Page 3044 - Week 08 - Thursday, 15 August 2019
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two other initiatives: stronger police support for family violence victims and enhanced child protection and case management and coordination. Unfortunately, she is not as forthcoming as JACS officials were during estimates hearings. Her response to my questions on notice was simply: “The safer families package funds functions, not positions.”
We do know that the last of these initiatives, the improved access to legal aid initiative, currently pays for 2.5 full-time staff. In hearings, Dr Boersig, the CEO of Legal Aid ACT, said that without continued funding after this year, he would have to either cut services to hundreds of domestic violence victims or cut services to other Legal Aid clients. The Attorney-General attempted to reassure us all by stating that the government is hoping that demand for these services will decrease before their funding is cut off, but we simply have no evidence of this yet.
Even some of those who have publicly supported the new safer families initiatives that will be funded in part through these cuts are worried about the capacity of our front-line services to deal with a demand that, despite Mr Ramsay’s hopefulness, seems to be going up, not down.
The Domestic Violence Crisis Service chief executive, Mirjana Wilson, for example, has called the decision to direct safer families funding towards training all 21,000 of the territory’s public servants a “bold move”, but she has expressed concern that:
Just raising awareness is not OK in and of itself … If we’re then funnelling everyone back to services of which there are few to respond to this in the territory, we really need to ensure they’re funded to do that well.
The issue is getting the balance right between funding front-line services whilst also piloting new initiatives. This is an issue of priorities and deciding what gets funded first. On this point, many Canberrans fear that this budget may be getting that all-important balance wrong.
I now want to address care and protection. This is another crucially important area where Canberrans expect their government to get things right. This budget commits an additional $39 million to out of home care over the next four years. Most people would see child protection as one of the essential services that a government should be funding appropriately. The question, then, is about how exactly the service is being run. On this point, we have mixed results, much of it quite worrying.
To take just one example, last year this government committed $594,000 in additional funding to increase permanency orders for children and young people in out of home care. This provided 4.1 full-time equivalent dedicated employees to work on this matter, and still the government fell short of its goal of just 25 permanency outcomes. This budget provides for an increase to $935,000, which will increase the number of dedicated staff to 6.5. One hopes that the target might actually be reached this year.
When the Minister for Children, Youth and Families recently tabled the mid-term review of the government’s out of home care strategy, she did highlight one bright point: that the number of children and young people entering care may finally be
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