Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Pursuant to order, I present the report of the Community Affairs References Committee on out-of-home care, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I move:

That the Senate take note of this report.

This report is a very comprehensive report on the committee's inquiry into out-of-home care. We make 39 recommendations, which I will come back to shortly, on areas that need improvement in out-of-home care.

In 2013, the first report to the Australian parliament by the National Children's Commissioner highlighted serious concerns about Australia's out-of-home care system, particularly with the significant increase in the number of children placed in out-of-home care, including disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. This committee inquiry certainly found that to be evident.

We also found the numbers going into out-of-home care very significantly troubling. There were, at 30 June 2014, 43,009 children in out-of-home care. What we found was that, over the past 15 years, the number of children and young people entering and remaining in statutory out-of-home care has more than doubled, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are almost 10 times more likely to be placed in out-of-home care than their peers. This is significantly troubling to the committee.

I would like to quote from Associate Professor Mendes, who gave evidence to the committee. He said:

If we as a community are going to give our government the power to coercively intervene in families where alleged significant abuse or neglect has occurred, then our government has both the moral and legal obligation to devote sufficient resources to ensure that the outcomes for those children are far better than if they had remained with their family of origin.

The committee recognises that parents have a responsibility to provide nurturing homes for their children, safe from abuse and neglect. The committee is, however, deeply concerned by the increasing number of children entering and remaining longer in out-of-home care. The committee recognises in our report that there are significant challenges facing Australia's out-of-home care system and that addressing these issues means addressing a range of complex and interrelated social issues linked to social disadvantage, including family violence, drug and alcohol abuse and mental health services.

We find that there are certain systemic factors that contribute to the high number of children entering and remaining in out-of-home care. In particular, the lack of family support services means there is limited scope for at-risk parents to get the support they need to build safe and resilient families for their children. The lack of available supports and understanding of the specific needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and families with disabilities also contributes to an overrepresentation of these groups in out-of-home care.

Australia currently has in place a National Framework for Protecting Australia's Children. It started in 2009 and goes through to 2020. The committee is greatly disturbed by the fact that we have yet to see the outcomes from the significant work that has gone into the establishment of this framework. There is a third action plan to be developed by the states, territories and Commonwealth for the implementation of the national framework, and many of our recommendations go to the fact that this action plan is being developed, and we make a series of recommendations for attention in the action plan.

When we are talking about the number of Aboriginal children in care, Aboriginal children make up less than five per cent of our population yet across Australia they make up 35 per cent of the total number of children in care. In the Northern Territory and in my home state of Western Australia this is far higher. In WA this is just over 50 per cent, and in the Northern Territory it is even higher than that.

The cost of the abuse and neglect of children, when you take into account the cost of out-of-home care, has been calculated as $6 billion. The cost of out-of-home care itself is $2.2 billion for the 2013-14 financial year. Many witnesses said that clearly we should investing those resources up-front in supporting families, before children come to the point of having to enter out-of-home care. Witnesses talked to the inquiry of a system in crisis, broken and crisis-driven. They talked about a number of issues, and I will very quickly touch on them because I want to leave time for the rest of the committee members to comment.

The issues that we address in our recommendations address the need for data—how could community affairs ever have a report without talking about the issues around making sure we have good datasets? We talk about the need for independent child commissioners and guardians. We talk about a process for complaints for young people. We talk particularly about the need for the voices of young people in decision making for out-of-home care. We talk about the need for addressing the issues around transition when young people are leaving out-of-home care.

An important point—and it relates directly to that—is that the evidence suggests, from what we heard in the committee, that young people that have been in out-of-home care are having poorer life outcomes than children that have not been in out-of-home care. This also directly relates to transition age. Young people in out-of-home care are expected to leave their place of care at the age of 18. Not all of the evidence but most of the evidence pointed out that that was far too young, so we talk about the issues of transition and also suggest that states and territories should consider a transition age of at least 21.

We made some recommendations specifically aimed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people with disability, some recommendations about permanency planning and about documentation. There are issues even around people coming into out-of-home care and young people being able to access documentation. We talk about better health outcomes, better education outcomes—all of which are poorer for those living in out-of-home care. The clear messages that I took from this inquiry were the importance of listening to the voice of young people and including them in decision making, and the importance of supporting parents who are at risk of losing their children and making sure their voices are heard in this process.

