Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin - Leader of the Greens) - Mr Deputy Speaker, it gives me no pleasure to rise on this censure motion today. We are disappointed that the Premier thinks this is a hypocritical action. I cannot speak for Labor but I want to put on the record for the people who are watching that before, and especially since, the Noetic report in 2015, the Greens have been consistently calling for Ashley to close. The Noetic report was very clear that the safest option for children was to close it and move towards a therapeutic response.
From the very dawn of time that this Government has been here, since the whole time minister Jaensch has been responsible for children and young people, the closure of Ashley as the only appropriate response for protecting children from neglect, abuse, trauma and especially the horrors of child sexual abuse has been squarely on his plate, sitting there for him to deal with every single day. What has happened under this minister over the slightly less than five years that he has been responsible -
Mr Jaensch - No.
Dr WOODRUFF - There was a break of nine months, so for years now this minister has been responsible for this portfolio. This is the minister who was responsible for trialling sending our vulnerable young Aboriginal people to the Northern Territory in a failed experiment to outsource our failure to deal with looking after young people in detention.
Today he continues to foster this narrative that there is something threatening about children in Ashley Youth Detention Centre that can only be responded to from a community safety point of view by creating another detention facility with a therapeutic overlay in the south of the state, instead of taking the response which is required and demonstrated to work in other jurisdictions, which is a therapeutic response to children who have suffered trauma which keeps them safe while they are working with a person who is trusted, respected, a single individual person who is allocated to work very closely with them, in conjunction with other people but the stability of therapeutic support as it is meant to work.
That is what can turn around the lives of young people who are only in Ashley because they themselves have been victims of trauma, neglect and/or abuse in families who have been wholly incapable of providing them with the lives that they need as young people. They are themselves victims of a society that just has not cared. We have not cared enough to identify the root cause of the trauma and get in there and do the work with their families and then with the children who act out, who undertake crimes and end up being locked up as a result of that, locked up until they can be attended to by the court system, until they can come to trial and be possibly convicted or not because we know that the majority, 11 out 12 young people who were at Ashley in recent times are not there because of their sentence, they are there on remand waiting to be heard as a matter of justice in the court system. For hundreds of days, two hundred plus days, one young person has been locked up for that very reason.
The whole time that, Roger Jaensch, has been the minister, he has failed to grapple with this issue. This is something that the former leader of the Tasmanian Greens, Cassie O'Connor, was incredibly passionate about. Since 2015 she has been on the front foot at every opportunity talking about the fact that we need to close Ashley. The Greens have funded it in our every single alternative budget now for years because we recognise the research and the experience from other jurisdictions, from people who work in the social service sector and the youth detention centre, the experience is that the model proposed by Noetic and by the subsequent reports are correct.
The only thing that is not happening in Tasmania is a Liberal government and this minister to do something about it. We collectively, the Labor Party and the Greens support this - I will hear from Independent members; I am not sure what their position is - but we censure this minister because after a commission of inquiry report has found the gravest things about the situation at Ashley, he still is now creating a false narrative, misrepresenting the words of the commission of inquiry and starting off on another course of arguing why he is justified in keeping Ashley open for another three years. The commission of inquiry could not have been clearer. They were so clear about in particular the role of the minister in failing in this matter. The commission of inquiry was very clear that their work was coming on the back of multiple reviews. There have been 17 internal and external briefings, reports and reviews completed since 2003. The findings of those reports has consistently identified systemic problems in how detainees are treated, seemingly with little improvement over time, especially in Mr Jaensch's time. We found that there is no lack of guidance they said and information about how the centre could be improved, only an absence of political will to see through necessary reforms.
In our view it has contributed to a crisis at Ashley Youth Detention Centre that must be addressed by its closure and significant reform of youth detention. This minister, despite reading that report, despite hearing these words, is demonstrating in his answers in parliament in the last couple of weeks that he will be the next in line to continue on the proud history that he has had, the ignominious history that he has had, of failing with political will to do something about it. He is still refusing to look at the alternatives that are being proposed to move children and young people with great speed out of Ashley Youth Detention Centre. I will get to the alternatives that are there.
