Foster carers’ secret meeting on failures

MORE frustrated foster carers have blown the whistle on systemic issues in North Queensland’s child safety sector at a secret meeting in Townsville.

The group gathered at an unknown location out of fear of reprisal from the Department of Children to raise serious concerns in a hope their experiences would lead to change to better protect vulnerable children.

Opposition child protection spokeswoman Amanda Camm hosted the meeting on Tuesday – the first of many across regional parts of the state. She sat down exclusively with the Bulletin and said she feared an exodus of carers who are at their wit’s end would lead to critical staffing issues despite recruitment pushes.

She said attendees told her not much had changed since senior department executives flew into the city following a Townsville Bulletin investigation in February that revealed the shocking inner workings of the child safety system and unearthed toxic cultural problems, a system in which children are reunified with sexually and physically abusive parents, a lack of accountability and carers in constant fear.

Ms Camm said foster carers told her that the department was not acting in the best interests of children and had reported increased pressure from higher ups after a string of whistleblowers spoke to media about what was happening.

“There is something wrong with the system,” she said.

She said one of her greatest concerns was a practice in which individual staff made key choices for children in care under the banner of “managerial discretion”. Ms Camm said these decisions ranged from approval for children to take antibiotics to whether they are reunified with their family even in complex cases where people in that home have committed prior sex offences.

“From the smallest things to the largest of decisions, there is a practice being called managerial discretion,” she said.

“That discretion is being used in a way that is very inconsistent across decision making. “I see a great risk of a child falling though a gap.”

Ms Camm said failures within the department were putting at-risk kids in even more vulnerable positions, which resulted in many entering the youth justice system and accused the government of using strict privacy provisions that prohibit the identification of the children in care to avoid public scrutiny of problems in the sector.

She said it was time for the government to evaluate what had improved since the 2012 inquiry into Queensland’s child protection services.

“The statistics speak for themselves, there are failures somewhere along the way,” she said.