I didn't spend 40 hours in labour to deliver my kids straight to predators

And when they wanted to do the 97 activities that modern children seem to love to do, that meant two of us having to be in three different places at the same time.

Why did we need to be there? Because my precious angels (who grew into bloody bossy adults) needed care and supervision - and I wasn't going to outsource that to people I didn't know.

The rate of child abuse in this country is terrifying - and we don't even have the whole picture. The prospect terrified me then and it terrifies me now, as a doting grandma. Swear to god, did you read the story about the poor girl abused by the person who was meant to care for her?

Who do you trust? Can you trust any organisation?

Now, if ever anything has put me off an organisation with care and responsibilities for chlidren, it's the kind of behaviour that tries to avoid that very responsibility. This time it is Scouts ACT.

It claimed this week that the amendment to the Civil Law Wrongs Act proposed by ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury would have a chilling effect.

Well yes, I sincerely hope that's right. Anything that has a chilling effect on child abusers in this country is welcome. And let me remind you that one of the ACT's most notorious convicted paedophiles, Aaron James Holliday, was a former trainee Scouts leader. Nice that in 2018, Scouts Australia apologised to children abused under its care. But apologies are not enough.

We urgently need to take on child abuse - and Rattenbury's amendments will at least make children safer in the ACT.

I'm not going to spend 40 hours in labour to deliver my kid into the hands of an abuser. All weapons necessary to fight this scourge, whether it's during childcare, school time or play time.

Of course, the leaders at Scouts ACT were not thinking about making children safer. They weren't thinking of the children. They were thinking of their own organisation. In its submission, it said volunteer-based organisations are already under pressure to recruit and retain volunteers.

"If participation becomes contingent on time-consuming compliance processes, especially for low-risk, incidental involvement, many people will simply choose not to help. Individuals may [also] be deterred by perceived legal risks."

Excellent. Anything to act as a deterrent for predators. Love that for us.

Strangely enough, though, Scouts Australia participated in new research on what makes volunteers tick. The Scouts know that compliance is not a big problem. Alex Luksyte, associate professor in the business school at the University of Western Australia, and colleagues interviewed thousands of scouting volunteers in WA. And did she discover that more "compliance", more "red tape" would make people leave?

It's pretty hard to predict what will happen when people volunteer - but the compliance, the red tape, that was way down the list. There are, she says, seven reasons why people leave volunteering.

Some of them I've experienced myself - you sign up to manage a sporting team or part of a band and suddenly your work changes or your shifts change or you have multiple competing priorities with kids all over the place. People, it is not possible to wrangle hockey practice on one side of the city and flute choir on the other.

So yes, the biggest reasons people leave are personal commitments and circumstances. These folks love volunteering and want to give back to the community, says Lutsyke, but they can't manage everything, everywhere, all at once.

Next biggest reason: when we volunteer, we think we can compartmentalise, manage the demands. But mostly organisations who use volunteers make high demands on their people but have low resources to support those very people. Lutsyke says that on average, the people she and her team interviewed volunteered seven hours a week.

"That's a lot of work for something you are not paid for," she says.

Then volunteers leave because they feel a lack of inclusion within their chosen organisation - and that's separate to conflicts within the organisation or feeling left out. Poor leadership made the list. Then there's feeling like you don't really fit into the organisation - and poor communication including red tape and bureaucracy. Guessing that's where the 'compliance' problem arises. But as Lutsyke says: "That's not the major reason people leave." Of course it's not. Out of the seven reasons, it's right at the bottom.

Want to know why Rattenbury moved this amendment? In November last year, the High Court found a Catholic Church diocese could not be held vicariously liable for a priest's alleged sexual abuse of a child because the church did not directly employ him. Rattenbury's proposed amendment would, blessedly, expand the definition of employee to include someone akin to an employee. That would include office holders, owners, volunteers, contractors, priests and ministers. As Lanie Tindale explained yesterday, "The amendment would be retroactive, meaning victim-survivors of historical sexual abuse could take up legal action."

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Earlier this year, the ACT government proposed an $11 charge on working with vulnerable people (WWVP) cards. It was baffling.

As Mainul Haique wrote at the time, it is an "outrageous and unjust penalty on those who give so much to keep our community strong". Then the government added fuel to fire by suggesting that the new cost would be modest. There's always someone with a sense of humour in government with no discernible understanding of what our lives are like. What would politicians know about the impacts on people's budgets?

That proposal got dumped - because managing our volunteering commitments shouldn't cost us money. And this proposal, this amendment, must be passed because managing the safety of our children should never cost us their innocence.