Tuesday, 22 February 2022

Child protection

Dr BACH (Eastern Metropolitan) (12:50): I was deeply disheartened on Friday when I read the government’s response to the scathing report Our Youth, Our Way by the commissioner for children and young people from last year. What she highlighted was an appalling pipeline, if you like, of vulnerable children moving from child protection, almost inevitably, especially when it comes to young Indigenous children, into our youth justice system. Now, our child protection system and our youth justice system are both facing grave challenges, and it is abundantly clear from the government’s response that it simply does not understand this. There are huge backlogs in our courts that have meant that now so many young people are being dumped into youth justice facilities. These are so-called ‘crossover kids’ according to the children’s commissioner.

What we must do in order to support these children is deliver evidence-based mental health initiatives and deliver evidence-based educational initiatives. When we were last in government we established schools—which Labor in their many years in office before then had not deemed fit to do—in our youth justice facilities. Well, under this government they have gone to rack and ruin. We established free TAFE. I understand now that this government has offered its bipartisan support to that Liberal initiative, free TAFE for children in the child protection system, and yet under this government in every vulnerable category those taking up TAFE have gone down. And so it is so important that the new Minister for Child Protection and Family Services and the ongoing Minister for Youth Justice work together to seek to resolve these crises, which are of the making of the Andrews Labor government.