The commissioners were very clear, child sexual abuse is not merely a historical problem at the centre but remains a live and current risk. The main concern about the safety and welfare of detainees, those same detainees that under Roger Jaensch's minister will be there for another three years unless as a parliament we act. That is why we are censuring him today. This censure the Greens believe should lead to his removal as minister. That is the only appropriate response for Jeremy Rockliff to make given the evidence of what we have from the commission of inquiry.
In the last sitting of parliament, on 18 October, the commission of inquiry unequivocally stated the use of isolation practices at Ashley Youth Detention Centre is a violation of the human rights of children and young people and they highlighted how the department staff accepted that fact as early as 2016 and documented extensively how the concerns raised in subsequent years by the children's commissioners, the Custodial Inspector, independent investigation and a United Nations committee have been ignored by this Government. In recent years they have been ignored on a regular basis by this minister. They also say:
We observed the closed institution with a culture that enable the humiliation and degradation of children, rationalised because the children were seen as the worst of the worst.
This is a narrative I have heard woven through the minister's response. He talks about the children, the security threat, the safety of society, the creation of another detention facility. The Premier talked about a high-risk detention facility. This is the sort of narrative of danger and threat, instead of the therapeutic approach which recognises safe boundaries for children, the requirement to keep them and the community safe, but the safety and wellbeing of child is first and foremost. We did not hear that in Roger Jaensch's responses as minister. We heard a question mark of concern. I feel that what is coming behind that is the whole Liberal populist, judgmental approach to people who have been on the so called wrong side of the law. The fact is these are children. They are young people. Almost of all of them, according to the commission of inquiry's findings and many other reports, have been victims of abuse.
They need specialist treatment and care, not the isolation, restrictive practices and lockdowns that occur on a daily basis, according to the Commissioner for Children and Young People. In July this year she said: 'Restrictive practices have occurred since June last year on a daily basis.' Instead of those restrictive practices, they need therapeutic input. The reason they are occurring, the commission of inquiry found and the minister has confirmed, is a result of staff shortages, rather than the minister finding the resources to put into targeted actions to manage specific children.
We are not blind to the fact that children need intensive support. Young people in Ashley definitely need intensive support. They need specialised care and treatment, and therapeutic support. The commission is clear that the Government's approach constitute human rights abuses and has the same impact as other isolation practices on children's health and wellbeing. In other words, a negative one.
I acknowledge the work of the Tasmanian Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT) network, who have been tireless in their efforts to shine a light on what has been happening at Ashley Youth Detention Centre. The Tasmanian Institute of Law Enforcement Studies, TOPCAT, the Justice Reform Initiative, TasCOSS and service providers, including Colony 47, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, were all signatories to a letter that called on the Government to close Ashley and to establish a Government working party with civil society to take alternatives to Ashley forward. This is the alternative that I have never heard the minister saying that he has taken up.
We have called on the Premier to have that meeting. We have called on minister Jaensch to have that meeting with the community service sector, to be on the front foot to talk about alternatives but he is refusing to do about that work. He is silent about it. I can only take his silence -
Mr Jaensch - I am meeting them tomorrow. We have said it three times. You cannot ignore that and keep lying that we are not going to meet anybody.
Dr WOODRUFF - You have not told us about it.
Mr Jaensch - We have told you three times today.
Dr WOODRUFF - Where is the ministerial statement about the alternatives to Ashley that you worked on with this sector? That is what we need to hear. What we are hearing from you is that they have to stay locked up with human rights abuses, at risk of live and current risk to themselves, for three more years. That is your response. We want to hear a statement to parliament about what you are actually going to do after you talk to these groups and find alternatives, because they say they are there.
