"Best interests" or

"safe and protected from harm"?

There is legislation before our state parliament at present which may fail because there is no agreement on whether it should say that a decision should be in the "best interests" of a child or whether it should say that a decision should "keep the child safe and protected from harm". 

Legislation is notoriously difficult to get right. Writing it is not a straightforward thing. "Interpreting" legislation is a minefield. The inclusion or exclusion of a word or the use of one word or another or the use of a comma can change everything. Anyone who doubts that things can get twisted in court only needs to look at the way our Constitution has been used and abused since 1901.   

So do the words to be used in this legislation matter? Yes, they do. 

My gut feeling would be to go with "best interests" because it is in their best interests to keep children safe and protected from harm. It is also my gut feeling that the legislation will not do that whichever way it is written or not written or, as threatened, abandoned. There will still be the policy of keeping children and parents, particularly children and mothers, together. 

Recently there were reports of a drug using mother who had left her child in the same nappy for five days. She was taken into court, given a slap on the wrist and her children will be back with her and "supports" put in place. It is not the first time the welfare services have been involved and it will not be the last. Is this situation really in the "best interests" of the children concerned? Are we really keeping them "safe and protected from harm"? 

Of course we are not doing any such thing. We are doing it because there is a belief that we should keep mother and child together even when the mother displays no desire to care for the child. It is not keeping a child safe and protected from harm. It is also seen as the easy way out, perhaps even the cheapest way out until the neglected child becomes another sort of problem. 

Acting in the "best interests" of the child does not always occur now. Failing to put that into the legislation is only going to cause more harm.