or during sexual activity, is absolutely unlawful conduct. This legislation has made it very clear to our community that stealthing is not acceptable. It is not something that our community accepts in any circumstances under any conditions whatsoever.

It is really important to clarify where our community's values are on this issue and really important that we illustrate that consent is conditional. It is really important that on the issue of consent our parliament leads the way in terms of promoting those discussions to raise awareness and that our parliament leads the way in terms of ensuring that our legislation is right, it is robust and sends that message to our community about what the expectation is, what is consent and, again, what absolutely is not consent. Again, I thank those who worked hard towards this law. I was very pleased to be able to play my part in this place.

I have outlined all of this work to tackle vile child sex abuse and the terrible predators who commit it. There is work that sits alongside that to more broadly tackle the issue of sexual assault and to help our community build an understanding that whilst sexual assault still happens in the way that I think many people in our community imagine it in their mind—where something happens late at night, in the dark, when a woman is alone; that still happens and that is horrific—what also happens now is a range of other types of sexual assault.

We know that there is a terrible rise of technology-facilitated abuse and that sexual predators use technological means to target particular people and particularly vulnerable people, including children, to sexually abuse them. Our government's work in this place on legislation is crucial in building that understanding of what constitutes consent, what constitutes sexual assault and what does not, and also in sending a message that as community leaders and as a community it is utterly unacceptable and we will take the harshest, strongest possible steps to stamp it out and to keep raising that awareness about what our community does not accept.

All of this work also sits amongst our comprehensive program of transformative reform of the child protection and family support system, reform that is happening because we are determined to help improve the lives of children and young people in every way. It sits alongside our determined, comprehensive legislative policy and investment action to tackle all of the insidious forms of domestic, family and sexual violence.

As I mentioned earlier, we have introduced legislation into the parliament and I will not speak about that in terms of the content. In regard to legislation, we will repeal the existing Children and Young People (Safety) Act and institute a new Children And Young People (Safety And Support) Act. Just yesterday I had the opportunity to speak at length about that particular piece of legislation.

What that legislation sits amongst in terms of that transformative work toward fundamental reform that strives to improve the lives of children and young people is a range of proactive measures that we are undertaking as part of that transformation to help prevent the sexual exploitation of children and young people in care.

These include, for the most vulnerable group of young people in care, having interagency plans in place to ensure that we have a rapid and holistic way of responding to the specific needs of a young person dealing with the horror of this sort of abuse. It also includes ensuring that if a child or young person is at imminent risk of danger, our staff proactively respond to prevent the risk of danger to the child or young person.

Amongst that practice that I have just spoken about, we are also working diligently to embed Australia's well-known, well-recognised best practice model, the MacKillop Institute Power to Kids program, into our residential care homes to help improve children and young people's awareness of what constitutes a respectful relationship, what grooming is, and to talk about healthy sexual development. This program, and the content of this program, is absolutely critical to building protective factors against the horror of sexual exploitation.

Residential care staff are extraordinary. They are critical to supporting and also empowering young people to be informed and to know when something is not right, and to feel safe and confident to reach out for the help, the support, that they need.

As I mentioned, we are investigating opportunities to strengthen penalties for sexual offenders who target children in care through the legislation that we have just introduced. We have also partnered with the outstanding UniSA's Australian Centre for Child Protection to better understand the causes, the effects, the prevention and treatment around harmful sexual behaviours.

Through a program co-funded by both the South Australian and Western Australian governments, this harmful sexual behaviour collaborative project is identifying practices that we can work with to support children who exhibit these damaging behaviours, to explore what the impact is of intergenerational trauma, the experience potentially from a young age of child sexual abuse, and what that means in terms of harmful sexual behaviours going forward.

This is difficult, challenging work. It is heartbreaking work. It is terrible that we even have to undertake that work, but it is absolutely necessary, and we are a government that tackles those hard challenges, that speaks up about the issues that children and young people confront, and that makes sure we are doing what we can to help improve their safety and their wellbeing.

