Belinda Valentine: This Government is protecting an entire toxic culture

IT was the case that shocked SA, and forced high-level change — Chloe Valentine, killed by horrific, criminal neglect by her mother and mother’s partner. Her grandmother fought relentless for change within Families SA. Here is her story.

12/6/16 Four people who have been failed by the State Government and its departments come together calling for reform. Belinda Valentine. Picture Roger Wyman

• Jay, we have a problem: Four people failed by our government demand answers

• Chloe Valentine Inquest: Coroner lashes Families SA
• Shocking details of the squalor of Chloe’s home
• Belinda Valentine tells Parliament to better protect children from drug-using parents

I RESPECT that our politicians have had to earn their way to their positions and are well-paid for a job well done.

Right now, I question their pay-packets because, if they’re based on performance, they should be very small.

This Government is not protecting people within the system as much as it’s protecting an entire culture that’s been identified, by coronial inquests, as toxic.

But the problem is that toxic culture is not just within agencies, it’s within the very government that’s running these agencies.

How can we affect change when the leaders of these agencies either belong to this toxic culture or, at the very least, condone it by inaction?

What happened to my granddaughter Chloe could have been called a comedy of errors, had a child not died at the end of it.

What came out of the inquest, day after day, was not only information we’d never heard but decisions that ran against what our family had tried to achieve for Ashlee and Chloe.

When we asked about these decisions we were shut down completely, effectively told our questions don’t matter because we’re not educated in this.

A court-released image of Chloe Valentine.

We’ve been educated in the fires of hell, and we’ve been tempered by them, and the government’s refusal to listen to us shows its ignorance.

We need to have a government of leaders who have emotion, who stand up for people in traumatic situations, who feel for the victims.

That’s what the narrative should be, but the government’s narrative is so blank that it’s like ‘your emotions are of no value to us’.

Yes, we need to take out raw bitterness and anger and pain, but coming up blank tells us we’re not worthy of anything — for me, that’s a really sad state of affairs.

I’m sure they get upset and annoyed every time they see me but I don’t care, I will not be pacified and I will not be placated.

Ours are personal stories of tragedy that could happen to anyone. They do not discriminate.

We all have been failed not only in our tragedies, but in the way this government has treated us afterwards.

I’ve been shut down, I’ve been not listened to and I’ve been told I’m not a textbook expert and they’re right — that’s because I’m the one writing the book.

None of us are ‘unsolicited commentators’, as Attorney-General John Rau called me — we are experts who others hear and say ‘this should be fixed’.

We have a Premier who says he stands for the rights of women and children, but in what way?

Words are cheap, words do not protect people and words can be, ultimately, damaging to those of us who’ve been through hell.

The Premier said, in the lead-up to the election campaign, that he was going to send a message to Canberra — I’d like to see him be as quick to send a message to us.

I want to be able to trust our government, to hear them admit mistakes have been made, to hear them tell us why.

I would like to see a government of heroes, and it’s not a question of resources but of resourcefulness.

Whether we’re a government or a family, we all face financial restraints and we have to be careful, but we also succeed and achieve by being resourceful with what we have.

That’s what we expect our governments to do, and they can do this by showing honesty and compassion.

It’s not about tearing this government down, it’s about building them up to represent us all and our values and be heroes.

More errors, bungles and cover-ups: Read other SA people’s stories of how the system let them down

ANDREW KNOX: ‘Cover-up, deception and disobedience’

BRIDGET WYATT: For a year, BreastScreen SA told me I didn’t have cancer

NATASHA PALMER: Domestic violence — and a failed system — killed my mum