Derryn Hinch (Victoria, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate notes that—

(a) seventeen children in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services in Victoria died between July and September this year;

(b) six children who were Department of Health and Human Services clients in Victoria were killed by 'non­-accidental trauma' last year; and

(c) outsourcing the care and welfare of our most vulnerable children should be reviewed.

In my first speech back in September, I talked about a dream project which I fervently believe would improve the quality of life for thousands of Australian children. It would improve their quality of life, their health, their education and their physical safety and help protect them from sexual predators both at home and in government institutions. It was part of a campaign pledge by the Justice Party to push for a Senate inquiry, if not a royal commission, into the Family Court and all child welfare agencies. In this house, I will also work towards building the Australian child protection agency, the ACPA, which would eventually absorb all state and territory child welfare agencies.

I said at the time:

I know we are a commonwealth of states, but it is madness, it is Noddyland, when a father can break a little boy's arm in Sydney and change states and kill that child in Adelaide, because medical records in New South Wales were not available in South Australia. That is mad.

I zero in on state and territory child welfare agencies because children are being put into foster care who should not be, children are being taken out of foster care who should not be and children are being returned to abusive parents who should not be. When you hear about veteran foster carers who will no longer take children over the age of three into their homes because 'by then they are not saveable', you know the system stinks.

The institutions we have set up to supposedly protect, shelter, feed and clothe state wards are nests of scandal and abuse. Girls, barely into their teens, are ignoring curfews, roaming the streets, being bribed with alcohol and drugs and getting pregnant—and they are 12 and 13 years old. This is nothing new, but I believe it is getting worse. I say it is nothing new because, more than 20 years ago on 3AW in Melbourne, I was exposing cases of young girls at Berry Street, petrol sniffing and trading sexual favours for cigarettes and booze.

Most of the cases I will detail tonight concern Victoria, but my office has heaps of emails and information from New South Wales and Queensland. Sadly, I believe that South Australia is probably the worst state in this country for abused and neglected children—especially when their attackers have been like foxes in the chicken coop, employees of the very agency that was supposed to protect them. And I am not forgetting the welter of child abuse cases in the Indigenous community in Queensland, the Northern Territory and WA.

Some of the horrors and failures of our current system were detailed in that FourCorners expose last month, highlighting yet again the failures at state and federal level. In Victoria, we have personally discovered that the Minister for Families and Children has been tested and found wanting. If frantic parents have been given the same mushroom treatment and brush-offs that my staff have by the responsible minister, Jenny Mikakos, and her staff, then I can understand their frustration and their fear for the safety of their children. I have names, ages and addresses of all the kids I am going to talk about, but I will not use them in order to protect those children. I will fudge some of the details to hide that identification.

Earlier this month, The Herald Sun had some statistics that make a mockery of the term 'the lucky country'. They would be more understandable, though no more acceptable, in the most remote recesses of a Third World country. The Herald Sun reported that 17 children in the care of DHHS—the Department of Health and Human Services—died between July and September this year. Seventeen children died in three months! A total of 45 children 'known to the department', as they say, died in the year to June 30. One-in-six children found to be abused or neglected last year had previously been identified as 'at risk' by child protection in the same year. Their previous cases had been closed before the new abuse was found—nothing to see here, just move along. Six children, who were DHHS clients, were killed by 'non-accidental trauma' last year. This is an appalling state of affairs.

I will give you some detailed examples. How about the boy who has lived safely with his grandmother since he was three months old? He has medical problems and learning difficulties because he was malnourished and neglected after birth. His mother was, and still is, an ice addict, and she is facing criminal charges for burglary. Her partner is also an ice addict. He also has guns and hunting knives in the house—a great family environment for a little boy. The grandmother got temporary custody of the child but has now been ordered to return him to his drug-addict mother. That grandmother and child are now in hiding.

If not given back to the mother, I guess that boy could be placed in government authorised residential care—what the kids call a 'resi'. These are run by private management companies, and I will get to that issue later. These units are supposed to keep vulnerable children safe. They are placed into privately-funded homes. Typically, each house accommodates four-to-five children, with only one staff member to oversee their needs. One former carer told us that absconding, drug and alcohol problems, theft and damage are a daily occurrence. It has been reported that some young female occupants are targeted by men on dating websites. Subsequently, those men turn up at the homes, take the teenagers away and, in some cases, do not return for days. Within less than a year, two girls have become pregnant.

I mentioned the Four Corners report, the result of a three-month investigation. Look at some of their cases. Renee is 17 years old and has been a ward of the state since she was a five-month-old baby. In that time she has lived in a number of homes and remained in one foster home until she was 12. This care arrangement broke down and she went into a resi house. Renee said that in this place police would be called once or twice a week. There were assaults among the children, sexual assaults, property damage and intimidation. While in resi care, Renée reported frequent screaming, which attracted frequent visits from the cops. She had anger outbursts too in that environment. She said the kids got little to no encouragement to go to school. There was no sex education, which resulted in numerous teenage pregnancies.

Renee turns 18 in February. She says she looks forward to moving into 'a home, instead of living in a house'. But what will really happen? What I worry about with Renee, who at 18 will leave residential care, is: where does she go? What does she do? She has no money, no education, no licence, not even a birth certificate. She wants a home, she wants love and she wants a future. Where will she find that?

Natalie Ottini was a youth care worker who Renee trusted. She worked for a group called Life Without Barriers. She is also from a broken home and has been on workers comp for 18 months due to what she experienced in a Life Without Barriers home. When first employed by that organisation, she thought it would be the best job in the world. She pictured herself counselling, educating, nurturing and inspiring these children. Instead, when entering a Life Without Barriers home, Natalie said, 'I thought I was living in a bubble.' She could not believe that kids could live like this in Australia. Natalie said that children with high needs are flung between 12 and 13 places and then ultimately end up in a resi house. They are told, 'You are here because no-one wants you.' She said men would turn up at the resi homes and girls would disappear, sometimes for days.

