Speech

June 24, 2021

Ms MAXWELL (Northern Victoria) (11:22): I rise today to speak on the Child Wellbeing and Safety (Child Safe Standards Compliance and Enforcement) Amendment Bill 2021.

This bill has come about as a result of the 2019 Department of Health and Human Services report Review of the Victorian Child Safe Standards. As I have said before about other bills like this one, legislation aimed at better protecting children is always very close to my heart, and it is also regarded as a priority of Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party as a whole. The overriding purpose of this legislation is to foster an increased focus on child safety within thousands of Victorian organisations. It is aimed at improving the way that the standards, policies, procedures and practices of those organisations are regulated so as to more effectively prevent, disclose and respond to allegations and instances of child abuse. It is therefore great to see broad support across the Parliament for such a bill.

It is a bill which, as other speakers before me have said, makes a series of important changes that are aimed at enhancing compliance with Victoria’s child safe standards. It also increases the monitoring and enforcement powers in relation to such compliance. Furthermore, the bill expands the range of information that can legally be collected in this field and strengthens disclosure, use and reporting requirements. In each of these respects its content has been heavily shaped by that 2019 review of the child safe standards, as I said, that was conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services, as it was known at that time.

There are a few points which I want to particularly concentrate on at the moment. First is the principle of better aligning Victorian child protection laws and regulations with those elsewhere in the country. Over a number of years there has been a far greater determination than ever before in many parts of Australia to try to substantially enhance legislation and regulation in this field. Accordingly there are likely to be many benefits from linking more closely the work of other states and territories and the federal government to Victoria, including by aligning the Victorian child safe standards with the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations. Indeed there was an article on June 22 calling for Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria to sign up for a national child protection scheme so those jurisdictions can crosscheck information on people deemed a risk to work with children.

Another particularly important change embedded in this bill is the creation of better demarcation across organisations in relation to their specific regulatory responsibilities. Until now there has been significant and frustrating complexity, overlap and confusion across the various relevant bodies. So the conception of a new mechanism that clearly delineates the regulator for each sector and stipulates their specific functions in relation to the standards appears to be a major positive step forward.

Alongside the improved collection, analysis and publication of data, arguably the most important change of all is the move towards the better exchange and sharing of information. Traditionally one of the biggest problems in the administration of child protection in Australia has been the siloed approach adopted by or forced upon many organisations. Generally speaking this has been a problem across many organisations who have identified the need for information sharing. However, the powers that be have not enabled this to happen previously. Individual organisations understand the crucial importance of cross-agency cooperation, collaboration and encouragement in jointly identifying and acting upon problems or potential problems when necessary to achieve positive outcomes. They also understand and respect the need for confidentiality. However, this must also allow information to be shared if and when it is in the best interest of the child’s health and wellbeing.

On the whole, the DHHS report and this bill are now paving the way for a number of important and worthwhile reforms. It is right that the administration of the child safe standards should now be strengthened, and I hope that there will be significant support provided to organisations to implement any changes which they are required to make in order to meet the recommendations in this bill. I would also like to see the government prioritise, recognise and consider voluntary placement survivors for informal foster care who have been sexually abused whilst in care, as they currently do not appear to have that same recognition.

More broadly, I have been glad to hear that the bill also has the support of the Commission for Children and Young People, given that this organisation will clearly have a crucial leadership role to play in administering this legislation. I would like to take this opportunity to formally thank Commissioner Liana Buchanan for taking the time to meet with Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party and all of her other very dedicated staff in that office who have liaised with us and who have been performing outstanding work. Whilst the organisation’s reports are often disturbing, their findings and recommendations are extremely valuable and illuminating. They highlight many problems in the Victorian child protection system and therefore the imperative for substantial changes and reforms.

On that note, I also want to reflect on the point that Mr Donnellan made in his second-reading speech on this bill that the harms and costs to individuals, their families and the broader community from child abuse remain unacceptably high. I agree with him wholeheartedly there and would say that this is all the more reason why there should continue to be further tightening and enhancement of the child protection system beyond just this legislation.

