Child Protection

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA (Hartley—Leader of the Opposition) (14:20): My question is to the Premier. Has the government let down South Australia's most vulnerable children and young people? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA: The Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services revealed that over the past five years the number of children in care in South Australia has increased by 23.2 per cent, while the national rate rose by just 4.6 per cent.

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:20): The Leader of the Opposition is well familiar with the statistics that were contributing to the extraordinary run rate of growth under former Minister Sanderson, I believe it was, who did so much. The former Minister for Child Protection, Ms Sanderson, was able to see an explosion in growth that this minister has been able to turn around in short order. There are other statistics that demonstrate the success.

The minister talks about failure of children. The truth is in some respects almost every child who finds themselves in the child protection system has been a subject of failure at some point or another. You do not end up in the child protection system, and particularly taken away from your parents, unless something has gone seriously wrong. We are lucky in this state that the overall majority of children grow up in safe and loving environments, but that's not something, tragically, that every child is able to be the beneficiary of, and wherever that does not occur, it represents failure somewhere along the system.

It's a heartbreaking proposition to think that kids have to be taken away from their parents, and that's when child protection steps up to the plate. In fact, when I think of child protection I think of it as being probably the most extraordinary example of the value and necessity of state government at the most acute and difficult end of public service delivery. I will acknowledge that people working in the child protection system I probably feel for more than anyone working in state government because they are making the hardest calls in the most difficult of circumstances. They are not our highest paid public servants, but they have probably got, in many respects, one of the hardest jobs in the state.

We quite rightly lionise and regularly reflect on how grateful we are for work amongst emergency services workers. People who wear uniforms are easy to depict and understand, but child protection workers do this work sight unseen in parts that are not always visible to television cameras and news crews, and they just keep getting on with the task. So I do not think they have failed. I think it's failure elsewhere: in families or amongst some parents, or in society writ large that contributes to these tragic outcomes. But I do not think it's child protection workers and I do not think it's the system that's failed.

I make one more observation, which runs against the grain in terms of the way the politics of child protection normally operates. Both sides of politics have, I think, practised the art of bashing the child protection system, bashing, if not the workers in the child protection system, at least the leaders in the bureaucracy of the child protection system. Then we replace one with the next and one with the next. In actual fact, they've got a really difficult job too. I think what we've got to try to do—it is a highly emotive area of public policy for good reason, because we are talking about vulnerable children, but if we try every now and then to have the capacity collectively to be a little bit less emotive and a little bit more principled and pragmatic when we think about what works and what doesn't, we are far more likely to get those types of better outcomes. I think this is exactly what the minister is trying to do.