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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-07-03 Daily Xml
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CHILD PROTECTION INQUIRY

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide) (14:18): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier inform the house about steps taken since 2002 to improve the protection of children in South Australia?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier, Treasurer, Minister for State Development, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for the Arts) (14:18): I thank the honourable member for her question. The welfare of South Australia's children and protecting them is the highest priority for this government, and it has been from the earliest days of the life of this government.

Mr Pisoni interjecting:

Mrs Redmond interjecting:

The SPEAKER: I call the member for Unley and the member for Heysen to order. Premier.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Within weeks of coming into office in 2002, we commissioned the far-reaching inquiry into child protection—in fact, it was from the member for Ashford at the time—by Ms Robyn Layton QC, the so-called Layton review. We were extremely concerned about the crisis that was described as existing in the child protection system within South Australia at that time. The number of mandatory notifications of abuse had increased by more than 6,000 over four years to 2,000 in 2001 without any meaningful response. Our response to that inquiry—Keeping Them Safe, a Reform Agenda—underpinned a comprehensive overhaul of South Australia's child protection system and also guided the work of every government agency, including the Department for Education.

Mrs Redmond interjecting:

The SPEAKER: I warn the member for Heysen for the first time.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: The government's response to this inquiry also included a significant increase in funding for our state's child protection efforts. Since 2002, the overall budget for the care and protection of children has tripled and the number of child protection workers has gone from 283 full-time equivalents in 2002 to 632 full-time equivalents today.

We established a range of important institutions to ensure that we were supervising the question of the protection of children—the Child Death and Serious Injury Review Committee, the Council for the Care of Children, the Office of the Guardian for Children and Young People—to protect children in state care. We expanded the people required by law to report child abuse to include, amongst others, people working in education, childcare workers, sporting groups and ministers of religion. We introduced mandatory three-yearly criminal history checks for teachers and those who work with children, expanding the number of counsellors in primary schools, and updated the state's child protection curriculum for the first time in 20 years.

The Department for Communities and Social Inclusion's screening unit was established in 2010 to include child protection and other relevant information in background screening, on top of criminal history checks. We removed protection for paedophiles who offended prior to 1982, supported a paedophile task force for the South Australian police force, and introduced a raft of new laws to better protect children. These have included increased penalties, the maximum penalties for child pornography, making it an offence to procure and groom a child to engage in sexual acts; criminalising the filming of children for prurient purposes regardless of consent; introducing a paedophile register; and allowing the courts to prevent convicted paedophiles from using the internet.

The late Ted Mullighan QC's inquiries into the past abuse of children in state care and vulnerable children in remote communities have also led to substantial legislative and policy change, including the introduction of the Statutes Amendment (Children's Protection) Bill 2009. In the last six months alone we have taken new, significant steps within the Department for Education and Child Development to improve child safety policy, practices and standards, and the release of the Debelle inquiry report will lead to further change. Sadly, this work must continue. Wherever there are vulnerable people there will sometimes be predators. The work of child protection must always, therefore, continue.

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