The ACT Legislative Assembly has passed new child protection laws to ensure one of the recommendations of the Glanfield Inquiry is fully implemented, more than two years after the death of a Canberra boy that triggered the inquiry.
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The amendments will ensure child protection workers would be able to officially consider taking a child into care without parental consent, in a formal care and protection appraisal, where protection authorities are concerned the child is at risk of abuse or neglect.
That measure was one of the key recommendations of the Glanfield Inquiry, a systemic review of the ACT's child protection system completed in the wake of the horrific murder of nine-year-old Jacka boy, Bradyn Dillon, in February 2016.
His father, Graham Dillon, was last month sentenced to a total of 41 years in jail for the murder and lengthy associated abuse he inflicted on Bradyn over more than a year before his death, which Supreme Court Justice John Burns said could be described as torture.
The Glanfield Inquiry was one of three damning reports about the territory's child protection system released in 2016 in the wake of Bradyn's death, the recommendations of which the government is still responding to.
While the legislation passed will ensure child protection authorities can complete care and protection appraisals in the absence of parental consent in such cases, it does not create new powers in that regard, rather clarifies the existing measures authorities have.
The measure also responds to a report from the Coordinator-General for Family Safety in February and a meeting of the territory's domestic violence prevention council in April, both of which highlighted the need for a greater focus on addressing the long-term impacts of family violence on children.
The amendments passed on Wednesday will also clarify that decisions about the management of specific children in care can be sub-delegated from the Community Services Directorate's Director-General to contracted staff actually managing the cases.
That change was originally meant to have been achieved by previous legislative amendments, to enact the government's 2015 A Step Up for Our Kids strategy, but the government realised after those changes were made they were not consistent with the Legislation Act 2001.
The legislation passed on Tuesday also inserts new measures to ensure child protection authorities have the ability to revoke the authorisation of foster or residential case services, and for authorisation holders to apply for merits review of such revocations, correcting another oversight in the previous amendments.
But the bill has not responded to repeated calls from community members and local politicians including Opposition children's spokeswoman Elizabeth Kikkert, to enshrine a mechanism to allow for independent, external reviews of actual decisions related to individual children in territory care.
That issue was also one of the recommendations of the Glanfield inquiry, which the government has not yet implemented.
Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith has previously told the Assembly that issue was being considered as part of a lengthy, wider review of the child protection system that has been underway for several months.
