NATIONAL CHILD PROTECTION WEEK
621. Ms J.M. FREEMAN to the Minister for Child Protection:
I refer to National Child Protection Week, which is this
week, and its theme of ''Putting children first''. Can the
minister update the house on the work being undertaken by the McGowan Labor
government to support and protect vulnerable children; and, further, can the
minister outline to the house what outcomes have been achieved by workers to
keep our children safe?
Ms S.F. McGURK
replied:
I thank the member for the question. I am pleased to have an
opportunity to address some of the important work being done by the Department
of Communities and some of our partners in caring for some of the state's
most vulnerable children. Those Department of Communities staff in particular
are focused day in and day out on improving outcomes for families and reducing
the number of children entering out-of-home care. Every day, the Department of
Communities does work on strengthening families and keeping children safe. As
at the end of June this year, there were 5 498
children in care. It is a difficult job, and I know that as a state, we should
be very grateful for the work that it does.
I want to talk about protecting children. We have put
additional new resources as a state government into early intervention and family support. We have put $97 million
into early intervention intensive work for families to reduce the number of children coming into care. We have
funded and are trialling an Aboriginal family–led decision-making
pilot to ensure greater self-determination and participation for Aboriginal
people in child protection matters. We have made one-off payments to carers
during the COVID period of $3.7 million. We have also provided funding of $5.7 million
for the implementation of royal commission work.
The workforce is important, particularly the Department of
Communities' workforce. As I said, it is very difficult work that they
do. Members might be aware that a cost-and-demand model was negotiated with Treasury,
and that has resulted in additional staff on the ground. Therefore, not only
were child protection workers shielded from the budget repair efforts that were
required when we came to government, but in fact in 2019–20 alone,
there were an extra 70 full-time equivalents. In this financial year, 2020–21,
the cost-and-demand model is expected to result in 183 more FTE child
protection workers. That is an over 18 per cent increase between June 2017 and
June 2020 in the number of child protection workers managing caseloads.
Finally, in regard to results, we have provided extra
funding, and we are supporting the workforce that is doing this work, and it is starting to pay dividends.
For instance, in the early intervention work, a consortium of Aboriginal
organisations is doing work in the metropolitan area and providing in-home
support for Aboriginal families. Over the last 12 months, 90 per cent of those
families who have been supported have not had a child taken into care. That is
a significant achievement for some very vulnerable families.
I want to stress that
reducing the number of children coming into care is not the only metric. We
need to keep children safe. That is our primary concern. But that work
of early intervention is starting to see results. Another important metric
across this state and across other states in Australia is that we generally see
an increase in the number of children in care coming from the out-of-home care
system into the child protection system, but for 2019–20, we have seen the
lowest rate of growth for almost two decades.
We are starting to see some significant changes, including a change
in direction, and I put that down to a committed government that is not only
putting some effort into working with our partners in the community services
sector, in the community itself with foster carers and the like, but also
supporting our workforce. We are putting new resources in and we are starting
to see results: keeping children safe and keeping families safe as well.