NSW Family and Community Services: From managing disadvantage to breaking it

October 25, 2011

Address to The Sydney Institute.

New Governments have a choice. They can choose business as usual, or they can choose change.

That choice was clear for the Liberal & Nationals Government elected here in NSW on the 26th of March. But when it came to the way our state cared for its most vulnerable and disadvantaged, there was no choice. We simply had to change.

In child protection especially, the outcomes were shocking - billions of dollars in additional spending, regular and growing Budget over-runs, a number of major enquiries recommending various significant reforms and still no improvement in the lives of the children. In fact as many have observed, the outcomes were getting worse.

New South Wales suffered the shame of removing the greatest number of children in Australia and, at more than one in one hundred, the highest rate of removal in the country. Aboriginal children were and still are being removed at a rate eight times higher than that. Children known to the Department continued to die in terrible circumstances at the hands of parents or step parents.

Children removed often went on to repeat the cycle of abuse and neglect as parents themselves.

The intergenerational cycle of disadvantage and poverty was not only continuing unbroken; it was spiralling out.

For all the money and the millions of words over the past sixteen years, dysfunction in all its ugliness has remained. There has been little change in the way government did its work with our most disadvantaged children and young people.

New South Wales has not been alone in this. Increasingly, when confronted with the complexity of deprivation and its resistance to government intervention, no matter how well meant, governments have become weary and wary of change, no longer believing it will or can be for the better. Welfare has increasingly assumed an air of sad resignation; an acceptance that we can do no better.

That is not to say there are not government and other organisations and individuals within them who are determined to move people from despair to hope, from dependence to independence; but they are overwhelmed by a system that has increasingly conspired against them.

In NSW, the former government stopped fighting the damage to families and settled for managing it.

Labor managed it politically by removing children as a first response and by shrouding their work in increasing secrecy and complexity.

The former government managed it in policy terms by doing more of what they had done before.

Despite the potential of hard working staff in government and non-government organisations, Labor did not veer from the path it was on.

So that is in fact the choice we face - do we continue to manage disadvantage, ladies and gentlemen – or do we break it? Shall we continue with a business as usual, “the poor will always be with us” approach, or do we launch ourselves into battle, determined to break the cycle by shifting the way we work.

We need to do so much better for troubled families in NSW and that means understanding why all the money and all the words have made so little difference.

First of all there are clearly a number of sociological factors at work beyond the control of state governments alone.

Australia-wide, birth rates in families with low income, low education and low employment are now significantly higher than the birth rates of high income, highly educated families. The lowest 20% of households by income have an average birth rate of 2.4, whereas the highest 20% of households by income have an average of 1.4 children born. Similar birth rate differentials are also provided by the HILDA survey conducted by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (1).

It means the absolute numbers of disadvantaged people is growing faster than the overall population. Inevitably this puts pressure on educational and public health authorities as well as welfare resources, but it cannot be changed by state governments acting alone.

Access to illegal drugs and alcohol is greater than ever before which not only affects an individuals' capacity to function but in particular to parent. What is more, foetal alcohol and drug related disorders are now recognised to be the largest combined source of intellectual disability in the western world (2). Modern drug and alcohol abuse contributes not only to disadvantage over the life cycle of people afflicted but, very often, also that of their children.

The extent to which state and federal governments work together on these issues is critical in breaking the cycle but is not the end of the story.

We know the risk factors for social and family dysfunction; domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness or cognitive disability overwhelmingly occur in families where children die accidently or by intent. We know there are a range of secondary factors such as the age of the parents, people in the household, social isolation and the incidence of a disability in a child which further add to the risk of a child being harmed.

In other words some contributors to child abuse and neglect and intergenerational disadvantage are clearly within the capacity of state governments to affect and it is these which principally concern me tonight.

While obviously Education and Health programmes are very important in addressing disadvantage, as Minister my focus is the work of the Department of Family and Community Services.

The Department of Family and Community Services, or „FaCS', is one of the 9 clusters in the NSW Government. It includes the divisions of Community Services, Housing NSW - and the Aboriginal Housing Office - and Ageing Disability and Home Care, ably led by my colleague Andrew Constance, the Minister for Ageing and the Minister for Disability Services.

These important services are under one roof to encourage coordination and integration of improved services. Housing, for example, is a central player in the intergenerational cycle of disadvantage and poverty. Safe and affordable homes are central to safe and secure families and children.

