Page 3045 - Week 08 - Thursday, 15 August 2019
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slowing. I note, however, that the number exiting care also appears to be in decline. One can add to this concerns that have recently been raised publicly about the state of the territory’s residential care system. They have been shared with me privately almost since I entered this place. As one barrister said to me earlier this year, there is little point in removing children from the parental home just to place them in a home where they feel completely unsafe much of the time.
I should add that though I am somewhat relieved that steps are finally being taken towards my 2017 motion regarding external review of care and protection decisions, this process has taken entirely too long, stretching back over several Labor-Greens governments. Earlier this year, all four of the territory’s human rights commissioners signed a document stating:
… the provision of external merits review of child protection decisions … is essential for achieving full compliance with the ACT’s human rights obligations.
In other words, we are not human rights compliant in the space of child protection. This needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency.
The response from the minister when I raise such issues is often that these matters are complex. They are; I acknowledge that. But then the question becomes: can we trust this government to handle complex matters? On this point, I and many other Canberra residents are not convinced.
Data in the KPMG-led mid-term evaluation of the government’s out of home care strategy, which I have referred to, add to this worry. The evaluation found that, during the first two years of the strategy’s implementation, the percentage of kids entering care for the first time who received the required health passport dropped from 73 per cent to 49 per cent. Even more worrying, over the same time span, the percentage of kids who have a therapeutic plan within six weeks of entering care plummeted from 64 per cent to only 22 per cent.
These plans are intended to allow for the correct placement and care of a child. I have heard from former residential care workers how difficult it is to meet the needs of a young person who shows up in a house without a plan in place, with the plan often not arriving until several months later. Yes, we know that some of these kids will have experienced more trauma in their short lives than all of us here in the Assembly combined. That is why it is even more crucial that each of them should have a therapeutic plan. The government is failing tremendously in this area.
I bring up these two statistics because, unlike so many other facets of child protection, they are not that complex. Making sure that children who enter care are provided with health passports and therapeutic plans is something that this government has complete control over. Yet instead of making it happen, they have let something that is relatively straightforward slip shamefully. Madam Deputy Speaker, if a government cannot get the easy parts right, why should we have confidence that they can get the complex parts correct?
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