The duty of care

Yes, they’re sweet, apple-cheeked things for the most part, sources of pride and satisfaction as they grow from moppets to adulthood. But the fact remains that children, for all the joy they bestow, can also be very annoying, often disrupting well-laid plans and causing considerable inconvenience. This may be why Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs, who cares so very much about babes behind wire, quite specifically included (on page 175) this quote in regard to parental obligation from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in her just-published The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention, 2014:

18(1) …Parents or, as the case may be, legal guardians, have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of the child. The best interests of the child will be their basic concern.

There is another of Triggs’ pronouncements on child-rearing that might also be of interest. It was tucked away at the tail end of a long and adulatory SMH profile of the $300,000-a-year commissioner, who discussed one of her own three children:

“Victoria was as severely retarded as anyone who is still alive can be,” Triggs says. “Her condition usually results in the death of the baby before or shortly after birth. In fact, the doctors kept saying, ‘Just leave her in the corner and she’ll die.’ So, it sounds terrible, but I’d look at Victoria and think, ‘Well, you’re going to die, so I’m not going to invest too much in you.’ But she didn’t die. She had this inner rod of determination, and she simply refused to die.”

At about six months of age, Triggs and Clark took Victoria home, and, with the help of the Uniting Church, found a family who took over her primary care. (Victoria died eight years ago, at the age of 21.) When I ask Triggs if this arrangement bothered her, she says:

“Yes, because you have child and you expect to look after her. But in the end I simply made the judgement that I would rather put my time into my other children and family, because I also never believed she would live to that age.”

Triggs’ report, now getting rave reviews in the Fairfax Press and ABC, can be read in full via the link below.

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