Page 1367 - Week 04 - Thursday, 4 April 2019
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that this government’s child protection system has consistently been ranked low in some areas but that in some areas it has actually worsened, such as placement stability and disrupting a placement against a child’s wishes, awareness of transition plans, and overall satisfaction. Minister, what specific factors have caused the ACT to decline from third in the nation to dead last when it comes to mean placement stability and removing children from placements against their will?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I thank Mrs Kikkert for the question. I was very pleased last week to attend the launch of the CREATE Foundation report in the ACT and to have an opportunity to talk to the report’s author and to hear from CREATE, and an excerpt from a young person on their experience in out-of-home care. I regularly meet with young people, including CREATE’s young consultants, and we have other opportunities to meet with young people.
It is a good question as to what has caused changes in the outcomes. Surveys are, of course, a difficult thing, because people are self-selecting in terms of who responds to the survey. But these are very serious issues and ones that we take very seriously. That is why we held a youth roundtable with young people in November 2018 to hear from them exactly what their experience of the out-of-home care system is. Their concerns aligned with both those expressed in the CREATE report and those expressed in the AIHW’s national survey report, that is, young people want better information about decisions that are being made and they want to be involved in those decisions. That goes directly to the point that Mrs Kikkert is making about decisions about where those young people live.
We did also hear some interesting information at the CREATE launch about how information was gathered in different states and territories. It is clear that the way the information was collected in the ACT was slightly different from other jurisdictions. That may have had an impact; nevertheless we take the outcomes of that report very seriously.
It was heartening to hear from the young person that his current situation is one where he is seeing a very positive future for himself as a result of his positive interactions with his case worker and his Australian Childhood Foundation worker and he has a very clear transition plan.
MRS KIKKERT: Minister, how do you account for the fact that no 15 to 18-year-olds in the 2018 survey reported being aware that they had a transition plan out of care?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I thank Mrs Kikkert for the supplementary. When I heard that on the radio, I was obviously concerned about that. But having looked at the report, it is clear that a small number of young people indicated that they believed they did not have a transition plan. The vast majority of young people in the ACT survey said they did not know whether they had a plan or not.
One of the things that I spoke to the researcher about was the language that we use when we talk to young people. Discussing transition from out of home care is a sensitive topic and a difficult one to have conversations with young people about. I
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