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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-03-18 Daily Xml
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Family Support Services

The Hon. N.J. CENTOFANTI (14:36): My question is to the Minister for Human Services regarding vulnerable families. Can the minister please update the council on how the Marshall Liberal government is helping vulnerable families to stay safely together?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (14:36): I thank the honourable member for her question. Indeed, we have been recommissioning a range of family support services, the unit that was known as EIRD. The Early Intervention Research Directorate was moved into the Department of Human Services I think in 2018 or 2019, and since then the government has been actively working towards implementing the recommendations for our most complex and vulnerable families in the state.

Broadly speaking, what the research of the directorate had found was that a lot of the services had a light touch, if you like, and that what we really needed to do was ensure that services that operate in the pre-statutory phase are working much more intensively with these families so that children are safe and, as far as possible, to prevent children from entering the statutory care system.

We do have funding to continue with the Child and Family Assessment and Referral Networks (CFARNs), which provide local level coordination to parents and children with complex needs. Also, in the budget we are trialling a program known as Breathing Space, which is to provide coordinated support to young women who are at a greater risk of requiring child protection intervention. That has been granted to Centacare.

The next steps in implementing the child and family support system reforms are in progress. We have done a very intensive co-design process, which I think I may have referred to in this place before, where people with lived experience and the frontline workers in this system gave the government advice about what works and how we should commission services going forward.

We are also developing what is known as a new front door for assessment and referral services, which has the effect of providing families who may be struggling with some advice and access to services, rather than necessarily going through the CARL reporting system. We will be working to integrate that better so that families can engage in help-seeking, because we have been told, particularly by people with lived experience and some Aboriginal families, that they don't wish to contact CARL in the first instance. So it's really about trying to get some early advice so that people can get assistance. I think I have advised before that, as a result of the consultation, we will be ring fencing 30 per cent of the funding for Aboriginal community-controlled organisations.

We are shortly to be announcing the new funding—the successful tenderers for the intensive family support services, which will be evidence based. The staff who work in those systems need to have some quite specific skills, including being trauma responsive and culturally safe. So the services will be working at a much more intense level with families, and we look forward to the outcomes of these services to ensure that children are kept safe into the future and, where it is safe to do so, that they remain with their families.

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