National conference provides unique insights for protecting children
Steve's update: This month’s conference of the Association of Children's Welfare Agencies (ACWA) provided a chance to take stock of how Australia’s systems, agencies and community organisations are working together to support children and young people.
As a former CEO of this important peak advocacy group, I was especially pleased to be part of the event that covered family support and intervention, family preservation, domestic violence and child protection, out-of-home care and residential care.
My formal role at this year’s conference was taking part in a panel discussion with interstate leaders Liana Buchanan, Alison Cameron and Leah Bromfield which included discussions of Reportable Conduct and Child Safe Schemes in different jurisdictions.
We touched on the findings of the Australian Child Maltreatment Study which found that the two most common forms of maltreatment children experience are family violence and harmful behaviour by a child or young person towards other children.
These findings show that our work at the Office of the Children’s Guardian needs to respond to broad systems issues to address this disturbing reality.
As part of our child safe regulatory leadership role, we have been strongly advocating for governance arrangements that seek to recognise and respond to systemic issues that cannot be dealt with by individual organisations alone.
We can’t be child safe unless we recognise and deliver well designed, integrated and nationally consistent responses.
We are always looking for ways to better coordinate our efforts across systems and jurisdictions, and a significant step forward in this area this month was the introduction of the Child Safe Organisations Bill 2024 to include mandatory child safe standards, and a reportable conduct scheme for certain organisations in Queensland.
Pioneered in NSW, and supported by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, these schemes provide oversight of notifications of reportable conduct and monitor how organisations conduct their investigation of reportable allegations.
Having these schemes consistently applied across Australia is an important measure to prevent child abuse, and to bring abusers to account. I encourage South Australia and the Northern Territory to join the rest of our states and territories in introducing such a scheme.