They are willing to step up and they are willing to do the work. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre has said on the record they will do the work with Aboriginal children and young people in detention. There are already members that do that work. They will provide the accommodation, they will work with the Government to make that safe for the community and safe for children. Colony 47 has specialist counselling and support services. TasCOSS organisations want to get involved and they want a response which is just and trauma informed and which puts children and their wellbeing at the centre. So, thank you to those organisations, to Val Kitchener, Rob White and all the other people who continue to do this work in the background for children and young people.
We know that the minister has been misrepresenting the commission of inquiry's findings and the commission made a specific mention of minister Jaensch. They call him out by name. He has been called out in the commission of inquiry's report on page 11 of volume 5 when they said:
The Tasmanian Government has previously announced its intention to close Ashley Youth Detention Centre by the end of 2024. On 13 July 2023 minister Jaensch cast doubt on this closure date. In evidence to a parliamentary inquiry on adult imprisonment and youth detention the minister said:
When we announced our intention to not just replace Ashley with two smaller Ashleys we also then realised that delivering this more sophisticated, better practiced model may take more time and so whilst we remain committed to the ambition of closing Ashley as soon as possible and 2024 is the date that was announced we believe that is going to need to be updated.
Now what I do not want to do is to issue another political deadline. What I want to do as soon as possible and I hope to be able to do in coming months is once we confirm the preferred site for the development of the southern detention facility which is a critical component of the new facilities delivery model. Once we have an actual site that we have locked in then we can conduct the remaining site investigations planning and design processes. Then we will know how much it will cost and how long it will take to build and my next step in terms of clarifying time frames will be to provide a firm actual timeframe based on those investigations. So, I hope to do that in coming months. (TBC)
Wow, that just sounds like something from Yes, Minister. That is the most garbled bureaucratic non-specific all things to all people never tie yourself down to anything no commitments no action response I have ever heard. The commission of inquiry's comment in relation to that was:
While we acknowledge the Government's re-stated commitment to closing Ashley, we are gravely concerned by any suggestion of further delay. (TBC)
They could not be clearer. The Government has to close Ashley Youth Detention Centre as soon as possible, they said. It is pure gaslighting for Roger Jaensch to try to pretend that 'as soon as possible' is 2026. It is also false for the Premier to say, as he said earlier, that there is a suggestion it should be sudden. Both those things are untrue. We heard today that the minister is taking 2026 as some kind of future timeline that he is working to rather than doing the work of making sure the children are out of Ashley at the end of next year and doing anything that is required to find the alternatives, to put them in places in the meantime.
These alternatives are on the table. They are being offered by the social services and justice sector and, as we continue to hear silence from the minister, we can only conclude that he is failing to take them up.
I will also comment about our concerns in relation to the censure. This is a censure of the Minister for Education, Children and Youth for misrepresenting the commission of inquiry and for his failure to adequately progress the closure of the Ashley Youth Detention Centre in a timely way.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I will move an amendment at this point which I have circulated.
I move -
Leave out clause (6) and insert instead:
(6) Further notes the Minister's failure to guarantee the safety of children in out of home care, stating instead children are being placed into care so they are 'less unsafe'.
(7) Further notes that under the Minister's watch, only 50% of children in out of home care have a primary child safety officer, and only 38.7% of children have been visited by a Child Safety Officer within relevant time frames.
(8) Censures the Minister for Education, Children and Youth for misrepresenting the Commission of Inquiry, his failure to adequately progress the closure of the Ashley Youth Detention Centre in a timely way and his refusal to guarantee the safety of children in out of home care. [OK]
On the amendment, Madam Deputy Speaker, we asked the minister yesterday whether he could guarantee the safety of children in out of home care in relation to whether they were being visited by child safety officers, how many of them were being visited by child safety officers, whether indeed they were all being visited and had a child safety officer assigned to them. His response was that the job of the state was to take the children out of unsafe places and place them into less unsafe places.
