Child and Family Support Service

The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD (15:02): My question is to the Minister for Human Services. Can the minister please update the chamber on the progress being made towards a new child and family support system, including the co-design findings highlighted in the recent feedback session and report?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:03): I thank the honourable member for his question. On 15 March, the state government announced the launch of a new effort to prevent child abuse and neglect by building a better connected system of evidence-informed support services for families with multiple and complex challenges. This builds on the work of the Early Intervention Research Directorate, which has identified four population groups who they have recommended to government as a focus for the service system as the populations that have high risk factors correlated with high rates of interaction with the child protection system, including out-of-home care, and who have the greatest likelihood of disrupting intergenerational patterns of abuse and neglect.

These groups include young parents. In particular, the research identified young mothers aged under 20 at the time of their first birth or first pregnancy and young fathers under 25 as a group with particularly high interaction with the child protection system. They also include adolescents with complex trauma histories. The research shows that by working with adolescents with complex trauma histories there is potential to disrupt intergenerational patterns of child abuse and neglect, as these adolescents are at risk of becoming parents of children in the child protection system. They also include Aboriginal families with multiple and complex needs.

Clearly, we know and are all distressed by the fact that Aboriginal children are over-represented at every level in the child protection system and are more likely to progress to more serious levels in the system. They are approximately one-third of all children in out-of-home care, and they experience more risk factors. The fourth target group is families of infants at risk. Within the first 100 days of life—that is, from conception to the age of two—there is a significant impact on an infant's development, both neurologically and in connected bodily systems.

The efforts are being consolidated within the Department of Human Services. DHS, in conjunction with the child protection department, has been working on what has been called a co-design process to better inform these services and recommission them as we are going forward. That process has taken some time, as both agencies have been working with people with lived experience, people who are the front-line workers, the non-government sector and the government sector, talking to them about what the services should look like going forward.

Last week on Monday 18 November, there was a session to report back to all those interested stakeholders about how the system should work going forward. The co-design process has helped to translate a number of elements. We particularly know that we need the services to be talking to each other more effectively. Part of that has been to reassure people working in the system that they can share information, that information-sharing guidelines exist between agencies, firstly so that families do not have to continue to repeat their stories but also so that, if referrals need to be made between different service providers, that can take place more rapidly.

We have also identified that there are a number of families who seek help before it gets to the crisis end, but they are also prevented from seeking help because they fear that any help-seeking may identify them as families at risk, which then means that they are more likely to get into trouble. They are scared of interaction with the child protection system. So there are a range of ways by which these workers and the non-government organisations have identified how we should shape our services going forward. Even though it is a very challenging area for people who are working in it, I think there is a great deal of optimism that we can do a lot better into the future to assist families where children are at risk. We look forward to growing these partnerships going forward.