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PM gets tough to protect children

By Imre Salusinszky

26 April 2008 - THE Rudd Government is about to launch a major takeover of child protection, leveraging its control of family assistance and childcare to intervene earlier in the child abuse cycle.

The move comes in response to the deepening crisis in state-based child protection systems across Australia.

Also among the wide-ranging reforms being considered is a new Children's Commissioner, who would monitor the performance of the states in combating child abuse.

A proposed national framework for child protection could also include elements of the Howard government's intervention in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities - such as quarantining welfare payments to make sure they are used in the best interests of children.

The quarantining measure would "use the income support system to encourage and support changes to inappropriate parenting behaviours" and would be imposed by Centrelink on families, white or black, who had been identified by child protection authorities.

The reforms are contained in a discussion paper on the national child protection framework, due for release later this month by federal Families Minister Jenny Macklin.

A confidential draft of the paper has been obtained by The Weekend Australian.

It calls for a "national planning mechanism" to co-ordinate the investment in child protection across all jurisdictions and says the federal Government will in future direct its family support programs more towards ending abuse.

Joe Tucci from the Australian Childhood Foundation, who has been a critic of state-based child protection, welcomed the reforms.

"I think the federal Government needs to get involved in child protection, because leaving it to the states has been shown to be a recipe for disaster," Mr Tucci said.

It was also important to grasp the opportunity offered by coast-to-coast Labor governments "to implement more accountable systems of auditing and regular review".

The reforms come as child protection services across Australia buckle under the strain of a doubling of notifications of suspected abuse over the past eight years. The discussion paper says that, in 2006-07, there were 58,563 substantiated cases of child abuse, with indigenous children at more than five times the risk of children generally. It estimates the direct cost of child abuse and neglect at $4.9 billion in 2001-02.

There have been 20 separate inquiries into child protection across Australia since 2000, with the majority finding the system had broken down.

Other measures proposed in the paper include a national version of the controversial Aboriginal child placement principle, so that an abused child in one jurisdiction could be removed from his or her parents and placed with an indigenous foster-family interstate.

Child sexual abuse experts are outraged that the framework, by focusing on family support, overlooks children who are the intentional victims of their parents' predatory and criminal behaviour.

In an area where the eight states and territories all operate according to different standards, the new framework will try to foster co-operation and develop "national child protection definitions, standards and jurisdiction-level performance indicators".

While the states have statutory responsibility for child protection, the commonwealth has a key role in primary prevention as the provider of childcare, family assistance and health services. The paper claims "robust data is not available" on child abuse.

Families Australia chief Brian Babington said the framework could mean "for the first time Australia will have a truly joined-up system where the efforts of the federal Government and the states and the non-government sector will be made more coherent in the interest of kids".

The paper slams the state of Aboriginal child protection and calls for a "specific set of principles ... for keeping indigenous children safe" and for common indicators of child well-being.

Findings from the Northern Territory intervention will be used to develop an overall approach to tackling child abuse in remote communities, including what the paper calls "innovative approaches to remove the risk from the child rather than always the child from the risk".

Noting problems with the child placement principle, which says indigenous children should be fostered by indigenous families, it argues "state-to-state protocols could be developed to enable indigenous children to be placed with a family interstate when it is in their best interests".

Source: The Australian

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