Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also welcome opportunity to speak on the motion moved by Senator Hinch today. It is a matter that I know something about, having been the minister responsible for a child protection system for five years or so in the ACT. I think—and I have said this a number of times—it is the hardest portfolio I have ever had to work in as a minister. I had a range of portfolios in my time in the ACT, including Chief Minister and health minister for eight years, but nothing came close to the attention and care that needed to be paid to this area of government service delivery.

Perhaps my comments today will be from that perspective and, whilst I acknowledge that child protection systems right around the country have failed children and young people at a time when they are most in need, there is also an incredible amount of good work that is done in this area. Often these systems have relied on non-government partners to deliver that care and support.

In my time in the portfolio—and that would have spanned from 2004 until 2009 or thereabouts—the funding that went into child protection systems not just in the ACT but right around the country, I would say, more than doubled. The staff provided to child protection certainly more than doubled. The resources going into the non-government system considerably increased. That aligned with changes to the law that introduced mandatory reporting in most systems—legislation which I wholeheartedly support. However, with mandatory reporting came a massive increase in the number of reports—I think in my time it went from something like 2,500 to 12,000 reports a year; it just increased exponentially. Every report had to be investigated, and of course they were triaged from the most serious to those that we did not believe needed immediate care—for example, a report about a baby under the age of 12 months would have to be investigated immediately. There were different parameters around those decisions. But these are really difficult areas—not only processing the reports; visiting the families, assessing the children and making sure that you have a range of options available.

Senator Dastyari mentioned we are heading into Christmas. At Christmas—any time when there is a holiday period, school holidays, public holidays, any time of the year like that—we would see a massive increase in reports to child protection. We would have to run increased staffing over those times so, when most people are at home with their families, a lot of the staff in child protection units across the country are working. They have to, because that is when the reports come in.

Holiday times are often a very difficult time to get emergency placements for kids, because there might not be the options with foster care. A lot of the accommodation options close down. This goes to how difficult it is to make sure you have a system that can respond to not only the demand but also the severity and intensity of the care that is required for children and young people coming into care.

Children who have extra support needs through the trauma that they may have experienced in their background—through disability, through anything; there is no end to the complexities in this area—are often the most difficult to place, because they cannot be put in your standard foster care arrangement or, if they do, it might fail quickly. Then what are the options?

The non-government sector provides a huge amount of back-up for these kids. That is where you will often see the very specialised units, whether they are intensive support units or youth houses, that have high levels of staff for kids for whom there is no other placement for whatever reason. Sometimes they break down. I have certainly read the files of kids who have gone through multiple placements and, for whatever reason and through no fault of their own, those placements have failed. The system itself in that sense has failed them, but it is also incredibly difficult to dream up services and have them operational and successful for many of the children because of the backgrounds they come from.

Running over the top of that you have all the family dynamics. When you remove children and young people against the will of their parents and their families, there is a whole range of very difficult issues. There may be court involvement and other considerations. For example, every child protection system has high numbers of children who come from Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander backgrounds and there is a whole range of sensitivities and processes. Child protection systems make efforts—certainly in the ACT—to ensure that there are kin arrangements for those kids to be placed in and, if there are not, that there are other culturally appropriate supports for the kids coming into care.

When the system fails, what do you do? The system has failed. In my time as a minister, I saw numerous reviews in almost every state and territory in the country because of some failure of the child protection system. There were often a number of reasons. Some of it was around resources. Some of it was around inadequate systems in place to ensure that the kids that needed urgent assessment were given urgent assessment. There were failures of process. There could be an inability to find appropriate placements or kids leave care of their own will and abscond.

The other issue is that states and territories have struggled at times to resolve the difference between laws as they operate across state jurisdictions. For many of these kids, if they are moving from Queensland and coming through New South Wales and maybe stopping in the ACT or going on to Victoria, there can be a failure of legal orders in place in Queensland and not applying in other jurisdictions. There was a fair bit of work being done on that. Also, there are the most severe cases of failure where, say, a child dies. I am certainly aware of cases like that, including in the ACT. How do you respond to those? What sorts of review mechanisms do you put in place to make sure that you are assessing immediately whether there was any failure that led to the child dying and whether reform is needed. The child protection system, like a health system, which relies so much on human decision-making and at times subjective assessment and analysis of a situation, is not perfect because it relies so strongly on human decision-making.

