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If you watched the end of the fascinating ABC series on "Fundamentalism" on the Sunday night and attended a public hearing of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Families SA on the following Monday afternoon, you would have noticed something strange.
The ABC series showed that fundamentalists of all religious persuasion have two common characteristics. The first is that, while they might claim to worship their God, what they really worship is the words of their holy text. In the case of people in the "Bible Belt" of the southern United States it is the 1611 English translation - the "King James" version of the Bible - which is worshiped. Whether it is the Torah, Vedas,Tripitaka, Qur'an, Guru Granth Sahib, Holy Bible, Zhuan Falun, Avesta, or The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the fanatical fundamentalists take a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase or even a few words, regardless of context, and use them to justify a predetermined action or attitude. The second common characteristic is that each believes themselves to be the sole custodians of absolute truth. Nothing unexpected about that, you might think.
However, listening to the officers of Families SA addressing the Select Committee, you would be astonished by the strange similarity. They too were obsessively enamoured of their 'bibles' - the Act, their Procedural Manuals, their Policies and Projects. Similarly, the suggestion that there might have been errors of judgement involved in aspects of Families SA activities seemed not to have been understood, let alone accepted.
Ann Bressington pursued this issue several times, pointing out that it is inconceivable that Families SA could never have made an error, and that there appeared to be no review or follow-up designed to detect and correct any such error. The answer to this and similar questions was to redirect the problem - not that any was admitted - elsewhere. For example, it was stated that Families SA puts forward evidence to the Youth Court to justify serious action such as removal of a child from their parents. We were meant to infer from this that therefore Families SA can assume no blame - it would be the Court that made the judgement. (It could not be that the Families SA evidence was flawed, could it?) In similar vein, reference was made to the Ombudsman who would handle any complaint. Obviously (to you and I) the first thing the Ombudsman would do on receiving any complaint would be to seek information from the alleged offender - in this case Families SA - and we are "back to square one".
The Richard Hillman Foundation was founded in 2002, following the outrageous "Hillman ruling" which stated that the department which intervened in a family situation owed no duty of care to the family and probably no duty of care to any child removed from them. The attitude of Families SA officers at the Select Committee hearing is entirely consistent with that ruling,
So now we have another enquiry - no, the current one is not the first - following a spate of complaints about Families SA mishandling. It would seem obvious that the first recommendation of this Select Committee should be that the Act must be changed so as to require Government officers, both individually and collectively, to exercise a duty of care to the people they are, after all, supposed to serve. That's what "public servant" means, isn't it?
Details about the Parliamentary Select Committee on Families SA are:
In her speech given at the inauguration of the Richard Hillman Foundation in 2002, Matilda Bawden - herself a social worker - said inter alia
Firstly, as a community we accept the gender-feminist mantra - that all males are abusers; three in five women have been sexually abused some time in their life, and some 97% of domestic violence offences are perpetrated by men. With over 90% of Social Work students being female, it is hardly surprising that many are prepared to absorb such doctrines like a sponge; as if preaching to the converted.
With no counter-feminist perspective to balance this equation, new Social Workers are ill-placed for de-programming themselves. This is particularly so in a public sector culture where professional de-skilling is the order of the day and independent thought is rendered impossible if one is not to be the subject of professional suicide or reprisal for challenging the elite.
Perhapa one of the recommendations of the Select Committee might be that the gross gender imbalance and the gender-feminist culture within Families SA be urgently corrected.