Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

I am grateful that the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs is here heckling me during this debate. She might actually want to do something about an issue relating to children at risk and children at risk funding. I have been contacted by the directors of the Kids Paradise Child Care Centre and by families in the community that I represent who are very concerned about a family with three children that is under great stress. Two of the children attending that childcare centre found themselves needing to be removed from their mother and placed in foster care. Had these children been assigned to a selfless family to receive that foster care, they would have continued to receive children at risk funding and the financial support of the Commonwealth. Instead, those children are being cared for by their grandparents. Those grandparents, who are not at all wealthy, who are in need of the support that would have otherwise been available had they been foster carers, are denied that support.

These children have been provided with a loving and caring household in a reasonably familiar family environment. Under the current regime that the minister at the table is overseeing, that family, those grandparents, are denied the very support that would help them in their role of caring for those children at risk. I am hopeful that she will turn her mind and focus in on that issue rather than playing the blame game. I have written to her about it—

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