Before I conclude my comments, I would like to thank all of the witnesses who provided written submissions and who gave oral evidence to this inquiry. In many instances, it was pretty tough going. I particularly want to thank the young people who appeared before our committee. I think it was very courageous of them to come to the committee and tell us their accounts of their lives in out-of-home care.

I would also like to express the committee's thanks to the secretariat, who provided so much support for this inquiry. We had a lot of submissions and a lot of evidence and the secretariat provided the committee with an excellent report and with excellent support.

I would like to thank the committee members of the Community Affairs References Committee. We get tough inquiries and I think that that we provide here a set of recommendations that will help address some of the issues that we talked about in this inquiry. There are 39 recommendations. I urge Senators and the government to review those recommendations.

Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am really grateful for the opportunity to speak on this issue. I think it is an issue of absolute critical importance. No-one can look at this area and not be frustrated and moved by the complexity and the size of this problem. There are no easy answers in this report. It does not pretend that there are any easy answers. It was a unanimous report, even if there were bits and pieces that we differed over. The broad thrust of the report, I think, is very good and lays out a whole range of really important recommendations. I commend the report to the Senate.

I want to come to an area of difference, where coalition senators drew some different conclusions from the evidence that we had. Before I do that, I would reinforce that some great work went into it. I thank very much all of the witnesses, all those who made themselves available, the experts, the young people we heard from, people caring for people. There was some outstanding evidence so I thank you for that.

I also wanted to make a brief note of some of the evidence of Greg Nicolau, from the Australian Childhood Trauma Group. Residential care is often where some of the kids who have done it toughest end up. It is often the kids who have been through many sets of foster carers who end up in these residential care group homes, which are managed by non-government organisations in most cases. Mr Nicolau raised some issues about some of these residences. We had pictures of residences presented to the committee, the standards which I thought were concerning. I hope that they do not represent the broader picture here. It is difficult for us to know. But certainly what was presented was concerning.

I note Mr Nicolau's suggestion of the best model as he sees it is the Jasper Mountain Centre in the United States. He said it provided the best example of therapeutic residential care in the world. He explained that under this model, children are sent away from the home in which they have been abused and live in a large residence on the top of a mountain. It provides an intensive residential treatment program with a therapeutic school, a short-term residential centre, a treatment foster care program, a community based wraparound program and a crisis response services. This facility offers a combination of traditional psychological and psychiatric interventions with innovations in treating abused and emotionally disturbed children. I think it is worth getting that on the record. I think that is something that governments need to look at.

But where coalition senators and I took a slightly different view, having looked at the evidence, was on the issue of adoption and the place of adoption in the whole space. I think that the rates of adoption in this country are simply unacceptable when we look at the issues that we are dealing with and when we look at the numbers of children who are being taken from their parents, who are in many cases having long-term orders and who in many cases find themselves going from foster carer to foster carer. We heard evidence about that. This is something that I believe needs to change.

Senator Lindgren and I have made some additional comments in addition to the report. We believe that this is something we have to take another look at as a nation. This is something that we believe we have to do better on as a nation. It is worth going through some of the stats in relation to this. We looked at the 2012-13 figures, which were the most comprehensive and up-to-date. In the year 2012-13, 27,924 children had been in care home out-of-home care for two years or more. Most of those are on long-term orders until they are 18, sometimes from six months, from one year, from 18 months, from two years to 18. We have this situation where tens of thousands kids have been in out-of-home care for more than two years yet, in that same year, there were 210 local adoptions. That is less than one per cent. I do not see how you can say that that is a reasonable number. I know the complexities. One of the reasons I think there is this bias against adoption is that it is a reaction to failings in the past. We should be clear about that. It is in part a reaction to some of the serious failures in the past. We would never want to go back—and we never will—to the kind of forced adoptions that before my time this committee looked at. That is not a reason to not have adoption as a serious option in this nation. That is what it has become, unfortunately. It has become not a serious and genuine option.

