Throughout 1990, Children Australia has extended an invitation to State Shadow Ministers to express their views and policies in regard to the interests of children.

Their responses tend to indicate some difficulty in responding to demands such as this in the absence of many support resources. It is part of the spirit of Children Australia and the NCBA to provide a forum for the sharing of ideas and information which might help leaders and policy makers to complete their tasks with the interests of children high on the agenda.

From a national perspective, making contact with state and territory shadow ministers was sometimes difficult and there was some turnover in the course of the year among the particular parliamentarians performing these roles. Nevertheless, Shadow Ministers concerned with the interests of children at state and territory levels in December 1990 are listed below. Contributions received to date, including those received earlier in the year, are presented for the information of readers. Any further contributions will be published in a later Issue.

No other group of children in Australian society stands in greater judgement of the ability and willingness of this society to deal with their problems than aboriginal children.

The challenge that faces all of us in the nineties, including aboriginal community-controlled organisations like SNAICC, is whether we are going to be able to break the cycle of disadvantage, poverty and racism that keeps our children and our community at the very bottom of this society.

The 20th century history of Australia will be seen as the millennium of a great expansion of wealth in Australia. It will be regarded as a period of gigantic advances in science and productive technology. It will also - if historians record accurately - show the plight of aboriginal people as the single glaring blight on the record of this country.

Writing about the French Revolution, Edmund Burke suggested that the state that cannot change will not survive. As I write this, at the end of 1989, it is evident that for many people the world is changing at a great pace, and that some states may not survive. There can be no doubt that 1989 will appear in history books as a year to be remembered, a year to be weighed alongside 1789, 1914, 1939 and so on. There is a sense that we are living through a momentous time in history. For those of us too young to remember 1939 or 1945, let alone 1914, this is the first experience of enormous upheaval. The map of Europe, East and West, appears to be changing every day.

With the established order, in Eastern Europe at least, disintegrating so rapidly, writing anything is a risky business, particularly for a journal such as Australian Child and Family Welfare where lead times are long and labour is voluntary. Much of what is written at the end of 1989 may appear irrelevant at best, in 1990.

In the last fifteen years a great deal of material has been published on child sexual abuse. All violence within the home retains a significant element of secrecy, but child sexual abuse has remained a shadowy secret longer than other forms of intra-familial assault. The battle to draw attention to physical abuse of children within the family was hard fought but controversy over child sexual abuse retains its intensity.

There are disagreements over the scale of the problem (Glaser and Frosh, 1988; Search. 1988) and the research findings concerning the effects of child sexual abuse vary ‘wildly’ (O'Hagan, 1989:53). Some myths about the problem however, have been successfully challenged. The stranger is no longer seen as the main danger and it is recognised that most perpetrators are members of the victim's immediate or extended family or known to the victim (Goddard, 1988).

This paper provides a brief account of a group program developed by Alys Key Family Care for parents and pre-school children where the growth of a sound, nurturing relationship has been significantly impaired. HUGS is an acronym for “Happiness, Understanding, Giving and Sharing”. The program has the overall aim of fostering positive interaction, enjoyment and the development of a reciprocal caring, confident bond between parents and children. The group has been evolving since 1987, with many refinements in its conceptualisation along the way. The agency is currently producing a manual which describes in detail the rationale and operation of the program, pilot evaluations, HUGS activities and styles of intervention and support which seem particularly effective within the group.

Seven days after he had attempted to gouge out his own eye with a paintbrush, 29 year old Malcolm Charles Smith, died in Sydney's Prince Henry's Hospital on January 5th 1989. Apart from the unusual circumstances of Malcolm's tragic death, inadvertently caused by his own actions, everything about his brief life since 1965 had been a complete denial of his existence as a human being and an aboriginal child.

The issue of surrogacy has attracted spirited and concerned public and professional debate. For some commentators even the term itself is considered a misnomer. In the midst of forceful opposition from feminists, churches, and groups concerned with preserving the “traditional family”, together with powerful support from sections of the medical establishment, certain academics and other high profile individuals, the future of surrogacy in Australia is uncertain. What is certain is that surrogacy challenges people's ideas about acceptable means of family formation both on a personal moral level and from the broader perspective of public policy.

Since the Australian Institute of Family Studies was established in 1980, we have kept in mind two slogans about family links and supports: ‘Every individual has a family’; and ‘The family does not stop at the front door’. What we meant was that family policy cannot be based solely on a static image of parents and children living together under the one roof.

Most families start off as a couple, then go through a stage of parents and children living in one household. But once the children have grown and gone, does the couple no longer have a family? If the parents separate or divorce, do the children not have any family? When a partner dies or the children are grown, the family still exists, though the patterns of interaction have changed. Thus family policy has to address the nature of these interactions, across households and across time.

The state government Department for Family and Community Services (formerly DCW) in South Australia is currently seeking to clarify and where necessary change policy in the area of guardianship, long term legal status and related issues. To facilitate this aim in the context of a broader consultation process, a discussion paper was prepared by the author in his role of Chief Policy Officer of DCW in October 1989. The full paper covers a range of issues bearing on the department's role in relation to children and their families where there is a possibility of state care being ordered.

In my first decade with the Brotherhood in the 60's, the poverty of older people was a central concern. The Henderson Poverty Inquiry's recommendation that the age pension be indexed has led to significant improvements and protection for retired people. But during the 1970's and 80's families with children became the group most vulnerable to poverty. I will refer to government action on child poverty later, but for our part, concern about large numbers of children growing up in poverty has prompted the Brotherhood of St. Laurence and Councils of Social Service to run a national awareness and action campaign: Promise the Children.