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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-09-20 Daily Xml
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Child Protection

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:53): I have a question again to the Minister for Education and Child Development. Given the royal commission's recommendation that no child under the age of 10 years be living in either emergency or residential care, unless to keep a sibling group together, can the minister confirm whether any children under this age are doing so now and, if so, how many?

The Hon. S.E. CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Minister for Education and Child Development, Minister for Higher Education and Skills) (14:53): I am curious about whether we are going to go through every single recommendation of the 260 minus 38 because, as has been very clear, we are going to take until the end of the year to work through the recommendations that we have yet to accept and address. While I absolutely support Justice Nyland's view about residential care facilities for children under 10—in fact, residential care facilities altogether in most cases are undesirable—I am not sure where people think we might put children immediately overnight if we are to move too quickly.

That is why Justice Nyland was so thoughtful in her report in making sure that we knew that we should take time to do this and that we should do it with the non-government organisations and the members of the community who are intimately involved in the delivery of these services, because if we push one button in one part of the system we risk causing chaos in others. We cannot remove children summarily from houses where they are being fed and where they are sleeping and put them on the streets because there is a recommendation that we not have children under 10 in residential care facilities.

Naturally, what we need to do at the initial end is get much better at prevention because if you have, by the age of 10, one in four of our children in this state having a notification made about them, which means someone is concerned about them—and that is at least one notification, many have multiple—then clearly what we are talking about is a failure of parenting and we need to work far better as a government and as a community with NGOs at improving our support early.

At the same time, at the other end, once children are under the care and guardianship of the minister, we need to find more homes for these children. We are not performing as well as some other states in providing sufficient foster care families and we are putting a lot of effort right now into (a) advertising (and we are seeing some results at least in people expressing an interest in finding out more about foster care) and (b) working to improve the foster care system, which is absolutely crucial because the best advocates for foster carers in the future are current foster carers and at present we have too many issues in the system where some foster carers feel aggrieved.

We need to sort out our system so that it is a more attractive proposition in order to get more carers in the future, and that is a project that we are undertaking at present as well.

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