Foster Carers

Ms STINSON (Badcoe) (15:04): My question is to the Minister for Child Protection. How many foster carers were recruited in 2018-19, above attrition, who are available to care for a child?

The Hon. R. SANDERSON (Adelaide—Minister for Child Protection) (15:05): I welcome the question. As this house would be well aware, recruiting foster carers has been one of my main goals that I have been working on for the past year. We know that for several years under the Labor government they made announcements of even up to $9 million to recruit foster carers—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. R. SANDERSON: —and in fact they lost more foster carers—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! Members on my left, be quiet.

The Hon. R. SANDERSON: As I was saying, the former Labor government announced up to $9 million in funding to recruit more foster carers yet actually lost more foster carers for many years, so it's a wonderful turnaround over the last couple of years to actually have more coming in than going out. I am very pleased to announce that we did make—

Ms Stinson interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Badcoe is warned.

The Hon. R. SANDERSON: —my goal of 50 net increase in foster carers. I thank all the foster carers and all the kinship carers for their wonderful work that they do in caring for our most vulnerable children. I have recently, during the school holidays, been to Mount Gambier and to Whyalla to meet with foster carers and hear their stories face to face and get their ideas of how we can improve the system.

As I said earlier, more foster carers were leaving the system under Labor than were coming in, so it was important to identify what were the reasons. We know that many of those reasons were lack of information, no blue books and no immunisation records. There were lots of issues: a lack of respect, a lack of information. A lot of issues have been able to be resolved through the new legislation enacted in October last year, which made a great deal of help.

Any removals that foster carers object to can be taken to SACAT now after an internal review. There's more information. The information-sharing guidelines have been updated. There is a lot more that is being done and there is certainly a lot more that will be done. I meet with foster carers for that reason: to hear what more we can do and what we can do better.

Recently, Connecting Foster and Kinship Carers actually did an exit survey for any foster or kinship carers leaving the system to find out their reasons why. We got some valuable feedback from them where we were able to see that some of them left for natural reasons, like a child ageing out of care and moving on or a change of circumstances in their own family life that meant that they could no longer foster, but many of them would consider coming back later on. My goal is to meet with previous foster carers who left under Labor to see if there are any circumstances under which they might come back now that we are changing and improving our system.

Even if it's as an emergency carer or respite carer, we really need people to think about foster caring. Our new website launched (https://fostercare.sa.gov.au/) only a couple of weeks ago and 13002FOSTER is the direct line where you will find out more information about fostering. I would call on anyone who is interested to call that number because we need more loving families for our children.