Foster Care

Ms SANDERSON (Adelaide) (14:54): My question, again, is to the Minister for Education and Child Development. Will the minister implement an independent panel to consider disputed care concerns and removals of foster children?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (14:54): Yes, I am in the process of considering such an entity. We are, as you are well aware, working through with various interested parties, including NGOs who offer foster-care services and the foster carers themselves, ways in which we can improve the foster-care system. The only way we will have more carers is to have a better system, and one of the matters that has been raised with me reasonably frequently is exactly that one. So, yes it is under active consideration as are a lot of different ways that we can arrange our processes for foster carers.