The commission of inquiry was a commission of inquiry into Tasmanian institutional child sexual abuse, so we are not talking about neglect here. We are not talking about other forms of abuse. They are all important and they are all serious. We are talking about child sexual abuse. Our really huge concern is that there is nothing in what the minister has given us in the response that he made that shows that we can be confident that children are safe in out of home care. We are also not confident that he recognises the seriousness of the situation and that he really understands that he cannot guarantee that children in out of home are in Tasmania are safe, he simply cannot to do that and he does not get the reason that they are not safe.
The reason that they are not safe is because they have not been resourced to have staff assigned to them. They have not been resourced to have staff to give them the therapeutic care they need and the parent family have not been supported. According to the commission of inquiry's evidence they do not have trauma-informed training. They did not understand child sexual abuse. They had not been given training about what grooming looks like. They did not know how to respond to a child who reported child sexual abuse to them.
They themselves were not given the support with respite care and they are not funded to recompense them for the sort of work they do. There is a series of resource gaps that is now extreme. The minister talks about trying to turn that around. He commented on how difficult it was to attract people to want to work in out-of-home care and made it sound as though he had done everything possible to try to attract them, but what he had not done was keep the resourcing up over years and years that he was minister.
He had overseen the removal of resources from out-of-home care in a very active way and he was aware of it too; the commission of inquiry made that very clear. The evidence from former secretary of the Department of Communities, Michael Pervan - on page 89 of volume 4, chapter 9 - was that he repeatedly noted budget constraints, including the redirection of resources to other departmental priorities, as hindering the reform agenda. He stressed that funding for out-of-home care was the responsibility of the government of the day and said that he was not given the resources he needed to run the department in the manner that the commission of inquiry has concluded that it needed to be run, despite asking for them at every opportunity from the Government. He told the commission that the Government effectively cut funding to the department by requiring an efficiency dividend from the department that equated to a significant sum over several years.
Members of this place who have been here under Peter Gutwein's premiership would recognise that as the cruel efficiency dividend that the Liberals, with Peter Gutwein as Treasurer, exacted over all Tasmanian departments. It was not supposed to affect so-called frontline services but the reality is it did - there are no real differences between frontline services and non-frontline services in out-of-home care, in hospitals and in education. It is part of a web of work that all needs to be funded in order to get the best outcomes and, in this case, the safety surety that is needed for children in out-of-home care.
Under Roger Jaensch as minister, the department has been hollowed out over years. It has been an attack, not just on the service delivery but on the wages and conditions of staff. They have not been increased, there is no loading for child safety officers working with children when they are working in regional Tasmania and there should be. There is not the staff numbers or expertise to get all of the staff needed in regional areas and people have to move there or travel there, so there should be extra support for them. This is something the union has been talking about for a long time but as minister, Roger Jaensch has stonewalled that because there has been no progress.
The Child Advocate in 2022 said there is simply not the resources for the breadth of roles in the portfolio to perform all corporate functions. The commission said:
We consider that chronic under-resourcing has been at the expense of maintaining up-to-date and clear policies and procedures. It has stalled continuous improvement and strategic direction for the department.
It is particularly hard to understand how the amount spent per placement night could be decreasing over recent years.
That is a terrible thing to consider. As we have known, the need has gone up and under minister Jaensch, the amount for placement nights has been going down. As the number of children who need to be placed into out-of-home care is going up, the amount of support for out-of-home carers is going down. As the referrals to the advice and referral line have been going up, the numbers of child safety officers to respond to them have been inadequate. They have been going down, effectively, to the need that has been coming in.
Minister Jaensch's response to the question we asked yesterday about how many children in out-of-home care have a case worker and what is the percentage of child safety worker visits that were conducted within the required time frames in the last year was disturbing. It clarified that 60 per cent of children have not been visited by a child safety officer within relevant time frames. Children who are vulnerable in out-of-home care have people as carers, fosters carers, and we know that they are under-resourced. We know that they do not have respite care as much as they need. We know that they do not have the policies and education they need to guide their care when it comes to being on the lookout for child sexual abuse and grooming. Sixty per cent of children are not visited by a child safety officer within the relevant time frames and only half of children in out-of-home care have a primary child safety officer.
