Children in Care

Ms STINSON (Badcoe) (15:22): I rise to speak on matters of concern in child protection. There are now 4,040 children in care, and that is 457 more little lives in the hands of the minister since she first took office—457. I say that figure is a figure from now with some caveat because those statistics are the latest available publicly, and they date all the way back to August. We heard yesterday that these so-called latest figures are four or five months in delay because the minister's department simply has not kept up with its annual reporting cycle this year, which of course happens every year.

It is pretty easy to see why the minister's staff are under such strain. Despite the minister's pre-election promise to reduce the number of children coming into care, and despite her quite specific promise last year to limit the rise of children coming into care to 3 per cent, it is plain that she simply failed to deliver. Those 457 extra children coming into care under minister Sanderson represent a 13 per cent jump in the number of children in state care since March last year. There is no sign of relief for those hardworking staff. The latest Auditor General's Report states:

DCP budgeted to expand its workforce with an additional 340 FTEs to be recruited in 2018-19, but actually only recruited an additional 100 FTEs.

So last financial year the minister fell a whopping 240 people short of the budgeted and targeted level of recruitment. Such a serious shortfall in child protection workers raises some very serious questions about what risks there might be to children and staff from that huge gap in manpower.

That report has been available for a while—more than a month to the parliament and weeks before that to the minister—yet under questioning in the Auditor General's Report hearing yesterday it was as though this was a fact that had completely escaped the minister. Asked whether the 240 unfilled positions were operational, professional or administrative, she could not answer. 'What classification were they in, or what area in the department?' She could not say. 'When will the remaining staff be hired?' She did not know. 'Will they all in fact be hired?' She could not say.

It is not comforting for the workers in the Department for Child Protection that their minister cannot answer the most basic and obvious of questions, the hardworking staff who are doing their best. But probably worst of all was the minister's inability to say why those staff had not been hired. She outright rejected any suggestion that there was any difficulty hiring staff. If there is no difficulty, why has it not been done?

It can only make you wonder if it is intentional to cut costs and bring down the cost of providing care to make the figures look better. You have to ask: what will be the ultimate cost for children in care and for those who care for them? Of course, the minister could not answer questions about those cost savings either. This news about hundreds of child protection roles being left unfilled comes on the back of an absolutely scathing report from the Guardian for Children and Young People.

It found that minister Sanderson's department is 'in crisis' and that poor decisions are being made on a day-to-day basis, especially around placements. She said that those decisions amount to a betrayal of children. Some young people spoke to the guardian about the abuse they had suffered in care and said that they would rather be in youth detention than returned to their residential care homes.

At the heart of this report was a dysfunctional department that she described as 'in crisis'. Surely, failing to recruit more than two-thirds of your promised workforce is part of that crisis. When the minister came in we did hear some rather lofty promises and some targets that the minister was going to meet, but few if any of those have actually been delivered. What we have now is a minister who is missing in action. There has barely been a peep from her this year.

You can count on one hand the number of radio interviews the minister has done, and I am not sure that there has been a single television interview. This is aside from a rather stellar interview in which she managed to tell Lauren Novak at The Advertiser that this job is actually harder than she thought it would be. I hope that in the new year the minister does find her voice, stops listening to those people who tell her to be quiet and actually does something for children in state care.