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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-07-22 Daily Xml
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Giles Electorate

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:26): I rise today to talk about three separate issues to do with my electorate. One is the steel industry and another is the Australian giant cuttlefish, but I will start with something that I believe is a tragedy and probably in some ways a predictable tragedy.

In December 2019, I wrote to the Minister for Child Protection. I wrote in relation to a very small group of young people who were doing a lot of damage in my community. Part of the letter states:

There are grave concerns in the community that the behaviour of the group—made [up] of very young children and teenagers—is escalating and it is highly likely that someone will be seriously injured or worse.

The reason I am writing to you is because it has been brought to my attention that some of the offenders are under the Guardianship of the [minister].

I wrote that because, as the responsible Minister for Child Protection, you need to take some action. There were thousands of dollars worth of damage done, with all sorts of things happening in the community, but my concern was that things would escalate, that someone would get seriously hurt and that it needed to be addressed.

When I wrote the letter, I also put in a freedom of information request to a particular unit within the South Australian police force to see how many Whyalla guardianship children were reported as missing and absent. These reports are held by the police. I got that information back. In early 2018, the numbers were very small, that is, a maximum of 11. There were two in July 2018, but then this spiked and the numbers increased to 99 reported missing children under the guardianship of the minister. Some of these were definitely multiple reports.

In the following year, 2019, each month high numbers of children under the guardianship of the minister were reported as missing. I flagged in the letter to the minister, I flagged in a letter to the Attorney-General and I flagged in a letter to the Minister for Health, from an ice perspective, the need to do stuff in our community, that there was a real issue in the Whyalla community and that there was an issue with kids under the guardianship of the minister.

Just the other day, in Whyalla we saw the tragic death of a 20 year old. The driver of the car was a 12 year old. There was another child in the car who was seriously injured. The 12 year old is facing charges as a result of his actions, but I do not want to go into that. What I do want to say is that this was, in a sense, predictable. I had flagged that something serious was going to happen in my community if action was not taken.

I am not here to score some cheap point against the government, because these issues are often extremely complex. Some of the families these kids come from have incredibly challenging circumstances. What I did want to flag to the minister was the real importance of serious early intervention in families to stop kids going off the rails. These kids now are going off the rails and they are going to be living with what has happened for the rest of their lives.

If we do not provide serious resources for the Department for Child Protection and the people who work within it, if we do not provide greater tools, if we do not provide greater options for the courts when imposing orders and if we do not have much stronger evidence-based intervention when it comes to families, then when it comes to children at risk, we are going to get circumstances like this again and again.

As I said, I am not here to score points against the government, because this is complex stuff and it happens in all our communities across the state. I am sure we can all point to examples where things have gone wrong. I qualified as a social worker. I have never worked as a social worker, but I know a lot of social workers. I know the frustration that we tackle at the acute end of things, but we need the real resources to go into prevention and family intervention early on in those first years of life and, indeed, even before the child is born.

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