Ms ROSOL (Bass) – Honourable Speaker, I rise to speak tonight about something that is very close to my heart, which is foster and kinship carers. Close to my heart because I am a foster carer and also because carers do amazing work. This week is Foster Care Week.
We hear a lot of negativity about child safety services and rightly so. We are experiencing incredible understaffing, under‑resourcing, and we know from the commission of inquiry that there have been significant issues in child safety services. Throughout all that, however, foster and kinship carers keep on doing what they always do, caring for Tasmania’s children who are in need and who are vulnerable. I would go so far as to say that foster carers are the backbone of our childcare system and we would not have a child‑safety system without them.
Our child‑safety system relies on the goodwill, determination, strength, commitment and kind‑heartedness of carers who consistently go above and beyond. They experience many difficulties in their role as foster and kinship carers, including a lack of support. They are at the bottom of the pile with minimal rights and almost no protections. They manage incredibly difficult behaviours with minimal support and very rarely get a break. We know that there are few respite carers available at the moment and so that means that long term carers are left with very few opportunities to take a break from what is very stressful work.
Foster carers and kinship carers often face long‑term uncertainty for the future, not knowing what might happen to the children in their care and living with that uncertainty, sometimes for years. Foster carers are effectively providing case management themselves a lot of the time. We know that there are not enough child‑safety officers at the moment, and that means that many children are unallocated, do not have CSOs, and foster carers are left holding the pieces in those situations and do the work of a case manager.
Foster carers and kinship carers are constantly fighting for resources, for healthcare for the children in their care. They have often received minimal, formal or meaningful recognition for what they do. DECYP talk a lot about children needing to be known, safe, well and learning, and that is one of the key lines from DECYP about what their goal is for caring for children. It is safe to say that without foster and kinship carers, that simply would not happen.
Foster and kinship carers have children in their home, they know those children. They keep those children safe, they do what it takes to ensure that those children can be well, and they look after their learning and help them get to school. The majority of children in out‑of‑home care are known, safe, well and learning because of foster and kinship carers putting in the hours, advocating for the children in their care, supporting them, and providing a safe space.
While I am here, I also want to mention the Foster and Kinship Carers Association Tasmania (FKAT). They are the peak body for foster carers in Tasmania and provide support to foster carers and kinship carers across the state. They put in huge numbers of hours of informal support that they are not funded for. They are a voice for carers, constantly advocating for carer needs, and advocating for the children in care. They provide training to foster carers and they are also involved in providing resources to carers. At the moment they are working on a review of the Foster Carers Handbook and they have also contributed to the Who Can Say OK in Tasmania? guide, which was launched today by the Department for Education, Children and Young People.
In this Foster Carers Week, the Greens say heartfelt thanks to all the fostering kinship carers who are providing amazing support and care to children in out of home care in Tasmania. We are incredibly grateful for what you do, and we honour you in that work. Thank you.