Also, for the interest of the house, we are currently working with various parties to convene a round table to much more deeply understand the sexual exploitation of young people in care. Again, this is really important; it is not something that I think has been explored in great depth in the past. It is a really difficult, awful issue, but we will tackle it, and we will tackle it alongside those who have deep practice knowledge, who have research history in this particular space, so I look forward to keeping the house informed about that particular round table and the outcomes.

It will be a high-level discussion to much better understand the prevalence of this terrible exploitation of children and young people in care, and to support an improved system response to that sexual exploitation, that deliberate targeting of children and young people in care by awful predators.

The department takes its responsibility incredibly seriously, as do I as minister, for the safety and wellbeing of these precious young people. In circumstances where there is a serious concern for a young person, the department immediately engages the expertise of services offered through SA Health and others to provide specialist support to that young person.

I know that today through this bill we focus on how we deal with those predators who commit terrible child sex abuse—and rightly so. I am proud of our decisive action in this space. What we know, though, is that keeping children and young people safe and free from child sex abuse and other forms of abuse is also about broader preventive action that enables the safety, the wellbeing, the health and the capacity to embrace equality of opportunity for children and young people to participate in every aspect of community life.

I am really proud of our $450 million investment into the child protection and family support system to make sure that we are instituting the programs and measures that sit in that broad suite of initiatives that we must focus on to make sure that we are doing what we can to enable children and young people to be strong and safe and supported while living their best lives, being empowered to thrive and being safe from abuse.

We are doing what we can in that broader sense of policy and program settings to help this be the case. As I said, we need both of these avenues. We need legislation to hold terrible perpetrators to account. We also need to support our young people to have the best chance of living their lives safely and well and with all of the protective factors that can come through particular programs.

As I said, our $450 million investment is enabling us to undertake a significant suite of programs. One of those is our $13.4 million additional investment into family group conferencing. We know that when we can mobilise the love and care across an extended family around a child who may be engaged with the child protection and family support system, when we can mobilise that collective family effort, when everybody is brought together through that unifying thing that is love and care for their particular child or children, we have the best chance of having a range of people to help keep them safe, well and thriving.

I had the opportunity just a couple of weeks ago to visit with the Relationships Australia South Australia practitioners who conduct family group conferences. It was an extraordinary visit. We spoke at length about how they approach those family group conferences and how they work in every second of those conferences, and in the establishment of the conference—the bringing people together before they even get there—to make sure that the uniting thing continues to be love and care for that child and the desire to make sure that they are doing the best they can to help them to be safe and well and enabled to thrive.

I thank those practitioners at Relationships Australia South Australia and also the practitioners at Aboriginal Family Support Services, who are the other provider, the ACO provider. They also do an absolutely extraordinary job. This is an area that we know works. There is a more than 90 per cent success rate after the family group conference. We see after more than 90 per cent of those conferences that families safely stay together in looking after their child.

We know it works. That is why we have invested more. That is why we are looking at how to intensify and increase the number of conferences that are offered, because, again, we know it works. We know that these measures have to sit alongside the legislative measures, including the measure that we have introduced, or commenced debate about, in this house in relation to this particular legislation.

One of the other programs that we have heavily invested in, alongside family group conferencing—again, that sits alongside the legislation—is our approximately $9 million into post-care supports for children and young people. I spoke a little bit earlier about intergenerational trauma and the impact that being sexually abused as a child may have on the capacity of a young person to live safe and well into the future, and how that terrible experience of child sex abuse can impact them into their adulthood and into their relationships in adulthood. We know that terrible interconnection between abuse experienced as a child and the impact it can have on a person as an adult.

That is the case for all people in our community who have experienced terrible child sex abuse as they enter adulthood. We know that an experience of child sex abuse stays with a person for the course of their entire life. We know that what helps get people through that is the support that is around them. Some people have that support because they have lived with people who can provide that support throughout their lives, and that they have that support at the point of transition to adulthood. Young people who have spent many years of their life in particular sorts of care cannot necessarily automatically rely on that support in terms of family being around them as they transition into adulthood.

