Make Child Protection a Priority Again
All is not well in the Child Protection system in WA. The signs are seemingly endless:
1000 child protection cases without a dedicated case worker; heavy-handed police raids hunting leaked documents; foster carer bullying; missing children in care; child protection workers overburdened with caseloads; and a damning report from the Commissioner for Children and Young People - all point to a Department “at crisis point” since WA Labor took the helm.
The department’s so-called “ghost list” – child protection cases unassigned to a case worker– has blown out beyond belief, triggering protests from angry child protection workers who feel they are failing the children they so passionately try to help due to being under-resourced.
This complaint is reinforced by the department admitting to child protection workers having caseloads that exceed the exceptional maximum limit set by the WA Industrial Relations Commission’s Order.
Further damning the mega-agency are leaked documents which included a 2019 report by psychologist Tracy Westerman who stated the department required urgent change or “outcomes for Aboriginal people in WA may remain the same or worsen”.
According to the leaked report “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”, and child protection workers described being “thrown in the deep end” and in desperate need of more training.
Tellingly, another leaked document, a 2021 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, revealed that none of Dr Westerman’s four dozen recommendations had been implemented.
Further, in the 2021 report from the Commissioner for Children and Young People: Independent Review of Department of Communities policies and practices in the placement of children with harmful sexual behaviours in residential care settings we find that the Government housed victims with known perpetrators despite repeated pleas for help.
You can read the WA Today article here.
It echoes other failures of the WA Labor Government, such as its inability to protect survivors of child sexual abuse from being confronted by their attackers at school, which I pursued for years, ultimately pressuring the government into changing the law to allow the director general to intervene.
Shockingly, although the department takes on parental responsibility for the children it takes into care, it didn’t know their whereabouts.
Given how unacceptable this is, I repeatedly questioned the WA Labor Government throughout 2021 and 2022 on this issue until they finally implemented a daily report to ensure the Minister and Director General are informed of any children missing from their care.
I routinely check on this to ensure it remains a priority at the highest levels.
These problems are basic; it shouldn’t take a Shadow Minister to pursue them to enact change.
We once again need a specialist Department of Child Protection and we urgently need it now.
Wade Scale was an 11-month-old who tragically died in the care of the department in 2003.
His death resulted in the Ford Review, which found that the role of the then department was too broad and caused confusion; that child protection should be a single, dedicated department to firmly entrench child protection as its number one priority.
Yet when Labor took office in 2017, it dissolved that specialised department and created the mega-department of Communities with multiple responsibilities and ministers, recreating exactly what the Ford Report had found so dangerous.
I’ve been calling persistently over the last eight years for the Cook Labor Government to fix the problems caused by the amalgamation. The price of these preventable issues has been too high.
Children in care deserve to be the top priority of their Department and their Minister.
A stand-alone Department of Child Protection would ensure this vital service is given the priority and focus it deserves.
You can access the WA Liberal’s Child Protection policy here.
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