South Australia’s horrific string of child protection disasters

PREMIER Jay Weatherill’s plan for one giant bureaucracy to oversee both education and child protection has ended in ignominy. We track the unfolding horror story that ended so badly for so many.

Jay Weatherill’s plan for one giant bureaucracy to oversee both education and child protection has ended in ignominy.

• SPLIT: Families SA to be separated from Education Department
• RESHUFFLE: Major shake-up of state government chief executives
• DEVIANT: Chance ‘wasted’ to catch Familes SA paedophile Shannon McCoole

PREMIER Jay Weatherill spent almost a decade sitting in Cabinet meetings, pondering a plan of action for the day he fulfilled his destiny and settled into the big chair at the head of the table.

On that long-awaited day — October 21, 2011 — he held a press conference in the Balcony Room of State Parliament and laid out a major reshuffle of both Cabinet and the bureaucracy.

After spending years in the key ministerial portfolios of both education and child protection, and commissioning major inquiries into the abuse of the innocent, he determined the best way forward was a merger of both departments to help track children from the cradle to adulthood.

This hulking new bureaucracy was to have both a bird’s-eye view of the challenges that confront troubled children, and the tools needed to swoop in to save them from harm in their own homes.

Now, the entire thing will be dismantled. The thought experiment has failed dismally in practice, and a Premier’s pride has been shattered by the brutal and direct finding of a Royal Commission.

Perhaps the most condemning line in Child Protection Systems Royal Commissioner Margaret Nyland’s statement, which will be followed by a full report in coming weeks, was that nothing short of a “serious and profound shift in leadership and culture” will do.

The problems on the frontline, she implies, flow right down from failures at the top.

Minister’s head rolls

The first wheels started buckling during parliamentary Question Time on October 30, 2012.

Left-aligned Labor MP Grace Portolesi had been given the task of overseeing the new super-department in a huge promotion during the reshuffle unveiled just over a year before.

Grace Portolesi with Jay Weatherill ... she was sacked within three months.

As a former chief of staff to Mr Weatherill, her appointment was widely seen as both payback for past loyalty and a way for the new Premier to maintain full influence over his pet project.

In a fiery and confused Question Time, Ms Portolesi batted away Opposition suggestions the Government had failed a western suburbs school community by not telling them about the arrest and jailing for six years of an out-of-school-hours carer who had raped a young student.

“I am advised that, given the sensitive nature of the incident and on advice of SAPOL, who I have to say do an outstanding job, the school did not send information to the community about this incident — on the advice of SAPOL,” Ms Portolesi told the House.

Within hours, SA Police took the extraordinary step of issuing a statement contradicting the minister and insisted the school principal was “advised by police that she should consult with DECS (the Education Department) to formulate a method of advising the school community”.

Within three months, Ms Portolesi would be sacked and a Royal Commission set rolling.

For almost a year, the Government was strangled of oxygen as the Opposition and its then-education spokesman David Pisoni set about exposing an almost endless series of cases of parents and children who felt wronged by the system.

With an election looming in the autumn of 2014, almost every day of news was dominated by uncomfortable stories of abuse and neglect which overwhelmed almost every attempt from Mr Weatherill to find a circuit-breaker.

Futile search

A parliamentary inquiry called by the Liberals and Upper House crossbench examined, in painstaking detail, the testimonies of parents like Danyse Soester, a parent at the school fearful of what remained unknown, and a suite of Labor staffers were dragged in for a grilling.

A mysterious email about the incident received by Mr Weatherill’s office, which the Liberals believed may have provided the smoking gun needed to bring down a premier, was never found.

Staff could recall receiving it, but had no recollection of who it was passed on to.

The records had been wiped, and even top computer experts couldn’t track the email down.

The entire government strained under the weight of the political assault, and the final outcome of former Supreme Court justice Bruce Debelle’s was absolutely scathing.

Mr Debelle found Ms Portolesi was fed incorrect information on the incident by the department, and there was “nothing that justified” keeping the child abuse incident secret from parents.

