Wednesday, 22 June 2022

Kinship carers

Dr BACH (Eastern Metropolitan) (17:43): (2005) My adjournment matter tonight is for the Minister for Child Protection and Family Services. Well, it has been another day here in Parliament and another extraordinary revelation of the failures of Minister Carbines and more broadly the failure of the Andrews Labor government to keep our most vulnerable children safe. Today the Auditor-General tabled a report in this place into kinship care.

In Victoria on any given night around 9000 children are in the care system. Some are in residential care units, some are in foster care. Overwhelmingly these children are in kinship care, not with their nuclear families but with an aunty or a grandmother—overwhelmingly a grandmother. And yet we learned today because of the work of the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office that 99 per cent of the time the Andrews Labor government was failing to meet its own target to even bother to check if these children are safe and well. Children in kinship care have overwhelmingly experienced unspeakable trauma, including sustained physical and sexual violence, so it is imperative that we know whether or not the placements that these children are in are stable and safe.

The vast majority of Victorian carers are saints—I speak from some experience as I started my life in foster care—and yet there is a requirement for the government, given that these children are in fact wards of the state, to take some interest in the safety and wellbeing of these children. But on 99 per cent of occasions the government has not even bothered to check up on the wellbeing and safety of these children in care, and so the Auditor-General has quite rightly concluded that what the Andrews Labor government is doing is not keeping these most vulnerable children safe but placing them at further risk of harm. So the action I seek from Minister Carbines tonight is for him to urgently release a plan to ensure the government can meet its own targets—that is all I am asking—in order to seek to ensure that when children are placed into kinship care they are kept safe, there are checks upon their wellbeing and kinship carers also receive the support also that they need.