I know many of us in this house or those of us who have teenagers and children in their young 20s, it is a very natural thing that we just keep providing them with that support as a transition into adulthood. For young people who have lived in particular sorts of care, that is not necessarily—sometimes it is—what happens for them, so at that point of transition we have invested $9 million to make sure that they have the best possible support around them to make that transition.

We do that because that is the right thing in terms of supporting those young people to thrive into adulthood with an experience of good employment, access to education and access to housing. We do that because that is the right thing for them. We also do it because the right thing for them is to support them to break the cycle of that intergenerational trauma that I spoke about. We want them to be the young people who break that cycle of intergenerational trauma. That is why we provide them with that support so that they in turn can go on to have the best chance of growing their own family in a way that is safe and well, where they have all of the tools that they need to provide a really positive environment for their child or children. Those post-care supports are so important.

I would just briefly reflect that I was so pleased recently to stand with the CEO of Junction Australia, Maria Palumbo, when we announced 10 tiny homes being established to make sure that, at that point of transition, rather than a young person leaving care and going straight to their own home or private rental or to a SA Housing Trust property without broad supports around them, they have an opportunity to transition by living in one of these tiny homes.

There are 10 tiny homes with young people of a particular age and there is also a person who is there with them around the clock. They make sure that when they have those moments that are challenging—when those really difficult feelings and thoughts come up about the trauma that they may have experienced; sadly, sometimes including child sex abuse—they have that period of time where they continue to have the support they had during their time in care as they transition from care. It is incredibly important in terms of breaking the cycle, and so incredibly important for those young people.

I feel so incredibly lucky, blessed and honoured that I get the opportunity to talk with young people who are living in care. I have said this a few times in this house and it is worth repeating: so often those young people are described as vulnerable—and in many ways they have vulnerabilities—but I say again that those young people are the strongest, the wisest, the cleverest and most resilient young people I have ever met. They are incredible and they have deep insight into both what they need going forward and what they have experienced and how that impacts them.

One thing they have consistently said to me when I have met with them is that that transition period from being in care to adulthood, when they live their lives in our community doing what so many young people are able to take for granted—looking for a job, looking for a home, looking for a pathway to particular education—is that that period of support is so incredibly important. It is about those big things like housing, employment and education, but it is also about those things that many of us take for granted, things they want to know: how to go shopping, how to cook dinner, how to budget, how to make sure that they are looking at their finances so that they have enough money for the next week to buy another round of food. They need that support around them. They have lived in a particular way where that is crucial to them—again, being able to break through that trauma and forge their pathway.

I am really proud of our $9 million investment. I am proud of the work that we are doing to create new opportunities for housing, including the tiny home project. As I said, I was with Maria Palumbo to announce that. It is brilliant. Of course, there will soon be young people living in those houses, so we will not be able to show people, but I really hope that when we are building those houses in the future before they are occupied we can show people in our community the difference that they can make both in terms of housing and just that journey of transition. I really hope that that is the case.

I think in my comments so far, particularly about post-care support, I have obviously spoken about children and young people who have had an experience of living in residential care. Another really important thing in terms of our efforts is that it must sit alongside the strongest possible legislation, and the legislation that we speak to today speaks to that. We must have the strongest possible legislation to deal with child sex abusers and absolutely to hold them to account for their heinous behaviour, which is what this legislation does. To be successful in helping to keep children and young people safe, we also have to do a range of other things. There has to be that duality of effort, and that is what is happening through our transformative reform of the child protection and family support system.

One of the things that we know is really important to invest in is to make sure we are absolutely investing in supports for those incredible foster and kinship carers who so generously open their homes, their hearts, their entire lives to children and young people who are facing the most difficult circumstances. I speak to many foster carers and they all tell me just how incredibly rewarding it is to provide love and care to a child or young person who most needs them. What they also tell me is that it can be really hard, it is difficult.

