Page 3179 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 18 October 2022
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Nearly three years ago the Our Booris, Our Way steering committee released its final report into the over-representation of Indigenous young people in child protection. Shortly before estimates hearings, the implementation oversight committee publicly stated that it was “tired and frustrated by the lack of progress and feel disappointed” that only one recommendation out of 28 has been fully implemented.
When I asked Minister Stephen-Smith, in hearings, what is taking so long, she shamelessly insisted that the government has made more progress than the committee understands. She also claimed that the government has struggled to explain all this progress to the committee. Several members of this committee helped to conduct the inquiry and wrote the recommendations, but, apparently, according to the minister, they are incapable of comprehending just how much progress this government is actually making. Never mind that the minister also admitted that some of the changes she believes her government has delivered have not necessarily resulted in a visible and significant change in outcomes. In many ways, that quote from the minister sums up this government and this budget: no visible or significant change in outcomes.
Let me give a more detailed example. Recommendation 4 from Our Booris, Our Way is universal access to the family led decision-making process called family group conferencing, for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families engaging with or entering the child protection system. This may be one of the recommendations that the minister believes has been implemented because it has now been adopted as government policy. There is just one problem: it is not actually happening!
For at least a year I have been asking for data regarding the implementation of this process, to no avail. All I know is that an internal government document last year noted that this policy, instead of providing universal access, has a “low referral rate”. In estimates hearings for this budget, I again asked the minister what percentage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families are actually being referred for family group conferencing, in alignment with the policy. The correct answer, of course, should be 100 per cent. The policy, after all, is meant to be universal. Her response, however, was:
CYPS do not collect data on the number of families who should have been referred to FGC [family group conferencing].
This government is spending money on providing family group conferencing for all Indigenous families but, at the same time, has literally no idea how close it is to achieving that target. Clearly, based on an internal assessment from 2021, the government knows its promise of universal access is, in reality, actually quite low. How low, nobody knows. The absence of a percentage certainly makes it easier to assert that the implementation of this policy has been successful—far easier than if it were known, for example, that only five to 10 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families are actually being offered this alternative. Significantly, whilst the tripartisan Select Committee on Estimates recommended that the ACT government begin reporting the correct percentage, the government, in its response, outright rejected this recommendation.
In summary, the ACT government has promised universal access to family group conferencing for Indigenous families who enter the child protection system. The
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