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  • 5 hours ago
‘Morally bankrupt’, that is how CLP backbencher Clinton Howe described some of the evidence heard at last month’s public inquiry into proposed child protection reforms. With the bill sent to return to parliament for the debate next week, virtually unchanged, the Member for Drysdale has doubled down on those remarks in an interview with the ABC, spelling out his passion for the reforms, and the reasons why they are needed.

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00:02A government member of the Legislative Scrutiny Committee
00:05unshackled after a child protection inquiry.
00:09That moral compass is really important to me
00:13and as a member of parliament, yeah, I want to defend it
00:18and I want to defend our children.
00:19The former residential care youth worker claiming moral bankruptcy
00:24on the part of some opposing the government's reforms.
00:27Some of these kind of debates around culture being protection
00:34and protection being culture I think has taken the child out of the centre.
00:39While the bill received some support including from foster carers,
00:43most witnesses opposed with tears shed over the impact on kids removed from culture
00:50and an argument made that safety already is the paramount consideration under current laws.
00:56It's not working and that's what I'd say.
00:59It doesn't actually state that the safety of the child is paramount.
01:04Clinton Howe also backing in the proposed two-year limit on reunification efforts,
01:10pointing to the case of a child taken into foster care at age zero
01:14before being reunified five years later.
01:17So that child's been taken out of the home that they've only ever known
01:21and then placed in a community where abuse has then occurred in the reunification attempt
01:26and has then been brought back to their family here in town.
01:31The case study hitting home.
01:34That individual was the same age as one of my daughters
01:37and to think her just being pulled out of our home,
01:41suffering abuse and then being brought back
01:43and then for a reunification attempt to happen five years later at ten
01:47for it to be failed again.
01:49And I think that is the system creating a very unfair situation for the child.
01:57The parliament will likely pass the bill due to the government's majority
02:01when it returns next week.
02:08One minute to remember what they were saying.
02:08Let's see.
02:09Menal's actions have been violated.
02:09That's the reason why they were told by the family
02:09the child dog was apparently possessed.
02:10He was sometimes in a lonely group of people with people with a child
02:10and he was the only ones in the family that took care of their children
02:10and he was marginalized by the child.
02:11This is why.
02:11The child's child's wife is not a child alone.
02:12He was the child's wife,
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