When it comes to Government services the easy refrain is the one which calls for more money

Improving services is not about the money. I would like to say that again: it is not about the money.

Spending additional billions has not made Community Services in NSW more effective, as the NSW Ombudsman has confirmed in reports about Community Services and Aboriginal disadvantage over the last months.

Our foster carers are paid more than foster carers in other states, our case-workers are tertiary educated and well trained, and people adopting children have been as generously supported as foster carers. There is an abundance of research and support programmes available in this state. It's just that the system's not working nearly well enough.

In some cases, money has actually got in the way. I was reminded even today, as I listened to a valued and professional executive in Community Services, that finding places to spend the additional millions in years past led to unnecessary spending. Labor's decisions, without real reform, will continue to divert resources from vulnerable children and young people.

Other reasons would be better known to you.

In NSW, government is famously known for its silo mentality, that is, departments not working together but acting independently. This means any number of agencies may be providing services to a family with a drug and alcohol history, a mental health problem, social isolation, joblessness, unstable housing, poor school attendance and a pattern of domestic violence. All in the name of keeping the children safe from harm. But they have not worked together to ensure the assistance is coordinated. It's meant a great deal of money and effort has been wasted - money and effort – and frustration by hard working staff - that could have produced not only better results but for more families and children.

We knew all of that in Opposition and unsurprisingly committed to breaking down the silos and forcing departments to work better together. A big job, but we must pursue it relentlessly and systematically.

There is also the role of the non-government sector. Traditionally in NSW the vast majority of children in foster care have been in government foster care. Programmes designed to help families at high risk have also been government run. Small, nimble privately run organisations, or even large private welfare organisations, have a capacity to think laterally, react quickly and adapt to changed circumstances that the public sector does not and cannot have. For this reason most other Australian child protection jurisdictions rely on the not-for-profit sector to provide the bulk of foster care for example. In NSW, by contrast, the state provides 80% of general foster care!

We are determined to change that - in order to unleash that creativity and responsiveness for our children. There will be plenty of work left for government to do. It will certainly not save the state money but it will mean better lives for our children and young people. Reform must mean the billions are better spent and deliver better lives.

It will also allow our great staff in Community Services to better focus on government priorities, such as statutory responsibilities. By utilising the entire sector's capabilities we can ensure that more government and non-government case workers can see more children more often.

The transfer of out-of-home care, otherwise known as foster care, to the non-government sector is about to begin and success can only come from an enormous amount of effort and, I believe, a determination on all sides to do this in real partnership with one another.

Even so, many non-government organisations providing a myriad of services ranging from drug and alcohol programmes to family support already complain about red tape and needless accountability mechanisms which often get in the way of actually caring for children and their families.

Currently 40% of the Department's budget is spent with non-government and other third party providers. If we are to improve our services and their effectiveness, we need to replace red tape with a working relationship built on trust so that responsibility for service provision and accountability rests clearly with funded service providers. That includes government and non-government providers alike.

It would be disingenuous to say that transferring to the NGOs and better service integration across government are the only reforms needed.

The truth is there is much about the way the Department itself has worked, both as an investigator and as a service provider that has contributed to the stumbling system we now have.

In my view it is important that there be a better understanding of the critical role poor delivery can play in derailing perfectly acceptable or even laudable public policy and outstanding staff.

I might also add that in observing these many administrative shortcomings over the past few months I came to understand the texture of failure of the former Labor government, that it was not confined to its failure to manage FaCS' Budget. Labor's utter failure to take responsibility for a system they had so stuffed with red tape and accountability it could not function as an effective child protection system of any distinction, their failure to question, to think differently or to challenge their departments to do so, stands in my mind as the bigger failure. Labor's mantra of “we're spending more money so it must be better” was an abrogation of leadership.

Labor failed to invest in Community Services' organisational infrastructure. Labor's failure was not just in physical infrastructure, like public transport, and hospitals, their legacy was also to fail to invest in our agencies to work better and smarter.

It is as important to reform public administration in this state as it is to change policy, although the two are of course interconnected. You cannot have good policy that responds to the circumstances confronting us without a culture of continuous improvement, and you can't have that if you don't have an effective and driven department with the right systems.

So let's start with our goals. The Liberals & National's Government's State Plan, NSW 2021 has goals. Goals are supposed to keep governments honest, especially when they are public.

Labor's State Plan talked a lot about disadvantage and programmes but with very few commitments to improved results.