We heard evidence to this effect. We heard from Barnardos:

The growing number of children in care is primarily driven by the fact that children are staying in care too long and entering care earlier. There is a failure to consider ensuring 'exit' from long-term care which leaves too many young people in unstable and damaging foster care. A proven way of doing so is through open adoption...Open adoption is valued highly by many children and Barnardos Australia has published extensively on our experience and can provide evidence from young people speaking themselves on the importance of this option. Both the USA and UK have a high number of children adopted from care.

To make that comparison that I have talked about: less than one per cent of kids who have been in out-of-home care for more than two years in Australia are adopted, and it is around six per cent in the UK. It is higher again in the United States. There does not seem to me to be any reasonable reason why, once these decisions have been made—and court orders have been made in many cases—that kids cannot return, we should not be looking at the option for adoption.

There is a short time left, and I wanted to touch on a couple of other things. I touch on the fact that the South Australian coroner has talked about this. We see the tragic cases, but the tragic cases are a different question. They are a question about whether or not we put kids at the centre, and there is a range of things about that, about where the kids were removed from harm—like Chloe Valentine, who was not and tragically died. There is a different issue here, but again it is about whether we want to be child centred or not. Do we want to be child centred? I say we have to be and I think everyone agrees, but what does that look like? As I say, adoption is not going to be the only answer. It is not going to be the answer for all kids, but it should be the answer for more kids.

We have locally here the Barnardos Mother of the Year. Chauntell McNamara talks about her experience with caring for foster kids. It has taken her six years to adopt her son, and she has now adopted a daughter. It was when her son said to her: 'I want that identity. I want to have the same name as you. I don't want to have two names. I want to have this identity.' And partly this is about giving kids that identity.

We heard from the New South Wales government, and I would like to commend the New South Wales government. We recommend that the New South Wales model be looked at nationally because it is a balanced and good model. It has a different hierarchy from what we have seen. As I say, there has been a bias against adoption in this country which I think is unreasonable and has gone too far—though I acknowledge some of the reasons why people have gone down that path.

This is the order of precedence in the New South Wales model. Family preservation and restoration, of course, is number one. If that can be done, that is the idea, but in many cases we know that it cannot. Where it cannot, we need to look at other options. The second option is long-term guardianship to relative or kin. If they can be found, that is ideal, but in many cases they cannot. The third option is adoption. Then the fourth option is parental responsibility to the minister. I would say that that is a model that should be looked at right around the county. I would say that the Australian government should be taking that to COAG and taking leadership on this. I know that the Prime Minister and the government are taking a lead on international adoptions, but what we are talking about is adoptions here in Australia.

Try and imagine the trauma for a young child of not just being removed once from a traumatic situation but then perhaps being removed a second time, a third time or a fourth time. Imagine if that is your child. I have got five children; my youngest is two. I cannot imagine her being taken away, but if in tragic circumstances she ever had to be taken away, I would not want her to be taken from safety again and again. That is potentially what some children face. We know it is not simple. This report does not pretend it is—I commend it—but we say we have to take another look. We cannot pretend that there are no answers. The New South Wales model presents some answers. I commend that model to other state governments, I commend it to COAG and I commend it to the Senate. (Time expired).

Nova Peris (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on today's tabling of the report of the out-of-home-care inquiry. I am very glad to have had the opportunity to speak with so many professionals working in the out-of-home-care space during this inquiry. To them I want to say that I have the utmost respect for you. You have an extremely challenging and difficult job, huge responsibilities and increasing workloads with limited resources. You also face the daily pressures of having to get it right and not least because young children and their families are depending on it.

Our inquiry heard that young people in out-of-home care have poor outcomes across a range of indicators whilst in the care. Then, when they leave care they are much more likely than any other children to experience homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse and physical and sexual abuse. Our children are killing themselves because they are unable to reconcile trauma in their lives and they cannot see any hope in their future. They need our help, and it is our responsibility to make sure they get help.

There is a disproportionate amount of Aboriginal children that are removed from their parents and placed in out-of-home care in the Northern Territory, and this is where I will focus because I think I have real opportunities to improve this situation.

Overwhelmingly, experts in the field told the inquiry that what is really needed is a greater focus on the early intervention programs because, clearly, with an ever increasing number of children going into out-of-home care, the statutory arrangements are not improving the situation. We need more programs that support vulnerable families. The experts say these families must be self-referred or referred by the community and that these programs need to be rolled out in more sites. There is also a shortage of experienced, skilled and trained professionals, social workers and community workers, including Aboriginal professionals in these roles, employed in the Northern Territory.

