Wednesday, 29 November 2023

 Matthew BACH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:19): (643) My adjournment matter tonight is for the Minister for Children, and the action that I seek is for her to reinstate the ministerial youth advisory group (MYAG), which has recently been shut down. To its credit, this government established the ministerial youth advisory group back in 2019. This was a group of young people with lived experience in the child protection system. The government said laudable things at that time about how important advice from young people who have been through the system was.

The government committed to bimonthly meetings in its media release at that time, which I am holding. The minister at the time – it was about four or five child protection ministers ago – Minister Donnellan said:

It’s vital we learn from the experiences of Victorians in the child protection system and I look forward to hearing from these remarkable young people …

Well, the house will be dismayed to learn that despite commitments from this government that the MYAG would meet bimonthly, the last meeting was held on 25 May. That is 187 days ago, and the wonderful young people on this group, several of whom have recently spoken to me about it, who respect Minister Blandthorn, as I respect Minister Blandthorn, very much, are desperate to get back into the room to have discussions with her about how to make the system better.

Now, despite a good recent budget outcome for residential care, which I have spoken about previously, I was really concerned to read the most recent report from the commissioner for children and young people. This is a body that Minister Wooldridge established back in 2011. It is about the shocking educational outcomes for children in care, and unsurprisingly to me children in residential care received the worst educational outcomes. The commissioner found:

Children and young people living in residential care have the highest level of school absences and achieve the lowest levels of numeracy and literacy compared to children and young people in other care settings.

As you know, previously I have called for residential care to just be shut down. I think it is an abomination. Why would you want to push more and more vulnerable young people into a government-run system of small homes out in the community? On this side of the house we want young people to be in loving families. Let us focus on building up our foster care stocks. Let us focus on kinship carers. We have already got secure welfare for the very small number of children who are so violent that they cannot be with loving families. Residential care costs 10 times as much as foster care or kinship care. Why wouldn’t we be focusing there? We must hear the voices of young people, like one in this report who said:

I fucking hate it here …

Another said this:

At the resi I felt … suicidal, used to cut myself …

These are the voices of young people, who we must hear.