Child safety Qld: Investigation to look into failures of state’s $1.1bn program
A Far North MP has accused large out-of-care home providers of gaming the system to “rake in rake millions in profits” as the LNP makes good on a promise to investigate a “broken” Child Safety system.
Cairns
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A Far North MP has accused large out-of-care home providers of gaming the system to “rake in rake millions in profits” as the LNP makes good on a promise to investigate a “broken” Child Safety system.
Child Safety Minister Amanda Camm has announced Federal Court Judge Paul Anastassiou will lead the 17-month inquiry into shocking failures in the $1.12bn care industry where children are suffering “generational trauma”.
Locally, Cook MP David Kempton said over one in four children in care in Queensland are in the Far North.
“There are many loving dedicated hard workers in our community being paid a pittance to care for children at risk,” he said.
Mr Kempton took aim at large companies exploiting the system, pointing the finger at the former government.
“The problem is not the carers but the large companies that have been allowed to rake millions in profits from Labor’s broken system.”
Previously the Far North has been the source of horrific claims of child-on-child abuse, and exploitation and failures by Cairns-based residential care houses including the death of 14-year-old Bradley Smith, understood to be living in resi care when he died after a stolen car crashed into a tree on Pease St in 2023.
A newly released 2024 Children in Care Report revealed, of the more than 3000 children in out-of-home care across Queensland, half had previously been physically abused and four in five had been emotionally abused.
Ms Camm said the state government had placed children into a system created “almost to re-traumatise” them and then turned a blind eye.
An increase in children entering the system since 2015 and significant decline in foster carers resulted in a major increase to the number of young people in residential care.
At December 31, 2212 children were languishing in residential care – a 240 per cent increase on the 650 kids in 2015.
Ms Camm, for the first time, declared it was “absolutely” her commitment to reduce that number.
She said the child safety system had been turned into a billion-dollar industry “created for private companies to come in and profit on the back of vulnerable children”.
Almost half of children in care experienced physical abuse before entering the system, 11 per cent had been sexually abused, and almost all had been neglected.
Of the children in care, one-third have an undiagnosed mental illness.
Half of young people in care with a youth justice order have self-harmed and 40 per cent had attempted suicide.
The bleak statistics are despite funding for non-family-based care exploding from $200.7m in 2014-15 to $1.12bn in 2024-25.
The huge increase in expenditure has not resulted in improved oversight of the companies contracted to provide care.
Ms Camm sensationally declared she had “no confidence” the majority of providers were doing the right thing.
“The size of the contracts that I have been briefed upon that I now see is why I recommended to the government the need for a commission,” she said.
“My concern is the quantum of funding that they are receiving and the heavy reliance on that. “Those children’s experience is not one that is positive and that is as a result now of a system created almost to re-traumatise them and in fact put them at risk as well.”
A forensic audit is under way into one unnamed service provider that paid $5.2m in dividends to three shareholders after receiving “tens of millions of dollars” from the state government.
The company hiked its “management fees” by 1000 per cent.
Ms Camm said the government was almost powerless to act against providers exploiting the system.
“I can’t just go and move 90 children out of one placement with one company,” she said.
“I don’t have the foster carers there to take those children.”
The declining number of foster carers has correlated with an increase in the number of children in residential care.
Ms Camm said foster care offered a better environment than a “youth worker on a rostered shift looking after a five-year old” in residential care.
“There’s nothing in this world as a mother that correlates to me as to why that would be a better designed level of care and at a cost of $35,000 per placement with foster carers who want to do this work … they’re amazing, doing amazing things,” she said.
“To have a bias towards placements that are costing over $300,000 per annum and not delivering the outcomes for children, and in fact putting them in potentially more vulnerable situations.
“I want to know when that started, who made those decisions … and why did no one intervene year-on-year as that was growing?
“They just continued to fund what is now more than a billion-dollar industry. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Queensland’s peak body for child and family services, Peak Care said the non-government sector has long called for the Queensland Government to fix its crippling over reliance on residential care which has resulted from decades of under investment in prevention, early intervention, and contemporary approaches to family-based care.
They identified in June 2024, through the Preserving a Vital System: Foster Care Demographics report, that the significant decline of foster carers in Queensland and the impacts of cost of living and housing in particular was seeing a reduction in the numbers of people applying to be foster carers.
“While I welcome today’s announcement of a Commission of Inquiry, I urge the Queensland
Government to learn from previous inquiries and not just repeat the mistakes of the past,”
PeakCare CEO Tom Allsop said.
“It will quickly become clear through the Inquiry that the challenges in Queensland are not a result of the absence of knowing what is needed to create a better system, it is an enduring and entrenched lack of meaningful action by successive governments on the things we know will make the biggest difference.”
“If we’re serious about addressing the issues in the child safety system in Queensland, we need to start by taking early intervention and prevention seriously.
“Central to that is making sure children and their families are supported is during those crucial 0-8 years.”
Government bureaucrats, stakeholders, providers and former Labor ministers are expected to be hauled before the commission of inquiry.
Originally published as Child safety Qld: Investigation to look into failures of state’s $1.1bn program
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