Bartlett's Blog

It was 20 years ago today. On 20 November 1989, the international Convention on the Rights of the Child (CROC) was formally adopted.  According http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/11/18/us-ratify-children-s-treaty?tr=y&auid=5614841 to Human Rights Watch, the Convention became “the most widely and rapidly ratified human rights treaty in history.  Twenty years on, only two countries have failed to ratify the Convention – Somalia and the USA. In the USA, Presidential action to ratify an international treaty ...

Following up on my previous pieces here on the controversies in Queensland surrounding Dennis Ferguson,  Jeremy Gans at Charterblog writes about the possible impact of a new piece of legislation that allows for a judge-only trial in cases where pre-trial publicity may effect jury deliberations.

I was interested to read that Queensland Liberal Senator Sue Boyce has called for special schools to be abolished and children with disabilities integrated into mainstream schools

There is an excellent article by Joe Tucci & Chris Goddard, examining the federal government’s discussion paper on the establishment a national framework for protecting children against abuse and neglect. It is a welcome thing that we are finally getting some national leadership on this issue. However, the article points out that the discussion paper focuses mostly on adults and families, giving little specific attention to the rights and voices ...

The Dennis Ferguson issue continues to garner a lot of media in Queensland. As Paul Norton notes in a comment on a previous thread, the Courier-Mail has been running strongly on whether or a not a form of Megan’s Law – where the community is notified when a sex offender is living in their region – should be adopted. This is the sort of action that might make parents feel ...

The revulsion felt toward child sex offenders is understandable. Indeed, it would be a worrying thing if we didn’t feel such revulsion. But the current vigilante fervour towards a now notorious convicted paedophile, Dennis Ferguson, who is lawfully living in south-east Queensland is ill-directed. This guy was chased out of the small town of Miles, north and a bit inland from Brisbane. He was moved to an area just south ...

The Senate Committee report into the sexualisation of children was tabled last week. It doesn’t seem to have pleased some of the children’s advocacy groups, or Family First for that matter. Clive Hamilton, who has campaigned on the issue for some time, is also pretty peeved, if his piece in Crikey is anything to go by – although I have to say I found his ‘pretend advertising industry memo’ a ...

Pretty much everything I did this week could have had a 'last time' label attached to it - last Party Room meeting, last Committee meeting, last Whips meeting, etc. I've avoided recording all of those, as it quickly gets rather tiresome. However, I thought I'd record the last Democrat question ever asked in the Senate. Partly because of that historic significance, but also because I think it is and ...

The controversy surrounding the Bill Henson photographs coincided almost precisely with when this blog was offline. There has been extensive and often very interesting debate on a range of blogs, which I found more stimulating than most of what occurred in the mainstream media, which seemed to mostly reflect the extremes of the debate without much acknowledgement or engagement with the complexities of the issues raised. I had a ...

Last week, Ted Mullighan, a former Supreme Court Judge in South Australia, produced a report containing over 50 recommendations and detailing his findings from a three year long inquiry which heard evidence from hundreds of children who had been subjected to sexual abuse. Naturally, we all say how terrible this is. But as he told a National Family Law conference in Adelaide, Australians actually rate petrol prices a far bigger problem than ...

I wrote a post back in 2006 about some of the concerns surrounding what is perceived to be the growing sexualisation in the portrayal of children in advertising and elsewhere in the media.  The issue has now been sent to the Senate’s Environment, Communications and the Arts Committee for an inquiry, which is due to report by 23 June, 2008. I’m Deputy Chair of this Committee, but I’m also involved ...

As mentioned here, I spent most of last week in Darwin and Alice Springs, meeting with and listening to people about their views on the federal government’s intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. I had eleven formal meetings, plus two informal talks with people over dinner. This involved around 70 people in total. The groups included health organisations, child and family organisations, land councils, health researchers and ...

Yesterday marked one month since the Prime Minister declared there was “a national emergency in relation to the abuse of children in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory,” in response to the first sentence of the first recommendation of the Little Children are Sacred report. At the time, it appeared the federal government was ignoring the second sentence of that recommendation (not to mention most of the following 96 ...

I have been one of many people, black and white, who have been calling on governments for a long time to make child abuse and Indigenous issues major, national priorities. As was noted in the Foreward of the recent Northern Territory Report on the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, it was via my motion that the Senate passed an all-party resolution last year supporting a national ...

Just before parliament rose for a six week break, the Prime Minister announced a major series of proposals to take control of Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory, and significant aspects of their lives, as part of responding to the latest report on sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory – a topic I spoke on in the Senate earlier this week. Given that the report itself ...

There’s been a significant development in New Zealand, with their Parliament passing a law which has been described as making it illegal for parents to smack their children. According to a report on the ABC website, New Zealand now “joins only a handful of European nations to legislate against the use of unreasonable force in disciplining children,” (although according to this media release from last year by the ...

I’ve been fairly busy the last few days on various activities which have kept me away from a computer, so I haven’t been able to post anything on this site. Here’s a quick snapshot of some of the things I’ve been working on in recent days – I might expand on some of them in future posts.

A few months ago I wrote a piece on a discussion paper put out by The Australia Institue which raised the issue of the sexualising of children in advertising and marketing - a concern which I believe definitely merits debate. The major Australian retailer David Jones was named as one of those who engaged in this practice. It has now been reported that David Jones is now suing ...

The Australia Institute has just issued a report provocatively titled Corporate Paedophilia (see summary here). It examines concerns with the early sexualisation of children, particularly young girls, and the role of corporate Australia in supporting and promoting this through marketing. Emma Rush, who co-authored the report, also touches on aspects such as sales and peer pressure in a piece in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. The various commercial outlets criticised in ...

Reading some of the reports of the latest massive failures by state agencies responsible for child protection is very distressing. See these media articles for examples: "Why won't you protect the children, Premier?" in the West Australian "Children in protective care beaten, starved" in The Australian "Child abuse, neglect at critical level" by AAP (through SMH website) I know this is an area where very fraught judgements have to be made, and ...