We say as a nation and the Northern Territory government says that they want to get Aboriginal people working. Here is our chance to make a solid investment in the mentoring, selection and training of Aboriginal people to work in the department and across whole of government—to be employed by NGOs working in this area of child protection. The staff case loads are huge and their burnout rate is high. Staff require better support systems so that their work includes early intervention so they can spend more time and care with families who want to keep their children with them at home. This is the best result we can have.

As a priority for the Northern Territory, it must create an Aboriginal child care agency to work with all the sectors but particularly with children and their families. There is currently no Aboriginal entity to play that essential role in identification of kinship carers, advocacy and the provision of advice on decisions to do with placements in general. I am glad that our recommendations look at establishing those functions in an Aboriginal organisation across every jurisdiction. The fact that there is not currently an Aboriginal organisation fulfilling that role shows us that the Northern Territory government still does not get it.

My greatest fear is that we are witnessing across this nation another type of stolen generation, an out-of-home care generation, and we are all complicit in this if we do not make hard and fast changes to the current system. We cannot stand idle whilst another whole generation of children are removed from their kin and their culture. We know that there are many extended families in our communities that already provide support to others within their kin. But sometimes, for various reasons, this cannot be made to work in the interests of the child and something must be done to safeguard the child so they can receive the appropriate care that they need.

The Northern Territory has a small and diverse population that consists of some large towns and a few cities and hundreds of smaller communities and homelands. We must acknowledge the context of disadvantage in many of these communities—poverty and overcrowding, poor infrastructure and poor or no access to employment, education and health services. These social determinants and others conspire to ferment domestic violence and neglect and, unfortunately, in some cases abuse that leads to the need for child protection measures like out-of-home care.

Of the types of out-of-home care available in the Northern Territory, kinship care has many positives. With kinship care we automatically have people who can translate and interpret the directions of the department both to the child and their family, whilst keeping the child better connected to their culture. We need to recognise and utilise the strengths inherent within a community itself and enable carers to tap into the significant supports that are often already there in the community.

Out of 932 placements in a year, as a broad guide roughly 70 to 85 per cent of these children are Aboriginal in any given year. In the Northern Territory there are only 194 authorised kinship households. The Northern Territory has roughly one child placed in out-of-home care for every 250 Territorians, and the numbers are steadily increasing. It is an extraordinary figure when you think about it. There has been a steadily increasing demand for child protective services, and this increase is a major problem in and of itself. But the departmental budget was also cut by $9 million last year, which is staggering and is one of the reasons why the Northern Territory opposition, under Territory Labor Leader Michael Gunner, is putting children at the centre of its plans for government.

Some of the family support programs in the Territory are federally funded. The Intensive Family Support Services program, working in four locations in the Northern Territory, is funded through the Commonwealth Department of Social Services. The IFSS is doing fantastic prevention work with families and has been described by some stakeholders as the final chance to keep kids with their families. Often the families have entrenched problems that are complex and, when you are working at this level, the results are not always positive. Any achievements are hard won and do not come quickly, so there is a limit to what can be done at this end with the resources that are applied to the program.

Permanent care orders are a relatively new development in the Northern Territory and one with a number of question marks hanging over it. A permanent care order is made by the court that grants a person parental responsibility for a child until they turn 18 years of age. The permanent care order does not totally cut the legal ties of the child with their biological parents in the same way that adoption does. But it assigns the child with a carer who has the rights and full responsibilities of a parent. So under a permanent care order the carer is now the parent, in law, and can decide whether or not the child can have any contact with the real parents. To assist with this responsibility, the permanent carer receives a one-off payment of $5,000, but no other allowances, for the care of that child. The committee has recommended that there be a nationally consistent approach to permanent placement and that it is only considered when there is no chance whatsoever of the child returning to its family.

What concerned many of the witnesses is the perception that the Northern Territory department can tend to take into account the biological parent's past record without considering the current status and work done to improve that parent's situation in life. It would be tragic for a parent to undergo rehabilitation only to find that they are not allowed to have their biological child back in their lives because he or she is under a permanent care order.