I would also like to see more of a focus on the working with children checks, particularly in sporting arenas. A constituent of mine, Barry Johnson, has raised this with me several times and met with the previous Attorney-General, Jill Hennessy, to try and raise the importance of coaches, in particular sporting coaches and those who are affiliated with sporting clubs, holding working with children checks.

I have spoken in here before, for instance, about the Commission for Children and Young People’s (CCYP) incredibly important and chilling Lost, Not Forgotten report of 2019. That report scrutinises the actions, or more accurately the lack of actions, of child protection and child and family services in relation to the repeated and severe neglect of each of those 35 children in particular. These 35 children, who were aged between 12 and 17, ultimately committed suicide in the years between 2007 and 2019, typically after their cases were closed or passed to other agencies who were not appropriately placed or equipped to help them. In essence, Lost, Not Forgotten shone a spotlight on issues like the generally inadequate tracking of families’ engagement with services, a pattern of reports and referrals essentially gathering dust.

This is not a slight in any way on individual child protection workers. This is to try and highlight the defunct system that they themselves are having to work with. I should add that CCYP’s work has also been reinforced by a number of other reports, including media reports, also pointing to a range of very serious systemic problems. Last year we also learned, for instance, that over 14,000 calls to the state’s child protection hotline were not even answered during a 20-month period (between 2018 and 2019). Similarly, a recent Victorian Auditor-General’s Office report made a series of scathing findings about the administrative inadequacies of the Department of Health and/or public health services responsible for child, youth and mental health services.

As Dr Bach stated in his speech earlier today, this month we have also become aware, courtesy of ABC News, of the absolutely shocking revelations that the department (of Health and Human Services, since renamed Families, Fairness and Housing) seriously misled the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner in the course of a recent official investigation.

This investigation centred on how a known sex offender gained unauthorised access for more than a year to the government’s client relationship information system for service providers (CRISSP) database that holds the personal details of child protection cases. This access allowed him to gain the details of at least 43 children and then prey on a number of them, including to the point that he was ultimately charged and jailed for raping that 13-year-old boy whose contact details he had accessed through that database.

This closely follows another similar case, the details of which came to public attention in March this year. Again, it was publicly revealed that after leaving their job a former caseworker who was investigated for an alleged child sex offence had been able to access confidential information through CRISSP around 260 times in relation to 27 separate vulnerable children. Each of these points is very distressing in its own right, but collectively they paint a clear picture again of serious systemic failings in Victoria’s child protection framework. They are backed up by so many other accounts that one hears as a member of Parliament, so I sincerely hope that this bill is a precursor to many other critically important changes as well.

I would also like to raise, as my last point, that while information sharing between organisations is essential in ensuring a collaborative approach, there should also be serious consideration for families to have access to their own records documented by child protection. It would appear that there are times when information that is documented is incorrect, and this can create serious and ongoing concerns for the families who are investigated and whose cases are closed due to lack of evidence or necessity for further engagement with child protection.

This is a point where I would actually like to reflect on some of the experiences that I have had with child protection.

I had notes come across my desk when I was a youth worker. Through those intake notes dates of birth were incorrect, we had different names for the one client in a document, we had a family’s siblings named who belonged to another family. This cannot go on, this needs to be rectified, and I am hoping that the government will make these changes within this bill. I am very grateful that they have now taken the time to reflect on the serious ramifications that some of these children and families have had to endure.

I would also like to talk about families who have had medical records with incorrect information inserted into child protection documents. These documents are not able to be changed, and families are also not able to gain access to the files which Child Protection have completed on their child. They say this is to protect the child. However, that information which leads to no further concern for the child’s welfare or safety should be made available to those parents so they know that what has been written about their child is factual and correct. I would implore the government to consider this. I have previously spoken to the minister about this very incident and will continue to follow up on this.

To sum up, I would like to confirm that Mr Grimley and I support this bill. We also thank the government, Minister Donnellan and the department for what is clearly a very considerable body of work that has led to its introduction into this Parliament. However, we do again want to reinforce the point that we would like to see further changes to, and a continued strengthening of, child protection legislation and its enforcement in a number of different forms. For the moment, though, I thank the house.