Lauren Novak: Minister Rachel Sanderson must deliver on promise to protect our kids
LAUREN Novak asks how did we get to the point that our child protection system is perceived as being so useless that grandparents believe abducting their own grandchildren might be the only way to keep them safe?
HOW did we get to the point that our child protection system is perceived as being so useless that grandparents believe abducting their own grandchildren might be the only way to keep them safe?
This week, the grandparents of siblings slain in Adelaide’s northern suburbs told how they wished they had simply taken and hidden them.
Instead, Amber, 6, and Korey, 5, were murdered, with their mother Yvette Rigney-Wilson, in 2016 by her then-partner Steven Graham Peet.
“I just wish we had grabbed them,” distraught grandmother Janet Wells said. And she’s not the first to have had the thought.
Belinda Valentine’s granddaughter Chloe died in 2012, aged 4, after repeated concerns were raised with authorities about her welfare. Her family also agonised over whether to take the girl from her mother, Ms Valentine’s daughter Ashlee Polkinghorne.
“We still have people now that say to us, ‘You should have just taken her away’. We were trying to do that but we’d been warned (off) by the police, by the department,” she said. In both cases, children died and their relatives are left racked with guilt that they should have intervened.
But we have a heaving taxpayer-funded system set up to intervene when children are at risk. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been pumped into this system in recent years, following a raft of coronial inquests and royal commissions that found a system “in crisis” needing a major overhaul.
Child Protection Minister Rachel Sanderson campaigned for office on the back of this very idea — the expensive system was broken and her fresh approach could fix it.
Now, four months after voters went to the polls, families affected by child protection failures argue the system is in worse shape than ever.
The Advertiser last week revealed staffing shortages were so dire at the department’s Elizabeth office that, for the first time, social workers temporarily stopped responding to the most serious reports of children at risk.
Staffing shortages are not new. Ms Sanderson repeatedly criticised the former Labor Government for ongoing vacancies in hundreds of positions.
Since coming to office, she has ordered that criteria for hiring staff be expanded so people with qualifications in health or human services are eligible, in addition to social workers. This will definitely help in the long term and is an indication of the approach Ms Sanderson brings to the portfolio.
In Opposition, she focused on searching out ideas that were working elsewhere and meticulously pored over data and reports to try to understand the system’s flaws.
Now she’s the one in charge and her approach is being put to the test.
Big-picture thinking will be needed to turn the system around but staff need help now to ease the pressure. They, and families of at-risk children, are tired of waiting.
As a more immediate response, the department redirected extra staff to its Elizabeth office — but two workers have quit since then. Here is a reminder of a stubborn obstacle to improvement: the job has a major image problem.
It is easy to question who would want the responsibility of triaging a never-ending deluge of reports, ensuring you pick every needle out of the haystack and don’t let anything slip through the cracks.
But the retort that “someone has to do it” has never been truer. Until we as a society learn to stop abusing illicit drugs and alcohol, assaulting each other or ignoring our children, this problem will exist, and we will need generous people willing to try to make a difference.
Adding to workers’ unease is a culture of fear, developed over years.
Coalface workers who are most familiar with the issues are frankly too afraid to speak up. Others have quit in frustration at not being heard.
Ms Sanderson told me she doesn’t want to “go on a witch hunt”. There won’t be any “standover tactics” or “bullying”, she promised.
“There’s been a toxic culture in the department. We don’t want staff living in fear. We will change this culture, but it’s not going to happen in 100-and-something days (post election).”
This pledge could be music to the ears of some long-suffering social workers. Or they may laugh it off wryly as rhetoric they’ve heard before.
But if Ms Sanderson is putting it on record, then I’ll hold her to it — and would want to hear from any worker who subsequently copped retribution for speaking up. As genuine as this new minister appears to be, good intentions aren’t enough. There is much work ahead to convince social workers, foster carers, at-risk children and their families — who have all lost faith in the system — that they will be listened to and change will manifest.
As Ms Wells, who dealt frequently with Ms Sanderson in Opposition but has heard from her only once since the election, put it: “I had faith in that woman to do something”.
You had the ideas, Minister. You made the promises. Now you’ve got the power. Don’t let them down.