Our State Plan Goals for children are very explicit. They actually involve numbers. We aim for the

• Increased proportion of NSW children who are developmentally on track in Australian Early Development Index domains, being

(i) physical health and wellbeing,

(ii) social competence,

(iii) emotional maturity,

(iv) language and cognitive skills (school–based), and

(v) communication and general knowledge,

• A reduced rate of children and young people reported at risk of significant harm, by 1.5% per year, and

• A reduced rate of children and young people in statutory out–of–home care, by 1.5% per year

Each of these is benchmarked at the time of our election. These State Plan goals are very explicit and specific.

They are a strong demonstration of the higher accountability and transparency we committed to, to reverse and repair Labor's cynical legacy of secrecy and spin.

The people of NSW need their governments to face scrutiny, independent scrutiny, and transparency. Nothing drives reform like the discomfort of accountability.

That is why we are reforming the Child Death Review Team to ensure it is more accountable and independent than before. We forced a reluctant Labor Government to it in Opposition. We promised to fix their half-hearted vindictive transfer. Now we are finishing the job with amendments before the Legislative Council.

There will also be more general scrutiny of child deaths and the role of agencies like Family and Community Services in those deaths.

The Child Death Annual Report is an important new initiative, another election commitment I will fulfil when our first Report is tabled in December this year. This Report will replace the secrecy of the past with a new transparency about the most serious end of child protection work. We will report the number of children known to FaCS who have died, the responses they received from Community Services, the lessons we have learned from reviewing their deaths, and the initiatives we are putting into place to improve both casework practice, and the systems which support best practice. We will also report what we have learned from the review of “near misses” – cases where children were seriously injured or harmed, but did not die.

Public reporting on Community Services response to risk of significant harm reports is another example of the Government putting this commitment into action. We will report on the proportion of reports that children are at risk of significant harm which are closed without assessment, the proportion we assess as safe with their parents, and the proportion who get an early intervention, child protection or out-of-home-care response.

Supporting our first Child Death Annual Report will be a Seminar, on December 14, to discuss with our partners how we can ensure that Community Services becomes a learning organisation.

We must use every child tragedy to improve the way we work to protect vulnerable children, young people and families. We must do better – all of us – re-steel our determination and implement improvements in how we work. An early example of this is the work we are doing now to improve how we assess carers and their partners as suitable for foster care.

Of course a department that is open and transparent about what it does well and badly is still lost if it is incapable of responding to its mistakes or changed circumstances.

Unlike widget making, we are not working here with many practical facts or immutable truths. Families and communities are constantly evolving - mores change, expectations change, technologies change, their problems change. There will never be, at any point in time, the perfect child protection system because the factors affecting it are so dynamic. What we need to be is responsive to those changes, responsive to our mistakes, determined always to do better and understanding what worked once will not necessarily work now.

That means of course we will be looking and learning from other states and internationally, wherever possible. But we also need to be guided by the one immutable truth that child protection is based upon: we need to keep seeing children. We need decision making tools and information systems, sure. These are far from perfect now and will only ever be a part of identifying families at risk and keeping children and young people from harm. But we need to see the children and work with the children. We need that finely trained intelligence and judgment brought to bear.

This requires our caseworkers to actually see children and their families.

If we are to do better we need more case workers seeing more children more often. It remains true that a disconcertingly high number of cases are closed because our caseworkers do not have time to see children.

This is borne out by the Ombudsman's most recent report about child protection which found that despite the extra money and the changed reporting thresholds for children at risk, we were seeing fewer children. He found 25% of cases are closed without any assessment due to workload constraints (3). This is precisely NOT what the reforms were supposed to do.

There are many explanations for this. I have so far met with staff at Community Services Centres around the state and their explanations are always the same - they spend enormous amounts of time photocopying, preparing for court, documenting contacts on a data management system that is cumbersome and slow. External business consultants, commissioned often by the previous Government, confirm this.

So we need to change that. I have asked the Department to trial minimum monthly visits: each caseworker seeing all their children in out-of-home care at least once a month. We will then be able to work out what isn't done, and what should be left undone. Caseworkers will be able to put children first. We will be looking at other ways to help caseworkers do their best.

Although the work of Community Services is very concerned with children in terrible circumstances at high risk of harm or neglect, in fact most of the focus of social policy needs to be earlier, before small problems become crises, and in preventing problems at all.

