Prasad Rajen: Reports — Inquiry into the Identification Rehabilitation and Care and Protection of Child Offenders 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Prasad Rajen: Reports — Inquiry into the Identification Rehabilitation and Care and Protection of Child Offenders 
[Sitting date: 29 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4942. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour) 
: 
 Just a couple of corrections: the chair of the last Social Services Committee was Katrina Shanks and I want to acknowledge her work in the last select committee. She actually worked very inclusively with us. This Inquiry into the identification rehabilitation and care and protection of child offenders was essentially a Government inquiry proposed by Government members and we went along with it. 
The second point I want to make is that this inquiry was essentially finished and ready to be presented to this House at the end of the last Parliament but for some strange reason it was not. There was no work to be done and there was no explanation given. So the current select committee has simply kept it boiling for a little bit and now we are presenting it. But this was an inquiry into three aspects of child offending: identification rehabilitation and care. Everything we know from research and from experience tells us that unless we have a comprehensive system and an integrated approach to each aspect of that system and unless each aspect is well designed and well integrated and unless the care and protection needs of children are met well—unless we have all of those pieces together—the system will not work. 
If we look at the recommendations of this inquiry there are 25 recommendations and they are quite serious and far-reaching recommendations. What that points to is the fact that this inquiry did not find such a system. We did not find an integrated system or a system that is actually working well. At each stage of the process around child offenders there is much more to be done and our recommendations actually point to that. My suspicion is that if we went at the moment into any other aspect of care and protection or the child welfare system and shone a torch on it we would find similar kinds of shortcomings. There is something that is quite wrong quite broken with the system that needs a major review. I suspect that what this inquiry has shown to me is that it has identified some of that. 
If we look at identification what we found was that there were many many opportunities for cases to be identified early whether it was in our schools or even our preschools but somehow that was not done. The system was not tight enough was not integrated enough to say that we could take advantage of all of the opportunities that we have that the system has and that many systems have to identify these kids. So the first recommendation under that one recommended that the Government require “government agencies to focus on the risk and protective factors identified in this report”—and we do not do that. We do not bring together the knowledge base around what the key indicators are and actually use them in everyday interaction with our young people. What we do is we wait until something really blows over. That notion of early intervention is really really important and it is an important aspect of this report. We need to also ensure that we identify the accountabilities of Government agencies—so who is going to do what and to what extent that will be done. 
When we go to the current rehabilitation system that was another aspect of what the committee was asked to look at. Again a really quite serious shortcoming is that the bulk of the programmes are not evaluated so how do we know that these things are actually working? There are a number of recommendations here around that. When we also look at the care and protection system it was really quite a worrying experience for us as a committee when the Family Court actually did a mock-up of a number of cases and we found out how the system prevaricates. It can keep a case going for months and months and months a year and even beyond. That has to be fixed because the system is not integrated. I am sure that Charles Chauvel my colleague will talk about that. In the end we did not have time to really look at the effectiveness of the care and protection system well enough. 
What this report presents is that the system is good in parts there are lots of things that need to be done with it the recommendations are quite serious and they ought to be addressed. Now that Katrina Shanks is here I did acknowledge your work as chair of the last select committee where all of the work of this committee was done and completed but not presented for some strange reason. Thank you.