Moroney Sue: Vulnerable Children Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Vulnerable Children Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 15 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17276. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): Thank you for the opportunity to rise and speak to the second reading of the Vulnerable Children Bill. I wish I could share the enthusiasm of the member who has just resumed his seat Tim Macindoe for how significant this bill is. Yes this is an issue that does need addressing. It is the Labour Party’s view that the Government has not grasped this opportunity to deal with the very serious issues that confront the nation’s children that the bill is not as significant as it should have been and that it falls short on a number of counts. So sadly if this is the most significant moment in the member’s career I wish it was an awful lot more significant that what it has been.We did have the opportunity and we still have the opportunity in this Parliament to actually address the issues that do make 285000 children in this country vulnerable but instead the Government has chosen to do some things to assist 30000 who are deemed to be at risk. Those I am referring to are the 285000 children who by this Government’s own estimation—by this Government’s own estimation—are living in poverty and sadly this bill does nothing to address their plight.Even for the children whose plight it does aim to address sadly it does fall short. It does aim to address the plight of children who find themselves in situations where they are at risk of being physically or sexually abused so they are very very vulnerable. I want to just restate—and I am sure other members when they have taken calls in this debate have been clear about this—that no one could be more vulnerable in our society than a child placed at risk in that way. But the bill focuses on people in paid employment and the risk they pose to vulnerable children when what we know as a country is that people in paid employment in front-line services with children are not where the vast majority of this harm takes place. What we know is that the paid professionals are much less likely to be in a situation of abusing children and that in fact it is in the unpaid workforce and the volunteer workforce where most of this harm happens.I was severely disappointed as a member of the Social Services Committee to discover part-way through the submissions on this bill that this bill did nothing and still does nothing to address that very serious and large-scale risk because we do know that that is where children are most at risk. Yet this bill does nothing to regulate or address the issue of having a safety regime for children around people who either work in volunteer organisations or volunteer for organisations where children are placed in care. I think that is a great gaping hole in this legislation.Again as it so often is with this Government sadly it is a grand title that the Government has afforded this bill but the detail does not actually match up with the rhetoric. If this really was a bill that addressed vulnerable children then as well as the issue of children being placed at risk of abuse it would deal with the vulnerability of those 285000 children who are living in poverty.The good news is that the Labour Party has got plans to do exactly this and I want to recommend to people listening to this debate Labour’s Best Start policy. If the Government was really serious about addressing the issues for vulnerable children then it would be agreeing with the approach being proposed by Labour. The Best Start policy ensures that every child who lives in a family where the family income is less than $155000 per annum would receive on the birth of that child $60 extra a week and for low-income families that payment would stay in place up until the age of 3. That is a very real and practical way of addressing poverty and vulnerable children living in poverty. If the Government was serious about addressing the concerns about vulnerablechildren that is exactly where it would be heading. It would be heading down that track of ensuring that all children get the very best start in life.Again a Government that is really serious about dealing with children and making sure that they have got the best start in life would be supporting my bill to extend paid parental leave to 6 months. Instead the Government is deploying all sorts of delaying tactics—everything it can think of to stop that bill from going through this House including the extreme threat of a financial veto. That is what the Government thinks of vulnerable children. It is actually prepared to use the most extreme tool available to it as a Government to stop children from getting supported in those very early and vulnerable first 6 months of their lives. That I think says it all about this Government’s priority for supporting children in those very early vulnerable months.That is also part of Labour’s Best Start programme—the policy that actually will deal with the needs of vulnerable children rather than this bill which addresses a narrow sliver of the issue. However however narrow the sliver is it is an important sliver I must add because of course we want to ensure that children who are at risk of being harmed by adults—and it bothers me to stand in this Parliament and say it because we as adults should be the people on whom vulnerable children can depend—should be able to depend on the fact that when they are in the company of adults they are safe but sadly that is not the case.This bill does a little to address that issue but it does not do a lot to address it. I was however pleased to see that the Government did back down in the end on the idea of using child harm prevention orders. It was the view of the Labour Party and other parties represented on the Social Services Committee right from the outset that these were not going to work and that the child harm prevention orders were going to be significantly overreaching. The Minister for Social Development came to that decision at the end of the day but it took many many submissions from a wide range of submitters to convince her that taking measures against people who had not had a conviction and for whom there was no evidence or proof that they had offended against children was not workable and was going a step too far. The Government came to its senses in the end.There is one other issue that came to light during the submissions on this bill that I would like to briefly give some oxygen to during this debate and that is the issue raised by a number of organisations who talked to us about the plight of children who are extremely vulnerable because they have severe disabilities their family has been unable to cope with those disabilities and they have ended up being institutionalised for life as a result of that. The plea from a number of those organisations was to say to the select committee that for goodness’ sake if these parents are not willing or able to give a home to these children there are other foster families who would like to do that and that child should have the right to not be institutionalised for life but to have a home for life. I think that is something that I would like to see this Parliament give some consideration to in the future.The Labour Party is supporting this bill. We do not think it goes far enough.Debate interrupted.