It is much more difficult to know what prevents child abuse or neglect, or what works best to contain it, than it is to predict demand for transport, water or electricity. For this reasons governments have been increasingly reluctant to invest in prevention or early intervention, despite their obvious importance. Investment has been replaced by lip service.

Arguably good public education and public health services are means of preventing abuse and neglect but there is clearly a need for more targeted policies to disadvantaged families who are less, not more, likely to take advantage of free educational and health services than others. School absenteeism, dropout rates and suspensions are more common in low socio-economic areas than elsewhere, for example. Girls in low income households are much more likely to have children earlier than others, despite the widespread availability of contraception and sex education.

While the NSW Government will continue to invest in early intervention we are looking for others to help us grow the pot.

So we are developing Social Benefits Bonds, where investors are encouraged to buy bonds in a welfare venture aimed at doing good. The investors will be repaid their money, with interest, if the venture can demonstrate it has prevented harm - harm which has a significant cost to taxpayers through government. The Attorney General, who has a deep interest in juvenile justice, has selected reoffending by minors as the preventable harm; I have selected the removal of children into state care.

This a very new approach and has only ever been trialled in the United Kingdom, so a great deal of work is being done to scope a bond and the benefit of preventing a child entering out-of-home care. Nevertheless, I am confident not only that there will be programmes designed to make exactly this difference but that Social Benefit Bonds, properly nurtured, can play an important part in broadening community involvement and resources applied to lifting children and families from lives of despair.

Making early intervention work also relies heavily on everyone working together pulling the levers. By everyone, I mean all of us, not just government departments. For example in the case of teen pregnancies in disadvantaged communities it's not just about access to sex education, it's about giving young women other aspirations and ambitions. They need more, not fewer, options, and education and training alternatives need to be available.

As Minster for Women I want young women who do not go to university to enjoy a wide range of choices and opportunities. Disadvantage is key to the vulnerability of many women. Ultimately through financial independence and freedom we will reduce the distressing rates of domestic violence. Making the trades traditional for women is another key focus to improve women's employment opportunities.

We need to ensure at risk families have housing that avoids the overcrowding often, although not always, associated with child sexual abuse. We need to ensure housing tenants with mental illness or addictions are protected from homelessness by the way Centrelink benefits are structured and delivered. We need to tackle the issue of unemployment among people with disabilities, which is why my colleague Andrew Constance, the Minister for Ageing and the Minster for Disability Services, recently announced a payroll tax rebate to support employment amongst our fellow citizens.

Of course the best way of ensuring at risk families are well managed and assisted with conquering their difficulties is to act locally. To have local organisations provide services and skills instead of relying on a head office machine to plan and execute it from afar.

That's why we have embarked on ensuring that whether it's a local Housing office, Community Services Centre or Aged Disabilities and Home Care office, they are all working together in the same regions, with the same local services and they all know the same families. You might think it's obvious that government departments should all have the same regions but it has never been done in NSW and I am told that it would be the biggest public sector reform in decades if we pull it off. Aged, Disability and Home Care and Housing are leading this work.

I look forward to working with other colleagues to integrate and coordinate government services, not least of all for Aboriginal citizens, as FaCS becomes better integrated and its systems are reformed to improve services.

Make no mistake, outcomes for children in the long term care of the state are often very poor. While removal keeps them from death or violence, it frequently results in youth homelessness, teenage pregnancy, unemployment, poor educational outcomes and living skills and over-representation in the juvenile justice system. For young people leaving care at 18 - and too often they are on the streets before that - there is a lack of permanent family in their lives which is deeply troubling. Again, what happened to young people when they have left care was not part of government thinking, despite the obvious personal and social costs.

So we certainly need to improve the way we prepare disadvantaged adolescents for adulthood but we also need to do better at offering them real and permanent homes with families in them, with ties that bind and endure throughout their lives.

This is why we are keen to promote adoption for foster children.

Extraordinarily, despite the cost of international adoption and the lack of government financial support, in NSW in 2009/10 there were 78 intercountry adoptions and only 48 were domestic adoptions of children in foster care. In fact overseas adoptions have been from twice to 10 times the number of adoptions in out-of-home care over the last decade! This is despite the former government's provision of payments equivalent to foster care, beginning at $18,500 a year.

The 45 out-of-home care adoptions in 2010/11 compares to 17,892 children and young people in out-of-home care in NSW when the O'Farrell Government was elected at the end of March. That's 11 in 1000 or over 1 in 100 children and young people.

