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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2015-05-06 Daily Xml
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Child Protection

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (14:17): My question is to the Minister for Education and Child Development. How many parents known to Families SA have drug use safety plans in place?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for the Public Sector) (14:17): This was a question or a variation of a version of a question which was asked previously by the member for Adelaide and which I took on notice and is still, I believe, on its way back. The challenge in giving a clear and easy answer, which I am sure is what everyone would love, is the number of safety plans that exist within the system and the difficulty of in fact extracting them all to have a look at them.

I think what is of more interest, and probably gets to the kernel of the concern that the leader is raising, is the question of the existence of drugs and the way in which illegal drugs and legal drugs (and by that I mean of course alcohol) interact with the way in which we attempt to keep children safe. What I am clear on and the Coroner is very clear on is that what must sit at the heart of any decisions and any practices, which includes the way in which safety plans are constructed, is that the way that the child's environment is managed is what matters.

By no means are social workers in a place to act as police officers, to see illegal drugs, to act on illegal drugs, to seize them and so on. Their role is to make judgements about the safety of the children. While alcohol is a legal drug, it can cause enormous harm and damage to a child; it can also be completely benign. So, what the social workers are attempting to do is make judgements about the way in which that child's environment is managed.

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