Some children receive care—I know myself—up to the age of 25, and I think that is important as we want children to transition well from out-of-home care into society. Children in foster care, however, often leave that care at 15 or 16, and this is when kids can become most vulnerable. The National Disability Insurance Scheme will improve some of the supports for, for example, the 20 per cent of 16- to 18-year-olds in out-of-home care that have a disability, but this is still a very difficult area. Whilst it seems that the Territory's carers of disabled children do not seem to relinquish those children to the same extent as happens in other jurisdictions, it is still very difficult. Those carers need additional support, and this has been raised in other forums. Places of respite are seriously needed in the Northern Territory.

This is a snapshot of some of the issues in the Northern Territory. We have some serious issues to deal with in child protection, and I really appreciate all of those who have contributed to this fine report. I commend it to the Senate.

Jo Lindgren (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Community Affairs References Committee report on the inquiry into out-of-home care. One cannot speak of this issue without being affected emotionally. Clearly, when looking at children in out-of-home care, in the long term there needs to be a more viable option. On that note, I would like to thank those people who gave evidence and made submissions to the committee.

There is a bias against adoption as an option for children in out-of-home care. Adoption should always be a viable option to create a safe, stable home for children. One thought is clear, and that is that children should always come first. All children need stability and certainty. Children in care are unfortunately in care because they have already had a tough time one way or another. Let us facilitate this stability. Let us give them a loving, stable home. Let them be woken up by the same person who put them to bed. And let us examine the issues that currently surround adoption in Australia—in particular, removing the barriers so that safe, permanent care arrangements can be opened up.

Ms Maree Walk from the New South Wales Department of Families and Communities presented evidence of some of the most moving applications and discussion points. They were submissions from children who grew up in the system who voiced that they had wished their care families had adopted them. These children have also been the most vocal pro-adoption people. Permanency for children in out-of-home care can be achieved.

Currently, the Queensland figures linger at 170 to 190 people who are assessed and approved to adopt a child. However, only eight to 10 adoptions happened within the year. This then leaves young children in residential care.

The New South Wales model incorporates a preferred hierarchy of permanency with the family perseveration/restoration as the first priority, but when this cannot be achieved it uses further mechanisms to achieve stability for children. These include long-term guardianship with a relative or kin, or adoption. As a last measure, parental responsibility to the minister should only happen when the long-term guardianship and adoption have been considered inappropriate to ensure that time frames are legislated regarding the feasibility of restoration so as to provide stability and permanency for the child.

The Carmody recommendations of the Queensland Child Protection Commission of Inquiry, similar to that of the New South Wales methodology, were agreed to in a bipartisan approach. Children should always come first. The main aim is to offer stability for children and young people. This improvement can be achieved in out-of-home care for children with the opening up of adoption. This is not to say that adoption is the right or the only path for an out-of-home care child, but the choice and ability needs to be there. We need to be able to offer our next generation a chance at stability. At all levels, a child-first approach should apply to all decisions.

The issues in regard to front-line services to support children to stay at home should be seen as separate to that of the decisions about the immediate and long-term safety and wellbeing of any child at risk. This can be seen in the very sad case of Chloe Valentine from South Australia, who died after Families SA failed to remove her from her drug-addicted parents. The coroner's report into Chloe's death stated, 'It seemed Chloe's interests had been forgotten while the focus was on Ashlee—Chloe's mother—and her demands.'

There is a greater need for parents to take seriously the responsibility of raising a child and if this responsibility is not undertaken and a child is placed at risk then they need to be held accountable. A larger focus needs to be placed on meeting the child's needs first. These needs in out-of-home care for at-risk children should always be front and centre of decisions. By placing decisions in the forefront of the out-of-home care, a child's welfare can be considered with a first approach to reunification with the family but also an acknowledgement for the removal of bias in regard to the adoption of children when reunification is not the best option.

Stability is needed for the child and a child's needs should always come first. An approach to make adoption a more acceptable and realistic option for children left in limbo in a system of out-of-home care should be seriously considered as there are many childless couples wanting to adopt and provide loving, stable homes.

Lastly, I would like to thank the committee for the work undertaken and for those who made submissions in the interest of putting children first. Ultimately, I would like to see the removal any bias against the adoption of children in the out-of-home care system. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.