Daniel Wills: Families SA split is a humiliating backdown for Jay Weatherill

THIS is a humiliating backdown for the Premier — forced to dismantle a pet project launched on the very first day of his leadership — the combined Education and Child Protection Department.

Premier Jay Weatherill speaks to the media on Wednesday, as he announces Families SA will be split off from the Education Department. Picture: Simon Cross

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THIS is the most humiliating of backdowns for Premier Jay Weatherill, as he is forced to dismantle a pet project launched with pride on the very first day of his leadership.

Mr Weatherill, both a former education and child protection minister, had ambitions to make improving the lives of the state’s most innocent and disadvantaged a major achievement of his premiership. Instead, it has become one of the State Government’s most shameful failures.

This is, in all and brutal fairness, one of the most challenging areas in all of government.

The child-protection system deals daily with stories of absolute despair and injustice.

Its core business is taping together lives that have been broken from the start by neglect and seeking to salvage what they can for children who lost out on the lottery of birth.

The task for the Government is not to eliminate all suffering, but to minimise it as far as humanly possible. The royal commission already makes clear it has fallen badly short.

Mr Weatherill’s record of ministerial portfolios left him uniquely positioned to understand what factors put children in peril and what the Government could best do to help them.

He has been at the Cabinet table discussing the House of Horrors disaster and findings of the Mullighan inquires. He has been responsible for Families SA and the education department.

Mr Weatherill both created the failed super-department, and oversaw its dysfunctional parents.

What’s most striking in the timeline of travesties that have beset the Education and Child Development Department over the past five years is how little is learnt from each of the tragedies.

They all follow the same depressing and familiar script, where only the ensemble cast changes.

Whether it’s the Debelle inquiry case of parents being left in the dark about the arrest of an out of school hours care rapist, or monster paedophile Shannon McCoole being hired as a Families SA worker, the common theme is a contemptible culture of ignorance and cover-up.

Something bad happens, then the department goes into lockdown and feeds false or incomplete information to a minister who then misleads the public and shields themself with an inquiry.

In the heartbreaking case of Chloe Valentine, a sweet and beautiful child was left with her drug-taking deadbeat mum despite more than 20 notifications to Families SA. She ultimately died.

While the cause of the problem in each case is an evil or derelict individual, the magnitude of the problem is amplified by either the direct incompetence of government or its own neglect.

This culture of failure and apathy must be broken down if anything is to ever change.

It is a common trick for ministers to hold their departments at arm’s length and beat them when things go wrong. One wonders what job ministers have if not to create professional cultures.

After 14 years, it’s almost impossible for the Government to put daylight between its long-term stewardship of the public service and toxic cultures which have grown or been fostered within.

Despite starting with the most pure of intentions, there’s now no one else left to blame.