Shadow Minister for Community Services

The Community Services portfolio is a diverse and demanding policy area lying at the heart of family life in New South Wales.  It is charged with the most serious and fundamental of government responsibilities, keeping our communities strong and secure.  That includes providing a well coordinated and effective domestic violence response for victims, families and perpetrators of violence and ensuring our pre schools and child care centres provide appropriate education and care and that adults who work with children in these centres are not a danger to them. 

Keeping our communities strong and secure also means ensuring the protection of our precious and sadly often our most vulnerable, the children of New South Wales. Keeping children safe from harm, very often at the hands of their families, requires policies to intervene early when a family is clearly struggling, to support them in giving better care and finally, to remove children from families where it is clear they are at risk of harm. This is a statutory responsibility that governments must take seriously when the lives and well being of our children are at stake.

Each year in New South Wales children die at the hands of their families, children like Ebony, whose mother was found guilty of her murder by starvation and Dean Shillingworth, also murdered by his mother. For every child who dies, thousands of others survive horrifying levels of abuse and neglect, living invisible lives of quiet desperation and often going on to be adults suffering damage that stays with them all their lives and flows into the cycle of violence. For this reason it falls to Governments to remove them from harm and place them with families that can provide the care and safety children need. The Liberal Nationals support the role of the Children`s Court in making these decisions although we agree with the Wood Commission of Enquiry that there is more room for non-adversarial ways, outside the courtrooms, for deciding the futures of children at risk of harm.

The care and protection of children requires an all-of-government approach, where government agencies share information and work together to give children a decent future. The Liberal Nationals believe that much remains to be done in improving cooperation between departments such as Education, Health, Housing, the Police and Community Services and that despite the Wood Enquiry`s report and additional money, the Government is moving far too slowly to improve this.

Protecting vulnerable children is not only a government responsibility of course, children are part of the community and we must all be vigilant in ensuring their safety and care.  For this reason the Liberal Nationals believe non-government community organizations (NGOs) can play a major role in community development and child protection. Again, the Government is moving far too slowly in the recommended transfer of responsibilities from government to our NGOs.  Much more needs to be done. Greater government support as well as assistance to the organisations themselves is urgently needed.  There are major service providers in NSW who have not received a real increase in their funding for more than a decade, despite their dedicated and proven work with families. 

The Liberal Nationals support prevention and early intervention, as these are well-recognised means of cutting down the damage to children without having to take them from their families. The investment needed is huge but it is preferable to the huge expense of supporting children in often unsatisfactory out of home care. Ultimately however we also know that the rights of children must be central to this and if families continue to fail their children, we need save those children as a first priority, and that means tough love.

In the Liberal Nationals social policy framework, SSHS, we have identified 6 principles that will guide our policy development. These are:

1. The importance of early intervention and prevention.
2. The value of local decision-making and community partnerships.
3. The rights of individuals to make informed choices and the expectation they will accept responsibility.
4. The belief that NSW should offer the highest quality and standard of services in Australia.
5. A promise to deliver timely and equitable services for all.
6. A commitment to openness, transparency and accountability.

But we also need to hear from the community; from families, community organizations, professionals and individuals, including children, about how best to reform the way the Government services the needs of families in distress or crisis.

So over the next few months we will be consulting with community organisations and special interest groups around New South Wales, listening to their views and ideas on how to tackle this horrible problem.

For a full list of dates and locations for these consultations, please go to http://www.sshs.com.au/ and click and click on the ‘Get Involved` link. We need your help to help NSW!

Shadow Minister for Women

The women`s portfolio is an overarching one. It extends through many other portfolios to ensure issues that are directly related to women are included in all relevant policy areas. These areas include health and police and community services and the role they play in supporting victims of domestic violence.

Improving access to services and equality in choice are important areas in the women`s portfolio. Statistics still reveal that women are far less represented in positions of administrative governance.