‘Foster families, not protection officers, the answer to Indigenous children in care crisis’

For every 1000 Indigenous children in Victoria, 103 are in state care, compared with a national average of 58 per 1000, and a rate of 4.7 per 1000 non-Indigenous children.

The chief executive of Victoria’s largest provider of foster care has urged state governments to focus on supporting community organisations such as his to support the families of at-risk children, rather than hiring more child protection workers. Anglicare Victoria chief Paul McDonald’s comments come after the state’s Auditor-General found children were being put at risk because the Department of Families Fairness and Housing is not properly monitoring their safety in kinship care, in a report tabled in parliament last week.

Thousands of the children affected are Indigenous, with a higher proportion of Indigenous children in Victoria in state care than in any other ­jurisdiction.

“Governments in a child protection crisis announcing they’re going to get more child protection workers is not the answer,” Mr McDonald said. “What we’ve got to do is put the right workers in the right places.”

Mr McDonald said programs such as Anglicare’s Functional Family Therapy initiative had shown that community organisations working closely with families could have strong positive outcomes.

“A whole range of parts of family functioning improve,” Mr McDonald said.

“School attendance goes up, routines increase. Basically, it’s an approach where the worker is inside the family home and working with all members of the family to address staying together and functioning well.

“One of the things that the Auditor-General’s report shows is that child protection is too stretched, and thus it’s not doing all of its functions well. We want the child protection workforce to do what it does well, and that is investigate allegations and notifications of harm and neglect to the child within families, and allow us to do what we do well, which is supporting families.”

Mr McDonald welcomed Andrews government legislation that will require judges, social workers and bureaucrats assessing child protection cases to weigh up the impact that colonisation and intergenerational trauma has had on vulnerable Aboriginal families in Australia.

The legislation is being introduced at a time when 103 of every 1000 Indigenous children in Victoria are in state care, compared with a national average of 58 per 1000, and a rate of 4.7 per 1000 for non-Indigenous children.

Anthony Carbines (right) was recently replaced as Child Protection Minister. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Andrew Henshaw

Asked on Thursday why his government was failing current and future generations of Indigenous Victorians so monumentally, while focusing on attempting to address the wrongs of previous generations through initiatives such as a treaty process, Premier Daniel Andrews said he was “not going to apologise” for intervening to place children in care where necessary.

He referred a question on why Victoria has the worst rates of state care for Indigenous children of any jurisdiction in the nation to then child protection minister Anthony Carbines, who was on Monday replaced in the portfolio by former speaker Colin Brooks – the fourth child protection minister in as many years.

A government spokeswoman said Labor was “committed to reducing the over-representation of Aboriginal children involved with child protection and placed in care”, including meeting the Closing the Gap agreement target to cut the rate of over-repre­sentation of Aboriginal children in care by 45 per cent by 2031.