Page 2782 - Week 09 - Thursday, 26 August 1993
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Why should these people accept the emotional, personal and financial burdens involved in providing a home to a teenager with high emotional needs for the equivalent amount currently paid to a day care mother for 45 hours' care a week? Teenagers in the RAFT program are a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week responsibility. Parents who choose to care for them are not going to have weekends off; nor are they going to see their charges go home at the end of a long day. I do not share the current optimism of the Government that current carers would consider staying on after their current placements are finalised.
Secondly, we stand to lose financially. As I have pointed out, the cost of providing alternative models of care is much more than the cost of providing adequate funding for foster care placement. Research indicates that, if young people do not develop life skills such as those exemplified and supported in foster placements, then their chances of being forced to rely on the social security system as adults are greatly increased. Thirdly, we lose emotionally. This latest failure to support a successful program makes carers, support workers and members of the community in general contract their efforts on behalf of others. If genuine effort is not going to be adequately supported and rewarded and the Government offers itself as an alternative service provider, we all move further away from a shared view and vision of community service.
I note that the Government's Family Services Branch of the Housing and Community Services Bureau feels that raising payments to Barnardo's foster parents, even if funds were available, would be a tacit acceptance of the concept of professional foster care, as Mr Cornwell has already said. I can only wonder at the philosophy which underlies these words. In conclusion, I urge the Government to rethink its current position with regard to the RAFT program and to assess its long-term goals before any precipitate action is taken.
MS ELLIS (4.05): I am always happy to debate in this Assembly questions of social justice which have been raised by the Opposition, particularly by Mr Cornwell. Mr Cornwell has highlighted foster care in the ACT. I am pleased that he has done this, as there are a considerable number of issues relating to foster care which I would like to bring to the attention of those opposite, who every now and then find themselves getting onto the social justice band wagon. We need to put this whole question into perspective. The ACT Government spent more than $3m in the 1992-93 financial year providing substitute care places to the at-risk children of the ACT. These services form part of the response to the 1,751 notifications of children at risk of abuse or neglect in 1992-93. Some of these children obviously cannot return to their homes because the risk to their safety is too great, so the ACT Government provides a range of different sorts of services to meet different children's needs. Foster care is a very important type of substitute family care, and the ACT Government is committed to providing good foster care.
The provision of these services is set within a broad policy framework which recognises the importance of the role families have in the community for the nurturing and caring of children. The development of this policy framework and its implications for ACT services occurred during 1989 as a result of the Callaghan review. At that time ACT services to children who required out-of-home care were dominated by campus-style and cottage residential programs. It was recognised that this form of care is often detrimental to the needs of children, who require ongoing nurturing and normality within a supportive family environment.
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