Page 4754 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 10 November 2009
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care or kinship care and sometimes residential care. The complexity of needs of some children and young people requires that they have intensive care and support.
It is important to recognise and thank the foster carers, kinship carers and non-government agencies who assist in looking after these children and young people. These too are dedicated people who take time out of their lives to look after those in need and who we could not do without. I thank them for their amazing efforts.
The department continues to review services for children and young people, requiring family and youth support services and out-of-home care. Major work is currently underway in remodelling the out-of-home care funding arrangements to ensure that all types of care, foster to therapeutic, are available and meet the needs of children and young people. There is also a current review of youth and family support funding being undertaken. The objective is to make sure services are provided at the right time and the right place to the right people and particularly to families and children at risk.
Keeping our children and young people as safe as possible is a high priority for this ACT Labor government. As the minister responsible for children and young people, I will be working to support evidence-based early intervention strategies; I will be working to create stronger and more resilient communities; and I will be working to support our care and protection professionals to do their job. The Labor government is committing to building stronger families and communities and that is what I will be doing as minister responsible for children and young people.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (3.40): Currently within the ACT and other Australian jurisdictions we know that there are growing numbers of children in out-of-home care. We have insufficient foster care placements to meet this need. We know that Indigenous children are over-represented in care. Indigenous children make up around 23 per cent of the Australian out-of-home care population yet represent 4.5 per cent of Australian children overall.
Internationally, there is a trend in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom to increasingly use kinship care as an option for out-of-home care placements. This trend towards kinship care is linked to research that kinship care can be potentially, in some cases, more beneficial for the child. Kinship care refers to the placement of children with relatives or kin, persons without a blood relationship, but who have a relationship with the child or family, or persons from the child or family’s community, also known as kith. Kinship care is also referred to as “relative care”, “kith and kin care” and “family and friends as carers”.
Kinship carers can assist children and young people to maintain connections with their family. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, a kinship carer may be another Indigenous person who is a member of their community, a compatible community or from the same language group. Benefits come from kinship care placements as they allow the child to maintain family, community and cultural ties. There is likelihood that the child will have increased contact with parents, siblings and families.
Families and the emotion and feeling that they have for a child mean there is a willingness to invest in the wellbeing of the child for the short and longer term. In
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