Ms ROSOL (Bass) – Honourable Speaker, I rise to speak about the question I asked in question time this morning and the answer that was given. This morning I asked the Premier a question about the future of children in Tasmania and highlighted that there are children in Tasmania who are being let down at the moment. Our child safety services and youth justice services are not being funded sufficiently. When I asked that question, the Minister for Children and Young People interjected that there was $30 million going into child safety services and that this was an ongoing commitment year by year.
That does not deny or get rid of the problem, and the fact that services are not being funded sufficiently. I have to say it was really disappointing hearing the Premier’s answer this morning. I felt that it was quite a brush-off of a really serious issue.
He started by saying he agreed with the sentiment and then he went on to answer a really serious question by talking about things that were not related to the question that I had asked. At the very end of the question he turned things political by saying, ‘Well, the Greens this and the Greens that’. This is a much bigger issue than politics. This is about the children of Tasmania.
At the moment there are enormous problems happening with children and with families. I have been in contact with a lot of community organisations that are providing services to families who are in really difficult situations, and they repeatedly tell me that there is an increase in the complexity of the issues that they are dealing with. They are funded based on funding figures from quite some time ago when the complexity was much less than what it is now, and their funding no longer covers what they need to do to support families.
We know that there are high numbers of children in out-of-home care who have no child safety officer allocated to them. When we asked, I think it was in budget Estimates last year, it was up in the hundreds of children with no child safety officer who were being managed in teams, and often those teams do not have a qualified social worker allocated to that team.
We know that there are slow responses from the Advice and Referral Line. We know that people are phoning up and doing the right thing, referring on families and situations where support is needed, and that response is being delayed, so families are not getting the support when they need it. We know that there are increased cases currently being referred by the Advice and Referral Line to child safety.
A few months ago there was a really significant increase – I believe it was a doubling in the number of children who were being referred through, but what we have seen more recently is that there has been a tripling in six months of the daily average cases of children who are pending a child safety assessment. So the referral has been made by the Advice and Referral Line through to child safety and then it is sitting there and not being allocated and not being assessed.
They are really concerning figures, and I just want to put on record how concerning and troubling it is to hear this constant talk about how the stadium is going to be wonderful for the future of our state, and yet the futures of the children of Tasmania are being impacted by a lack of resources, a lack of investment in services and a lack of funding. We cannot do this in Tasmania. It is not acceptable to have children and families missing out on the support that they need. It makes a long-term difference in their lives. It sets them on really difficult trajectories.
We could be doing more, we need to be doing more and the Greens call on the government to not just look at the funding that they are putting in, but to look at the need and make sure that the funding that they give matches the need. They need to look at that in the context of a stadium that is going to take masses of funding and say, ‘We can do better for Tasmanians; we can do better for children; we can fund the services they need; and we can make a real transformational difference to their future by changing our priorities’.