I used to do walk-arounds in that area of the department because it was an incredibly stressful place to work, particularly around Christmas and holiday times when families are stressed and under pressure. We would see family breakdown, domestic violence and other problems occurring in the family unit and a significant number of children would come into care. I saw firsthand the work that went on in those workplaces. I am not sure it is a job that I could do, I have to say: seeing those reports coming in; making snap decisions about whether resources need to be deployed immediately; whether it is something that could wait a few hours or whether it is something that needs to be dealt with tomorrow or, indeed, in a week's time. When those decisions might not be right, how does that affect the workforce? They particularly feel it when there are high-profile cases and there are questions, quite rightly. I am not making any point here that people should not be raising questions and making sure that the publicly funded child protection system is robust, strong, open and transparent, and open to review, but I am saying that this is an area in particular where the finger that blames is very quick to be pulled out. People make decisions about who went wrong—in my experience, usually the government—and how that affects the workforce.

We had so many reports coming in and a complete inability to recruit staff in this area because of the nature of the work—because there is a high burnout rate and people often cannot do it for a long periods of time. They need to be highly skilled and often have a social work degree or a psychology degree. We simply could not attract staff to the positions. At one point we had 25 per cent of positions unfilled against a backdrop of a massive increase in the number of reports and a commensurate increase in the number of kids coming into care, to the point that we had to go overseas. We sent people over to Ireland to recruit about 50 social workers from Ireland to come and staff our child protection system, and that was because of a national shortage. To some degree now, there is a drain on the international workforce to get people in place to do these jobs. I have to say that, from my experience, the people who have worked in these positions are, for the large part, extraordinary. We should remember that at times the work they do is extremely difficult. As I said, I would place it up there with probably the most difficult jobs for a public servant. It would be right up there amongst the top. They quite often have the finger pointed at them very quickly. It is rare—when those decisions go right, decisions are taken and kids' lives are saved or they are put on a more supportive path—that the work is acknowledged. That is because for the large part, unless these cases are under public review through a coronial process or some sort of bureaucratic review that is then released, this information is often not available because of privacy considerations.

I do not think child protection systems, regardless of how well-resourced they are and regardless of having the right staff in place, will ever be perfect, because of the nature of the work being done in these systems. I too would have concern about the privatisation of child protection, definitely, but I think the balance has to be found between government and the non-government sector working together through some sort of contractual arrangement. Private partnerships and private arrangements funded by the public sector have been in place for some time because the public sector simply cannot deliver the services that are required for many of these children.

I know that many of the partnerships we had here in the ACT were with community service providers. They were often a church based organisation or a youth based organisation that was a not-for-profit organisation. There were times when we would have to go beyond those organisations. That was often for the most difficult kids. There are examples where you have to design a service around a child or family because their needs are so difficult that they will not fit into a traditional service. There are certainly examples where separate houses have been set up for kids or sibling groups, perhaps without their parents, where staff are put in place to support those kids. That is funded almost directly through one organisation that has the ability to deliver that service. In those situations, again, the service arrangements quite often break down—usually on a Friday afternoon!—and you have to work out what you are going to do to keep the care wrapped around those kids.

I accept that these systems are not perfect. I accept that these systems have failed children at times and children have suffered injury or death because the right decisions were not made. But I would also put in a little plug for the departments themselves in saying that there needs to be some balance here. These people go to work every day and often get the most horrific cases referred to them for assessment. Some of the staff will not last very long. Others will require ongoing counselling and support. Some will not return to work after some of the things that they have witnessed. But all of them—every single person I have met who has worked in child protection—always have the best interests of the child front and centre. That is what they are trained to do. That is the work they do. Whether the systems allow them to deliver that and whether their judgement has been right a hundred per cent of the time are separate matters. I would just like to put some balance in and say that this is an extremely difficult area.

There is no perfect solution, believe me; otherwise there would not have been the number of reviews that have been conducted. And every review that is conducted in one state is read and copied and assessed by every other state, because we are all looking for what the secret is, what the answer is, to make sure that we keep our most vulnerable children safe from their family, from their peers or from other influences, and there is not a single, perfect solution.

This is an area where I think the Commonwealth and the states and territories could work more closely together. It is largely seen by the Commonwealth as a matter for the states. It is very easy, when you are in a level of government that does not have responsibility, to say you are not going near any other level because you do not want to pick up anything more than you are already responsible for—particularly in areas where the growth in funding requirements is on par with the growth that we have seen in health departments. It is a rapidly increasing area of expenditure, it is a very difficult area to deliver services in, but it is an area where greater cooperation could occur between the different levels of government, and certainly where the Commonwealth, in the interests of children nationally, could take more interest and support the work being done by the states and territories.

I acknowledge Senator Hinch's interest in this area. It is great that there is a champion here for children and vulnerable children—another one in this chamber; I know that there are many senators who feel strongly about this area. But I would also put on the record my plug for the work that is being done by the states and territories to keep our children safe.