Page 3703 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 18 September 2018
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Not only this, but more than a third of all emergency action is taken on these families where authorities come and remove a child believed to be at imminent risk, meaning that these children are often subject to more traumatic separations from their family. We need to urgently address the core issues that perpetuate these situations and the recommendations of the interim report should be implemented without delay.
It is really rather baffling to put it mildly that some of these recommendations even have to be made. For example, recommendation 2, that child protection workers should be trained on the five Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child placement principles. You would not let someone operate a forklift without training, and neither should we have child protection workers operating without the appropriate tools and training for the job, for their own sake as well as that of the children and families who are their clients.
As highlighted in the priority areas of focus, this needs to be complemented with workforce attraction and retention strategies so that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff are engaged at senior levels where their knowledge and experience can have an influence on workplace practice and culture.
I draw attention to another particularly concerning issue for kinship carers of children in formal, out of home care arrangements. Again, this is a situation where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are over-represented, especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women looking after their grandchildren. These are women in their 50s and 60s looking after two, three, four, sometimes even five children from toddlers to teenagers.
In some cases, the care for the children has been arranged informally in order to avoid coming into contact with the child protection system, in other words, parents are sometimes undertaking protective action regarding their children by requesting that a grandparent take over as the primary carer of their children. This, of course, is what we want: fewer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids coming into statutory services. But, on the other hand, it appears that we do not provide support to these kinship carers because, technically, of course, these kids are not in care.
The reality that we are aware of is that single grandparents are out there taking care of these kids. Sometimes these grandparents are struggling to make ends meet while holding down a job and struggling to pay for the increased living costs such as clothing, groceries and utility bills because they care for kids who otherwise would have to be involved in and supported by the statutory system.
If we are able to provide support for these grandparents, usually grandmothers, in practical ways such as provision of funds for extra expenses or some assistance with home cleaning and meal preparation, we would be investing wisely and ultimately contributing to preventing higher long-term costs in the child protection system. Being pressured into formal child and youth protection reporting and court orders in order to gain such assistance should not be how we address this issue.
We also need to remember, of course, that this is all happening on the lands of the Ngunnawal, Ngambri and Ngarigo peoples. It is all well and good to make symbolic
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