Then there is Amy. Amy has been a ward of the state since she was four years old. She was moved around many homes before being placed in two resi houses. She said there were no rules and there was no curfew, and the majority of kids were not looked after. She claimed they were provided with very little clothing. She also got pregnant. Karah Anderson, a former Life Without Barriers youth worker, reported being in ambulances and in hospitals and attending to kids who had attempted suicide. It was Karah who got a call in the middle of the night from the hospital that Amy had been admitted to when expecting to give birth. Karah sat with her for three days until her baby was born. Horribly, soon after the birth, the baby died. Karah says she will never work in a resi care facility again.

I may sound like I am drawing a long bow here, but this is sounding to me a lot like the refugees on Manus and in Nauru. There has been protracted debate over the morality and safety of the government contracting private companies like Transfield and Serco to run those security systems. There is talk of doing the same with our prisons. But should the care, protection and welfare of vulnerable Australian children be privatised, for God's sake, given to companies like Safe Pathways, Life Without Barriers and Premier Youthworks? These are multi-million dollar operations, and there is evidence that very little of that money is being used to buy food and clothes for these wretched kids.

Janine Holbrow, a former manager at Safe Pathways, claims that children in their housing are not given access to counselling programs and that the taxpayers' money paid to Safe Pathways rarely filters down to the children. Janine resigned in July 2016 and reported that the government was paying the company $100,000 per child per year, and that the organisation, as a whole, turned over $70 million in one year.

At one of the resi homes in Tasmania, they were only given a food budget of $100 per week, and clothes for the children were hardly ever purchased. One child only had only one set of underwear. It was also reported by one former worker that the government used these organisations to offload children they could not place anywhere else, and simply said: 'Give us a price and we'll double it.'

Four Corners reported that Safe Pathways claimed on its website that it required more than $9,000 per week per child to pay for rent, food, utilities et cetera. It also says that it is a 'safe environment for children to recover from past trauma'. Former workers tell me that staff were never trained. A former army medic and aged-care worker, Chris Dawkins, said he was never trained in youth work, as he had been promised. He said he was never briefed about the young boy he was to care for. The kid was five years old, and a care plan was meant to be in place. No care plan ever eventuated. Chris said this boy was evicted from his accommodation, and at one point he personally had to pay for the child's accommodation out of his own pocket. He stated that no counselling, clothing or clinicians were ever provided. Chris resigned, stating, 'What an effing joke.' He saw that same child recently, and, thankfully, he is now in good care. The boy simply said to him: 'Guess what, bro? I've got food.'

These are the most vulnerable kids in Australia we are talking about. Another group charged with housing these children is Premier Youthworks. A youth worker there for five years said that in 2015 the government gave them $550 to $1,700 per day per child, and that in that year they were given a total of $20 million in funding. He reported that the housing was covered in graffiti and human excrement, and that there were holes in the walls and there was damage everywhere. The money never filtered down to care for the children. It was also reported that the government had paid up to $1 million per year per child for those who were deemed to be children with no hope and who no-one else would care for. Those children received little care, no or little education, limited food and not much clothing.

Last year, former Victorian children's commissioner Bernie Geary released a scathing report in relation to resi homes. He concluded that these homes were being used to house the most traumatised and violated children, and that resi was the most unsuitable housing and care for them. He reported that a 14-year-old resi client had been stranded at a railway station and called the home for help, for someone to pick him up. They refused his call and he was subsequently raped.

The Australian public was outraged when the major banks and telecommunications companies outsourced many of their services offshore to India and the Philippines. This outrage led to many companies, including the big four banks, bringing these services back to Australia. Therefore, how can the government and the people of Australia not be doubly outraged that our children have been outsourced to businesses which clearly have scant interest in the care of them, and that are only interested in what money they can make from this misery? If state governments think outsourcing the care and welfare of our most vulnerable children is somehow acceptable, if they think that taking them from families to provide a better life which leaves them uneducated, unloved and uncared for is somehow okay, I believe it is time the federal government stepped in.

Mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles desperately want to be assessed as carers, but they are increasingly being ignored. In the months since I was elected, and with people knowing that I want an inquiry into child welfare agency abuses, my staff have been dealing with family members in relation to their massive concerns in dealing with DHHS. They have met with constituents desperately seeking our assistance, as the DHHS child protection division had either refused to investigate their situation of abuse against their children from another family member or a partner et cetera, or had refused to allow a child to stay with a trusting relative. Instead, they had placed them into foster care or back with the alleged abuser.

These people have also contacted the Minister for Families and Children, Jenny Mikakos, other MPs and senators—all without reply, or they have been dissatisfied with the outcome, as many cases are dropped before they are completed. Out of all the investigations my staff have conducted, only one has received a positive response and outcome from the minister's office and DHHS. That was the case of a baby who was allowed to stay with his grandmother—for now, anyway. We are consistently being stonewalled by the minister's office. Each time my staff send an email to the minister we receive the same standard response, or nonresponse, under the guise of 'child protection laws'.

We have been lied to. Worried parents have been lied to. I will give you an example but delete the father's name, involving a little boy and claims that he has now been physically and sexually abused by his mother's new partner. The case was referred to police and statements were taken, but the department has now closed the file. I received a letter from the minister saying that the father had been contacted 'on numerous occasions to discuss his concerns', yet the father told us this week that he has not heard from them once. Is it any wonder that I want a federal child protection agency and that I want it pronto? I fervently believe that this current system shames us all.