00:01The Independent Web Review was sparked by the alleged murder of Kumunjai Little Baby in April this year,
00:08which shook not just the town of Alice Springs in Central Australia, but sent ripples across the country.
00:14The girl was staying with her mother at Old Times or Ilparinya Town Camp, which is just behind me here.
00:19It's a small Aboriginal community on the outskirts of Alice Springs when she went missing.
00:25And then five days later, she was found deceased in the Tod River bed about five kilometres south of the
00:31town camp.
00:3247-year-old Jefferson Lewis has been charged with her alleged murder, but it is understood he was not known
00:37to her family.
00:39A week later, reports emerged in the media that the five-year-old had been subject to multiple child protection
00:44notifications prior to her disappearance.
00:46And soon after, the NT Child Protection Minister, Robin Kyle, announced that she was standing down three child protection workers.
00:52However, we understand two have since been reinstated.
00:55In May, Ms Carl announced this independent review to investigate how Kumunjai Little Baby came into contact with the child
01:03protection system and how it may have failed her.
01:06The review was led by former New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb and senior NT public servant Greg Shanahan.
01:13However, critics, including the National Commissioner for Indigenous Children, have said they weren't the right pair to lead the review.
01:18They lacked the expertise to lead the charge.
01:21The report reviewed practice frameworks, risk assessments and integration of domestic violence reporting, information sharing across agencies, workforce capability and
01:31sustainability, organisational structure and leadership response and response timeliness.
01:37How damning were the findings and what specifically did it uncover?
01:43The report calls for a system-wide reset of child protection in the Northern Territory, making 45 recommendations, all of
01:50which have been accepted by the Northern Territory Government.
01:53It found the little girl's death could not be considered an individual case management failure, but rather the result of
01:59broader and interconnected shortcomings across the child protection system.
02:03The report shows a long history of violence in the five-year-old's family and identifies a number of issues
02:09with the Department of Children and Families responses to the matter.
02:13Rather shockingly, it found Kumunjai Little Baby had been known to the department before she was born.
02:18There were 14 notifications about the girl's exposure to violence, many of which involved her father.
02:23The review also found there was a lack of due diligence from the department around family members who were relied
02:29on to protect her mother and sibling.
02:31Responses to notifications were slow as well.
02:35One notification from August 2022 about an exposure to domestic violence, a breach of the domestic violence order and assault
02:41and concern about the child's involvement was not closed until March the next year.
02:46The signs of safety framework was also scrutinised.
02:49It uses a scaling system to judge a child's safety.
02:52It was implemented in 2019, and her safety was scored twice, twice scored as low as 2 out of 10,
03:01and the framework was never evaluated.
03:04It also found information wasn't shared well between agencies, while frontline workers were overstretched with rising demands and were unsupported.
03:14The report found those problems could not be solved by asking workers to go faster, but that they needed more
03:20leadership, oversight and accountability.
03:22The report found that there is no longer going to be a family member, based on their existing business community.