This is a terrible failing. It is very concerning that the minister's response was to try to argue that they are doing everything possible to put on more staff. His comments this morning were that these children in long-term and stable care had low complexity and low-risk needs. He is making an assumption that those children are not at risk and has justified the lack of child safety officers being assigned to children in out-of-home care on the assumption that they are low-risk cases with low complexity in their needs and that they are in stable situations.
The very point of the commission of inquiry was that you cannot guarantee a so called stable environment is a safe one for children from child sexual abuse. The evidence is there in the cases that were given of young people and children who were abused and sexually assaulted. There were terrible cases of sexual abuse of young people and some were in situations with people who were paragons of the community, upstanding members of the community, and that is why there was no action taken when they spoke out. It is a dangerous assumption to believe there is such a thing as a stable low-risk environment that does not need checking or an eyes-on situation, because they are the sorts of circumstances that can foster abusers.
I accept that there would be a prioritising of children in greatest need to provide a different type of care. I accept what the minister says, but he is looking at the needs of the child in terms of care and support but not looking at the needs of all children in out-of-home care for the state to guarantee that they will not be victims of child sexual abuse. That can only be done when there is a child safety officer assigned to each child and there are regular checks at intervals as determined by the relevant time frames. We know that for half the children in out-of-home care that is not happening and 60 per cent of children are not being checked within the relevant time frames. That is appalling. What the commission of inquiry found in out-of-home care is not news to the minister because the grave concerns they had were raised previously by the Greens when we obtained right to information about the lack of oversight of children in out-of-home care. That was news reported in June 2021. He has had two and-a half years now to fix what was demonstrated by that information as an unsafe system and he has done nothing concrete about it.
Here we are today with him talking about the fact that he is trying to scrabble together and get some more staff. He is talking about 12 more staff, so that is going to fix this problem. That is so overdue. He has been the minister for almost five years. Most importantly, this has been pointed out to him on a regular basis by child protection workers, child safety officers, by the Greens through right to information and by the unions.
The lack of support and resourcing, and the continual removal of resourcing from out of-home care, has meant we have a situation where we are starved of staff to work with the most vulnerable children. That is a decision taken repeatedly by this minister, Roger Jaensch, by not fighting for funding, by not making the case for why this is the most important part of the budget, for not standing up for children in Cabinet, demanding they get a better cut of the pie. This is not an extra or a frills option: it is a core budget priority to make sure that children at most risk have a person assigned to them who is a regular, continuous person, who keeps in touch with them to check how they are and make sure that they are not victim to child sexual abuse.
I will conclude by coming back to the fact that this is a minister with a history of failures. He has had numerous opportunities to step up and to take the actions that many reviews, reports, bodies, investigation by the United Nations, by the Custodial Inspector, by the Commissioner for Children and Young People, all of these bodies have made strong repeated statements about problems at Ashley, the dangers for children there, the human right abuses and violations that occur on a daily basis. Now the commission of inquiry has demonstrated that there remains today a live and current risk of child sexual abuse occurring at Ashley Youth Detention Centre. His response to that is to say, 'We will keep doing this for another three years' because in his mind there is no other option. I am afraid that shows how small-minded he is when it comes to this matter. We can no longer afford to have a minister with a small mind who is incapable of making decisions, who will not reach out and talk to the community organisations who are prepared to step up and find another way. Instead, he is going to plough the same field as though it will make a difference.
We have not just spent two years of Tasmanians' time, victim/survivors giving evidence, to get this result from the minister. It is time for him to be censured for his actions. But more than that, it is the role of the Premier to remove him because he is incapable of doing the job of closing Ashley, he is failing to act on the concerns of staff and he is failing to stand up for the children that his sworn duty is to protect.