It also painted the picture of a department in disarray, where lax records were kept and a culture of cover-up had developed that put a higher value on protecting staff than serving parents.

And the man in charge of that department, UK ring-in Keith Bartley, jetted home a month later and left former top policeman Tony Harrison in the chair to clean up the mess.

New minister

Another inheritor of this off-the-rails freight train was Labor MP Jennifer Rankine, who stepped in to take over as education minister in January 2013 and oversaw the response to Debelle.

Jennifer Rankine became Education and Childhood Services Minister in 2013.

After the Government was returned at an election in March the following year, and its record of child protection breakdowns failed to feature at the ballot box, the waters began to calm.

Ms Portolesi lost her marginal seat in Adelaide’s inner east, and the caravan moved on.

Evil uncovered

Then came the most crushing catastrophe of them all, and revelations that put Adelaide at the centre of an international child pornography ring led by a trusted Families SA worker.

Shannon McCoole was locked away for 35 years.

The crimes are just as hard to read, recount and comprehend now as they were on July 23, 2014.

A man now named as Shannon McCoole, and locked away for 35 years in prison with a non-parole period of 28 years, committed a horrifying list of sex offences against young children in his care. They were as young as 18 months old. One had autism. Another was disabled.

During the court case that concluded in August last year, he was described as the “CEO” of an international child pornography website with more than 1000 members. He would share videos and photos of him abusing his victims with fellow paedophiles around the world.

District Court Judge Paul Rice, for a lack of any stronger language, branded McCoole “evil”.

But having arrived at that point, we await a ruling on the Government’s culpability.

No red flags

In now-infamous language which may haunt the Premier, the public was told on the day of the arrests that a Royal Commission would be called and there were no red flags on McCoole.

Ms Rankine said of employment screening checks: “The first thing I asked myself was how, with all of these things in place, could someone get through all of those checks with no indication”.

That reassuring explanation too, quickly disintegrated as sunlight was applied.

The Advertiser revealed over the week following the arrest that McCoole had been investigated by Families SA over an incident of alleged rape, but later cleared and promoted.

It has also emerged that his psychological testing revealed risks which could have been further investigated by the department prior to his employment, and had him turned away.

That complete breakdown in the departmental chain of command, which led Ms Rankine to utter public falsehoods, claimed another scalp in a script identical to the Bartley disaster.

No answers

Families SA boss David Waterford fell on his sword, saying he only “skimmed” key documents and “misinterpreted information on one page because I had not read another critical section’’.

Former Families SA boss David Waterford.

“This failure caused me to honestly but inaccurately brief the minister,” he said.

“I believe that as a consequence, the minister made certain statements that were inaccurate.’’

Neither he nor the Government have ever clarified what the public has been told that was incorrect.

Even when the court case was complete, they refused to cough it up. We’re left to guess.

Those answers may become clearer when Ms Nyland reports on August 5. Or maybe not.

Last year the findings of the Coroner’s inquiry into the 2012 death of Chloe Valentine, who was made to ride motorbike and died from multiple injuries after repeatedly falling off, brought crushing confirmation that the system remained “broken and fundamentally flawed”.

Coroner Mark Johns thundered that “nothing less than a massive overhaul of Families SA and its culture and training of its staff will be sufficient”. He added that the agency “took the path of least resistance” in dealing with Chloe’s drugged-out mother despite more than 20 warnings.

Ignorance was no longer a defence, he ruled. The department was told, and failed to act.

Jay’s “fresh start”

Mr Weatherill is the only member of the current Cabinet to have been a minister for the entire 14-year life of the Government. Four-and-a-half of those years have been spent as premier.

Another three were in families and communities, three in early childhood, and one in education.

Mr Weatherill both built the new super-department and ran those which comprise it.

On Tuesday, he said the child protection system now had the opportunity for a “fresh start”.

“It’s definitely a system that is in need of dramatic reform,” Mr Weatherill conceded.

“The changes that were put in place, there’s no doubt that they haven’t worked.

“It was my idea, I put it in place and it hasn’t worked, so I have to accept responsibility for it.”