As with so much else, Labor assumed if you threw money at a problem it was fixed. The numbers tell a different story. There would be no one in NSW who does not know how difficult it is to adopt a child here, or how long it takes. One of the many process reforms we have embarked upon is ways to streamline and speed up processes and reduce the bureaucracy surrounding adoption. We believe this will lead to more adoptions and better lives for children and young people, including adolescents.

There are any number of other reforms in Family and Community Services that are vitally necessary and we will pursue them.

Staying within financial constraints in some senses makes it easier, but also more difficult. We began with Budget gap bequeathed by Labor of $1.9 billion over 4 years, meaning reform for FaCS includes making it financially sustainable, getting it back in the black. For those who believe budget management is a trivial issue and that we should spend whatever it takes, let me make two points.

First, state governments particularly don't have unlimited resources. Instead they have competing priorities and just like every other part of the government, we need to work within our means. Running a system with unrealistic expectations is neither fair nor just. Indeed building the needy's hopes on a financial house of cards is immoral. Too often good non-government programmes have been closed, or only pilots funded, because finances have not been managed effectively. Social justice demands financial sustainability.

Second, sticking within a budget imposes a reform culture as we are inevitably asked to do more with less. Innovation and creativity are frequent outcomes of scarcity.

Labor's legacy in Housing was a social housing waiting list of 43,000 people, and a public housing maintenance backlog of $300 million.

NSW's ageing housing stock is misaligned to tenants' needs – we have big houses when households have shrunk - and the problems of disadvantage are often entrenched problems in housing estates.

To address this backlog will require billions of additional expenditure - which we don't have - or innovative solutions, which the Government needs to find.

Ladies and gentlemen, I do not underestimate the difficulty of this task, its riskiness and its urgency. The government also appreciates that the death of any child is one too many and that these reforms must only ever make children's lives better and safer.

While I have outlined a number of particular challenges the list is not exhaustive. There are however a number of common themes and on these I will conclude.

Firstly, it is important to test each improvement we make against its contribution to making a child's life better, instead of the usual imperatives of political risk management.

Secondly, the dangers of believing the system is right just as it is. While this is almost never true, it is particularly never true in the dark and complex world of social dysfunction.

We need to build a culture that learns from its mistakes, turns questions on their head, surprises and delights itself with new ideas. By contrast we cannot afford a culture that resents scrutiny, hides its mistakes, holds its knowledge to itself and ignores those who question its philosophy.

Thirdly, we need to stop thinking more money is always the answer. In fact money often gets in the way when it is handled poorly and while it may create more work in bureaucracies, it may not ever reach the ground. Sure, we need enough money, but we need good ideas, shared commitments and enthusiastic front line workers, not discouraged ones who may spend as much time photocopying and at a computer, than seeing children.

Finally, we know that government cannot solve every family problem or dysfunction. To improve the lives of vulnerable children and families,

• the state government is responsible to do its best in serving the public, to work better and smarter to improve services and never stop learning to improve,

• the federal government is responsible for income support and working with state service provision to align all our efforts and programs, and

• families, like us all, are responsible for their choices.

We know there are no silver bullets. We know there is no perfect child protection system. But we need to believe in change and seek to build a culture that thrives on the challenge of continuous change for the better. So long as we remain true to our vision for children, a vision of safe and happy childhood, then no change can harm us.

If that is a challenge for the thousands of staff at the Department of Family and Community Services believe me, it will also be a challenge for government. It means leadership of the daily, not the occasional kind. It means stretching your team and urging them on. It means never thinking we'll get away with it just this once. It means never believing we're there yet.

We need to break disadvantage rather than just continue to manage it. That is the challenge I will hold myself and my colleagues to.

The children and young people of New South Wales and the urgency of arresting the intergenerational cycle of despair demand that we give it our best shot.

1 Wilkins, R., Warren, D., Hahn, M. and Houng, B., 2011, Incomes and Jobs, Volume 6: A Statistical Report on Waves 1 to 8 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne, at http://melbourneinstitute.com/hilda/statreport.html

2 Sebastian, C.S., 2011, “Mental retardation: What it is and What it is Not”, at http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/289117-overview

3 NSW Ombudsman, 2011, Keep Them Safe? A Special Report to Parliament under s31 of the Ombudsman Act 1974, August.