Department of Communities in Crisis

Leaked documents published by The West Australian have revealed the Department of Communities is “plagued by widescale and endemic racism” and “at crisis point”.

One of these leaked documents is a report by respected psychologist Tracy Westerman who slammed the mega-agency in 2019, saying it needed urgent change or “outcomes for Aboriginal people in WA may remain the same or worsen”.

Disturbingly, child protection workers described being “thrown in the deep end” and in desperate need of more training just to do their jobs.

According to Dr Westerman “only one staff member from a sample of 295 … met the cultural competence benchmark, with all other staff (294) meeting the benchmark of cultural incompetence”.

Another of the leaked documents, a 2021 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, revealed that none of Dr Westerman’s four dozen recommendations had been implemented.

I’ve been calling persistently over the last five years for Mark McGowan and child protection minister Simone McGurk to fix the problems caused by their decision to amalgamate child protection into a mega-department in 2017.

We once again need a specialist Department of Child Protection and we urgently need it now.

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