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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-04-09 Daily Xml
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KIDSAFE

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (15:36): I rise today to inform the house of a very important organisation working in community safety in South Australia called Kidsafe. It is a small but very important organisation and, in my capacity as shadow minister for community safety, I had a meeting with them approximately two weeks ago and was very impressed with the work that they do. Kidsafe is a national, non-government, not-for-profit organisation, with the Acting CEO, Ms Holly Fitzgerald, in charge at the moment. She is currently acting on behalf of Ms Helen Nobbet who has been the CEO of Kidsafe for approximately 20 years. Ms Nobbet is actually unwell at the moment so my thoughts go out to her, but she should feel comfortable in the fact that Ms Holly Fitzgerald is doing a fantastic job and is a wonderful advocate for Kidsafe.

Kidsafe is an organisation that concentrates on preventing accidental injuries to children, and they focus on the birth to two year old area. They are not focused on abuse or criminal activities. It is very much about trying to avoid and reduce accidental injuries. Prevention is, of course, very important, and to try and prevent these injuries they undertake an enormous amount of training—in fact, antenatal classes—so, right from pre-birth, trying to teach people about safe infant guidelines and other issues like that. They are very focused on trying to prevent falls, burns, scalds, drownings, playground injuries, and a whole range of other avoidable injuries, including those sustained by infants in car crashes.

Driveway safety is another area on which they concentrate a lot. People would know that there have been many very unfortunate situations in Australia and in South Australia where parents, typically, have backed over a child in the driveway—which is dreadfully sad for the whole family and the whole community.

Kidsafe works with many partners. They work with local councils when it comes to issues like pool fencing and playground inspections, and other issues that councils are involved with. They work with Surf Life Saving on beach safety for infants. They work with the RAA when if comes to issues like proper fitting and installation of car seats to avoid injuries to children in the unfortunate event of a car crash.

They do training on the Aboriginal lands and in other Aboriginal communities, which is very important. Anybody who has had anything to do with Aboriginal communities would know how incredibly highly valued children are in Aboriginal families, particularly in traditional Aboriginal communities. Kidsafe does a lot of work and go to a lot of effort to try to do some training and education. I also recommended to Ms Fitzgerald that Remote and Isolated Children's Exercise (RICE) would be a very good partner for them, a group that does a lot of fantastic work in the outback.

Much of Kidsafe's work is to do with research and trying to identify trends so that they can look at the accidents that are happening now and, potentially, the accidents that seem to be growing in frequency, to try to stop them before they become more prevalent. Their funding of course like that of many organisations is exceptionally tight. They get approximately 30 per cent of their funding from the health department and I certainly appreciate that that funding is coming from the government, but really the other 70 per cent of their funding is coming from a range of sources, including retail sales.

They work very hard in a small shop in the Women's and Children's Hospital to raise funds. They have fundraising events. They have corporate sponsorship which is largely in the form of donated or heavily-subsidised advertising for their campaigns and they do a lot of grant applications as well. As I am sure all members of this house would know, grant writing is a very time-consuming exercise, so they work extremely hard to get their funding to do this important work on behalf of the whole community.

One thing that Ms Fitzgerald said to me is that public awareness of their organisation, of their campaigns and of the issues about which they are trying to educate people and promote changes in behaviour is extremely important, so I have taken this opportunity today to advise all members of this house of the work they do and I hope that every single member of parliament in this place will go out and support the work that Kidsafe does in their broader communities. I certainly intend to do that as shadow minister for community safety, and I hope that I can count on all my colleagues here to do exactly the same, because the work that they are doing in trying to prevent injuries to children from birth to two years old is exceptionally important.

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