Daniel Wills: SA’s child system hits new low

NO. Not again. When will this horror end and is anyone prepared to take responsibility?

• 11 carers returned to work with kids despite red flags
• Analysis: On a disaster scale of one to 10, this latest scandal is 9.9
• Child protection bombshell: Another carer charged with sex offences
• Nyland report: 260 recommendations for SA child protection system

NO. Not again. When will this horror end and is anyone prepared to take responsibility?

Readers today must be shaking their heads in complete and utter despair at what now seems an almost mangled child protection system which continually fails the state’s most vulnerable.

After countless reviews — including a scathing royal commission that’s only months old and inquiries by the coroner, a judge and former police commissioner — another Families SA worker has been arrested over allegations of sexually abusing vulnerable children in his care.

It is gut-wrenching, sickening news and the horror of these alleged crimes is compounded by the obvious conclusion that the people in charge of a shattered system have been unable to fix it.

When monster paedophile Shannon McCoole was arrested for the sexual abuse of seven vulnerable children, and spreading the evidence throughout the most debased corners of the internet, the entire state was left reeling over how such an individual could go undetected.

As evidence to the royal commission unfolded, it became clear that a culture of cover-up and neglect within Government agencies could and should have stopped him much sooner.

Government claims that McCoole offered no warning signs were revealed as absolute crap.

Should the allegations revealed in the Sunday Mail on Sunday be proven true in a court of law, then an even darker and depressing reality confronts us. A system which seemed to have hit rock-bottom has sunk even further and shows no capacity for learning or improvement.

In the latest case, the Barossa man was charged with multiple counts of abuse that are alleged to have occurred after he returned to work — despite having been red flagged during a high-level review.

A high-level review, it should be noted, that was delivered in 2014 when the McCoole allegations were known and which the responsible minister has only read in recent months.

The Government possessed information that showed there was a risk, forfeiting any limp defence of ignorance, and may have made a terrible misjudgment in having dismissed it.

Yesterday, neither Education and Child Development Minister Susan Close nor her most senior bureaucrat was able to give guarantees that other predators weren’t lurking within the system.

To this point, Premier Jay Weatherill and his ministers have batted away direct personal accountability and held up the now-countless reviews as evidence of their willingness to face up to scrutiny. The Opposition has unsuccessfully called for resignations and, despite a few heads rolling in departments, there has been close to no political price paid for repeated failures.

Tragically, this is in part because party hardheads don’t think these issues move votes.

And that view, which seems proven by the poor electoral showing of candidates who ran against the Government on child protection platforms at the last election, is cause for deep concern.

Voter pressure is one of the few, sometimes only, things that politicians actually respond to.