Children and young people in care have gone through some very tough times and that comes, as I have spoken about, with trauma, trauma-related behaviours, complex sets of issues that children and young people are grappling with. There are often emotional, mental, physical, health and wellbeing challenges for this particular group of children and young people. For those kinship and foster carers who take on those children, again we want to have the programs, the support in place that helps them succeed as they go on their carer journey.

That is why, as part of our $450 million investment into the child protection and family support system, in a previous budget we included provision for a $50 per fortnight increase to carers with children 16 and under, and we also included a 4.8 per cent increase to carer payments. In the following budget we ensured there was a 2.5 per cent further increase to carer payments.

I know, from the many conversations with foster and kinship carers, that none of them do it for any sort of financial gain, but they absolutely do need recompense for the costs of what they so generously do. Through that increase in payments we are trying to help. We know that it does not cover everything, but it absolutely does help. That has been a really important step for us in caring for carers.

There are a couple of other really important steps we have taken between those two increases. One of the things carers speak with us about a lot is that they need respite. Respite can come in different forms. It can come in the form of those other incredibly generous people who put up their hand to be a respite carer and look after a child, young person or group of children or young people once a fortnight, once a month, over school holidays, or help with care in particular ways. That is one way our incredible carers receive respite.

What carers have said to us, though, is that sometimes, because of the complex needs of the child or young person for whom they care, just simply having someone come to their house, or a new person take over care for a particular period of time, does not always quite work. They need to experience respite in other ways. That is why the department sat down with carers for some time to think through how that sense of respite can be provided in other ways.

So what we did at the beginning of this year was to institute, on top of those increases, a new $800 per year or $200 per quarter respite payment to carers so that they can access flexible respite options, respite options that work for them. For some people that may mean that they get a hand with cleaning. It might mean that there is a hand to take the child or young person in their care away for a night. It might mean there is help with gardening or other household chores.

What was really important to carers is that there is that respite and that it is flexible—there is an opportunity to access that respite-like effect in a way that works for them. I am really proud that we have listened to them and that we have instituted that brand-new payment on top of existing carer payments. It is not a payment that existed before; it is a brand-new payment that started from 1 January this year.

Also, again, we are thinking about what we need to do to make sure that alongside this crucial legislation that we are speaking about today we are always looking at those programs that help to keep children safe and well. As I have said, I have spoken about family group conferencing, I have spoken about post-care support and I am speaking about the support that we have to give to family-based carers so that they can take on those roles and know that they are valued as they should be.

Also, as I said before, giving your time, your home, your energy, your love to a child or young person in care is an extraordinarily generous thing to do. It is rewarding, but it also comes with deep challenges, and what that means is that it is crucial that we listen to foster and kinship carers about what they need, what will make a difference in their caring journey.

One of the ways that we are listening to them, as well as the comprehensive program of forums and meetings that we have with carers, is through the establishment of the inaugural Carer Council. We now have a Carer Council in this state that is supported by Fiona Endicott and the incredible staff—the incredible team and the board—at Connecting Foster and Kinship Carers SA. That team absolutely supports the Carer Council. The Carer Council is made up of 12 remarkable carers from both regional and metropolitan South Australia. The purpose of the Carer Council is for that group to give advice to me about what else we can do to make things as good as they can possibly be for carers.

That group has already provided advice about things like the flexible respite options that I have spoken about. They have given advice about a range of things, and I am grateful to every single one of them, because as well as giving of their time, their energy, their home, their love and care so incredibly generously to a child or young person, they have also made the decision to advocate for other carers and to spend their time speaking up through the Carer Council, deeply discussing the range of challenges that carers can face and making sure that they are working to absolutely provide frank advice about what needs to change. Again, I am really grateful to every single one of them.

As well as tough legislation that makes a difference on child sex abuse, we need to make sure we have those programs and those people in place that help to keep—

The ACTING SPEAKER (Mr Odenwalder): Minister, I might suggest you seek leave to continue your remarks at this point.

The Hon. K.A. HILDYARD: I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00.