Smith Murray: Care of Children Bill — Instruction to Committee Procedure In Committee 
Smith Murray: Care of Children Bill — Instruction to Committee Procedure In Committee 
[Volume:621;Page:16632] 
MURRAY SMITH (United Future) 
: 
 In rising on behalf of United Future to speak to Part 1 of the Care of Children Bill I want to address clause 4A “Principles relevant to child’s welfare and best interests”. That clause provides that a child’s parents and guardians should have the primary responsibility for the child’s care development and upbringing. It appears that the whole Committee including the Government agrees that a child’s parents and guardians should have the primary responsibility for the child’s care development and upbringing and that is quite proper and quite logical. We do not give that responsibility to the State. We give that role to parents and particularly we give that role to parents until children reach the age of 16 years. 
Why do we do that? We do that because parents provide what the State cannot provide. Parents provide love and affection for their children whom they have conceived and nurtured and had dealings with over their whole lifetime. Parents provide money way beyond what the State could afford in order to properly nurture and bring up a child often extremely sacrificially. They go to extraordinary lengths where children need special assistance such as with special-needs children and other children who suffer disabilities and they use their life savings to help their children to have the best life that is possible. Parents provide time. They are with their children day and night and the State at best can provide only short-term supervision. We do not give the primary responsibility for children to schools to school councillors and nurses or to doctors. Why not? Because schools do not provide the love and affection on an individual basis that parents can provide—far from it. The schools do not have the monetary resources to do that job and they do not have the time to look after children night and day. Children are at school for a few brief hours each working day. Doctors do not provide the love and affection that parents do. They have a multitude of patients to care for. Doctors do not have money to put into children and they do not have the time—they see children for a few brief minutes in appointments. 
Parents are in the best position to know what is best for their children. The case of Stacey Brindle a 16-year-old is one appropriate example of that. She was given contraceptives in order to try to cure acne and she then died from deep vein thrombosis simply because it appears the doctor was unaware that she had a susceptibility to that condition. Her parents knew that but they were not told—they did not know that she had been given that medication. Children are not in the best position to know what is in their own best interests particularly young children and children under the age of 16. That is where our privacy laws have grossly let us down because we assume that children should be able to have privacy and say they do not want their parents to know about something and we assume that that will always be in children’s best interests. It is not. Doctors and children together are not in the best position to know what is in the best interests of a child. Doctors see children for a brief period and a child’s position in terms of seeing a doctor for a brief time is far from satisfactory in terms of the confidence and length of relationship that is necessary to make those sorts of judgments. Doctors act on present symptoms and possibly on past experience. They cannot provide for the future welfare of a child who is in a situation whereby he or she needs ongoing supervision and attention particularly where medication has been prescribed or there is a need for other medical procedures. They simply prescribe the medication and leave the child to it. 
That issue is particularly appropriate when we consider clause 37A and in respect of the termination of a pregnancy. Terminating a pregnancy can have serious health consequences for young children and it is imperative in that situation that the parents be involved in order to oversee the physical emotional and psychological impacts that all pregnancy terminations cause. It is simply inadequate to assume that parents should not be told about a termination because a child and a doctor believe it is not necessary to do so.