Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin - Leader of the Greens) - Mr Speaker, I recognise the victims/survivors and advocates who are in the Chamber or who are watching online. I note the comments that have been made, and the comment by Ms White, which I think was an appropriate one, that victims/survivors want to step back and it is the time for members of the Government and members of the parliament to step up.
I also recognise that whilst it is the deepest desire of all the victims/survivors I have spoken with to step back, there is a part of them that cannot rest until they can be confident that action will be taken and justice will be done. That is why they are looking so closely at this point in time to understand the response of the Government. It is the response of the Government that is central here. I have been concerned at the language used by the Premier yesterday and by ministers today which, in my view, seeks to smear the blame and the responsibility across all members of parliament.
Let me be clear, as I made the point in my response yesterday, I am not resiling from the reality that multiple political parties over decades have been in government and have been responsible for failings that led to child sex abuse. Here, today, if we have the Premier and the minister for Children and Youth telling me, as a member of parliament, that I need to be working on Ashley - sure, give me the job. Yes, I will do that. I will take that on. I do not have access to that budget. I do not have responsibility for telling staff what to do, and I cannot design a therapeutic detention centre. However, it is my job, on behalf of the 12 children in Ashley, including 11 of whom are there on remand and who, according to the Commissioner for Children and Young People, are subject every day to restrictive practices - including isolation and any other euphemism the minister likes to use, and has continued to use this morning - that effectively mean isolation, according to the commission of inquiry.
Those children deserve a time line today. The Government has had months. They have seen the commission of inquiry's report. They had it for a month before the 31st - two months now - and we have to wait another 10 weeks. What the Greens want to see when the supplementary budget comes down is a proper budget. We want to see the sort of budget that we would see at the end of each year. We want to see that level of detail. We want to see how the money is going to be spent.
It is clear from the answers today and the commission of inquiry's report that the commissioners have had to make the difficult balance between winding up the process because of the grave concerns about Ashley Youth Detention Centre. They could not delay their findings and recommendations. As a result, they say they could not pursue some issues in detail. Those issues include the reopening of hearings to look at other potential adverse findings of some people. The Government, it appears, has been successful in presenting legal arguments to prevent some people, some state servants, from having adverse findings made against them. Those legal arguments were effective, at least in some cases.
Because of the commission's desire to do its work and to focus on the public interest of the children in Ashley, and all the other children they were reporting on, and the commission's desire not to retraumatise witnesses, and in regard to their time and resource constraints, they made the decision to finish the process. They clearly flagged suggestions that very senior public servants have potentially engaged in inappropriate conduct, and we did not get an answer this morning about what the response will be.
The Premier was asked what he could do to hold those people to account. This morning, he talked about holding perpetrators to account, and holding people accountable for the findings in the report - as though it is the same thing; as though we are in the same category. The Premier's response suggests to me that he has no intention of investigating the potential serious misconduct that has been flagged.
I note there is a letter that has been sent by Lawrie Donaldson [OK], an advocate, to the Premier and to other members, and I have a copy of it here. Mr Donaldson talks about Employment Direction (ED) No. 5 provisions that he understands permit retroactive findings, and this is in relation to retired individuals. The commission of inquiry notes that findings against three people warrant ED 5 investigation and subsequent action, and they name those three people - Dr Peter Renshaw, James Ballinger, and Luigino Fratangelo [OK]. They say that there is a possibility for ED 5 retroactive findings. We want to hear whether that will be undertaken by the Government. We want to hear from the Premier whether that sort of action is going to be taken.
Those three are just a subset of senior servants. We need to be confident that the Government is undertaking a full, proper and appropriate review and audit as the commission of inquiry said. I did not get confidence from the Premier that that is what he is doing. I urge him to reconsider that response. I urge the minister for Children and Youth to understand that we demand a concrete time line. That is our job. That is our responsibility. We want to know the time line for the closure of Ashley. We want to see the details around that in the supplementary budget. We will not be put off by a lump sum in a supplementary budget to sign on to.
