Turner Judy: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Turner Judy: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:637;Page:7938] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 My interest in this Government agency dates right back to way before even the infamous baseline review; it was certainly fuelled by that review. I believe that this current review needs to reflect on what progress has been made since that very important review. 
The first thing I note is that the Government has piloted in two sites the differential response model. United Future is supportive of that. We believe that we might take some credit for it. With the assistance of the Minister for Social Development and Employment I was able to visit one of those sites and see how it is progressing. I was incredibly encouraged to see that great relationships are being built between the department and the community sector that the medium to low risk cases are being worked through and interventions are being more speedily executed and that some real relief is being provided to enable departmental workers to do some real quality social work at the high-risk end of their caseloads. That is a great thing and we would encourage the Minister to see that this model is rolled out as quickly as is practicable across the country. 
We also note that there has been an amalgamation and that the Department of Child Youth and Family Services has come back under the Ministry of Social Development umbrella as the Child Youth and Family service. While we are still unclear as to why that was done staff have assured us they see positive things in it and it will make a difference to the operation of the department. 
For this brief speech I want to focus on the call that United Future has been making for an independent complaints authority. Like most MPs—and maybe even more than some—I receive probably on a weekly basis letters and emails from people who have had dealings with the department and have complaints about the way their cases have been handled. As a member of Parliament I am not in a position—nor do I have the resources or the skills—to investigate these claims to determine whether they would in any way be upheld. I am sure that some of them would not be upheld; they are from disgruntled parents who have had an intervention done on them as a family and are not happy with that consequence. 
However I looked at the Police Complaints Authority. I looked at that authority because of the fact that like Child Youth and Family the police enjoy statutory powers and have great power to intervene in the lives of families and individual people. About 13 percent of the authority’s complaints—and it receives about 2000 a year—are upheld. That represents on average about 343 cases. It occurred to me that if 13 percent of all the cases that come across my desk—and I am sure that is not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination—would be upheld if closely investigated that would represent a substantial number of mums and dads and their children who did not get a fair deal from this department. 
Although none of us envy the work the social workers in this department have to contend with it is still hugely important that the work that is done is quality work. I know that the Minister has acknowledged to me in the past that if and when the department gets it wrong that would itself constitute child abuse. If children are wrongly removed and there is a failure on the part of the department to return them in a timely way to the care of their family that would constitute abuse. 
United Future has been calling for something akin to the Police Complaints Authority—an independent body where adults could go. Currently if there are some questions as to how the department has handled a case as it pertains to a child the Office of the Children’s Commissioner has a legislative mandate to investigate. That is a good thing and I call on the Government to better resource that office in that role. It currently uses staff allocated to all sorts of other jobs within that office to do that investigative work and it could do with some more resources. 
We are in no way proposing to duplicate or take over the work of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner. We are asking for somewhere where adults can go—either adults who have been notifiers to the department and are not happy with the way the department has responded to the notification or people who have been on the hard end of a notification people to whom an intervention has happened who are unhappy with how it has been handled and feel they were not listened to. 
One of the other things that I call on the Government to consider which is related to this complaints authority is better support for the client base. I had a really interesting question asked of me by someone who used to work for the service. That person had been a social worker and was now on the staff of a non-governmental organisation. One of the questions that person asked me was who the clients of the service were. I said I presumed it was the children. That person said no it was the notifier. We need to think a lot about that particular issue.