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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-10-31 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

CHILD PROTECTION

Mr PISONI (Unley) (15:36): Today we spent quite some time in question time trying to find out just how it can be in 2012 that a department has a policy of dealing with child abuse as secrecy. The sort of thing which we hear about time and time again and which happened in the 1950s and 1960s in Australia and other parts of the world where this type of thing was pushed under the counter, people were not allowed to talk about it and perpetrators were let off the hook. We are still seeing court cases today of people that were abused as children 20 and 30 years ago because of such a policy.

Let us look at the situation at the western suburbs primary school. November 2010, Mark Harvey, director of the western suburbs primary out of school hours care and a part-time SSO dealing with special needs students, arrested and charged with child abuse. This situation was not made known to the school community, and the Premier, the education minister at the time of the assault, has today denied any knowledge of the case, I read in the media.

Under this current minister, minister Portolesi, on 12 February this year, after the trial of Mr Harvey, he was found guilty and sentenced to six years for the rape of a student. At no time were the school community and potentially affected students and families made aware that they had potentially been exposed to child abuse.

We know this man had been at that school for at least three years. We heard yesterday from one of the mothers whose children, she has discovered, have since become victims of this man. He made himself the most popular man, the most popular person at the school, and we now know why. Many others have only been made aware of the situation through media reports at the time of Mr Harvey's conviction, and my recollection was it was only a very, very brief report.

It is alleged that the school governing council were threatened by the department at losing their indemnity if they made the issue more widely known. In other words, the department warned the governing council, the governing council chair and others, that if they spoke outside of the governing council about this issue, they may be sued. A departmental email to a concerned parent that I have viewed would back the view that the department was very comfortable with the decision to provide no official notification to the school community.

Since this time, through their own investigations with their own children, parents have discovered that the abuse is more widespread. Many parents were justifiably outraged that they were never made aware that their children had been potentially exposed to the sexual abuse from a paedophile working in a position of trust at their school and in the education system for a very long time.

Some of these alleged assaults by Mr Harvey at the school on the school students have since become the subject of further SAPOL investigations, I have been advised. Yesterday in this parliament, the minister stated categorically that her advice was that SAPOL had provided the school with the advice not to send information to the community about this incident. SAPOL responded extremely quickly when they heard that news and released a statement yesterday, and I quote from that statement:

The principal was present at the time of the arrest [this is of Harvey] and was advised by police that she should consult with DECS [the department] to formulate a method of advising the school community of what had occurred. The principal was also advised that it was not the role of the police to inform the school community. Once the school principal had been advised and SAPOL lodged a notification with the Child Abuse Reporting Line...its mandatory notification processes were complete.

The minister must table the advice she relied on in the house yesterday that is in total contradiction to the information since provided by the police on this issue. It is extraordinary that even after the release of that advice by the police yesterday, the minister is still in denial that the wrong decision was made not to tell the parents of that school that their children were in the care of a paedophile.

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