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Richardson: No hyperbole, this is a crisis

Sep 27, 2013
Jay Weatherill being filmed in State Parliament: an unwanted spotlight will not go away. Photo: Nat Rogers/InDaily

Jay Weatherill being filmed in State Parliament: an unwanted spotlight will not go away. Photo: Nat Rogers/InDaily

When the Layton Report was handed down a decade ago, it spurred some significant reform and also garnered a few headlines. Nowhere near as many, however, as the ongoing debacle over child protection and the Education Department’s numerous failings thereof.

Perhaps this is because the newly-crowned Rann administration did not appoint Robyn Layton QC to examine the state’s child protection regime in the midst of a public uproar or a media storm. Rather, Labor took a front-footed approach. There was certainly none of the pervading sense of crisis with which the Weatherill Government is now dogged. And let’s be frank, it’s no hyperbole. The system is in crisis, if we take crisis to refer to intense difficulty and, more pertinently, a fundamental turning point.

But if the state’s child protection regime is flawed now, it was shambolic 10 years ago. If there was none of the political theatre, one reason perhaps might be because the Layton Report itself didn’t contend that the system was in crisis.

The reason for that, peculiarly, was revealed by Premier Jay Weatherill in yesterday’s Question Time. It was a fascinating admission, but one that was clearly destined to be lost amid the cacophony of controversy.

“We had a child protection system that was in crisis,” Weatherill began, “not that that word was permitted to be used.

“Because one of the advisers on a particular advisory panel to government told me that, when she tried to use that word, it was edited out of the reports to be given to the former government. She was not permitted to use the word ‘crisis’ in relation to child protection.”

That same adviser reported that “a layer of authority, a coordinating committee, was actually put over the top of her”, preventing her ensuring her entreaties on the flawed regime ever found their way to the relevant ministerial authorities.

The revelation formed part of an impassioned speech by Weatherill, a Premier not usually noted for inflamed rhetoric.

It was even more notable for being tucked away in the middle of Question Time, part of his response to the umpteenth Opposition imputation of a “casual attitude to child protection”.

“We have done more to shine a light on the evil of child sexual abuse in this state than any other government that has come before us or any other government around our nation,” the Premier lamented.

“There is no more important issue to me personally or to this government than protecting our most vulnerable citizens, our little children.

“Nothing could be more important to me or to us, and every day, we do everything we possibly can to try to achieve that. Does that mean that horrible things don’t still happen? Of course they do. Is that an awful thing and does it hurt all of us? Of course it does. But, every single day, we devote ourselves to that objective.”

The recent trail of the Education Department is littered with professional corpses. The only one still standing is Jay Weatherill.

The trouble for Weatherill, though, is that he seems unable to shake that cynical Liberal tag. His irony – he, who as Families and Communities Minister instigated the Mullighan Inquiry into child sexual abuse, probably the most far-reaching of its kind in Australia until this year – is that child protection failures may well be his Government’s epitaph.

You can sense his frustration rising, and you can appreciate it. After all, this week he tried to move the narrative on by pronouncing it was “time to re-focus on state issues” after months of federal feuding, and outlined a big-picture-type economic policy for a Future Fund, which failed to resonate much because: a) he’d announced it before, and b) it may well never eventuate. He pledged to unveil a series of similar announcements, trying to wrest the policy momentum in the lead-up to the March election. The problem is, there is one state issue that never went away, and it continues to dominate the public discourse, all but drowning out his “vision thing” type pronouncements.

You can almost hear his internal monologue, echoing The Godfather’s Michael Corleone: “Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in!”

Yesterday, two more scalps were claimed: two senior and long-serving Education executives who incoming CEO Tony Harrison didn’t want on his team. Five lower ranked bureaucrats have been counselled, or soon will be. Another three remain under investigation. The Opposition was quick to draw the obvious parallel – senior public servants were urged to resign or be sacked, while the Premier refused to adequately discipline his own ministerial staff for their culpability. But the analogy is flawed. Weatherill’s underlings – chief of staff Simon Blewett and former advisor Jadynne Harvey – were not senior executives. Like their departmental equivalents, they were counselled for their actions, or lack thereof. That appears to be the way of things; the lower ranks are counselled, the senior ones moved on, as with Weatherill’s long-time friend and ally Grace Portolesi, who was feeling the heat and was swiftly ushered out of the kitchen.

When Weatherill took over the reins at Education he quickly sacked then-department chief Chris Robinson, for reasons that were never properly explained (although the incoming minister did publicly rail against the departmental “culture”). Keith Bartley was appointed in early 2011, although he too resigned in the wake of the Debelle Report (citing health and family reasons). In the interim (during which time a staff member at a western suburbs school was arrested and charged with serious sexual assault about which the school community was not informed) the department was overseen by deputy chief Gino DeGennaro, who resigned this week.

The recent trail of the Education Department is littered with professional corpses. The only one still standing is Jay Weatherill.

This becomes conspicuous amid his gritty determination not to front an Upper House committee that kicked off this morning, examining and re-examining aspects of the Debelle inquiry. The Premier plays the constitutional card, a weak gambit in the circumstances, arguing the committee is a political witchhunt that scorns the authority of a Royal Commission and, if it were to try and compel lower house ministers as witnesses, the separation of powers to boot.

Politically, it merely comes off as an arid legalese response to an issue that is publicly understood through a prism of shock and outrage. Logically, it leaves a gaping flaw that the Government can’t escape. Can they continue to cite Westminster convention to justify shunning a Legislative Council inquiry moved and supported by crossbenchers, when they won’t honour the long-held Westminster convention of ministerial responsibility?

Three senior bureaucrats have jumped or been pushed. Convention should dictate that it is the minister, not the public servants, who take the fall.

In reality, of course, Weatherill and his ministers don’t want to front the new inquiry because they’re terrified of perpetuating an issue that, politically at least, they’ll never win. What they don’t appear to have grasped is that this storm will not pass; as a political issue, child protection is here to stay now. By remaining aloof from the inquiry, the Government merely perpetuates the Opposition’s silly slogan that it has a “casual attitude”.

However falsely, however unfairly, it gives the impression that it doesn’t want to be part of a solution. And it certainly gives the impression that it is simply terrified of what might happen next.

Jay Weatherill says the state’s child protection regime was in systemic crisis a decade ago. It certainly is now. And so is his Government.

Tom Richardson is InDaily’s political commentator and Channel Nine’s political reporter.

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