Wednesday, 17 June 2026

 Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:37): I rise to speak on the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office report on out-of-home-care services from June 2026. The recently released VAGO report on out-of-home-care services paints a deeply concerning picture of Victoria’s out-of-home-care system. The department cannot demonstrate that it is consistently achieving safe, stable and positive outcomes for children and young people in care.

If we look at finding 1, which has to do with kinship and foster care, I think we need to remember that children and young people who enter out-of-home-care are among the most vulnerable members of our community. The government has a huge responsibility to do the right thing by these children. Many of these children come from homes or situations where they have experienced trauma, abuse or neglect. They need carers who can support them during this difficult time in their early life, yet the report finds that kinship and foster carers are being short-changed by this government. It is only a very general report, this one. It is a beginning report, because allegedly there are more to come, and I do hope more does come from further research.

Despite kinship care being proven to be a good option for children – in fact often one of the best to keep children within their family network and have that support from family members – we find that it is common for kinship carers to get the lowest care allowance amount. In fact this government is continually short-changing kinship carers. Victoria’s base allowance for kinship carers for children aged zero to 7, so the youngest and the most vulnerable, is the lowest in the country. That is right: Victoria pays its kinship carers the least amount of money out of every state in Australia. The report also finds that kinship carers need additional allowances, and they are forced to navigate bureaucratic red tape and complex processes to try to get anything extra at all.

Next in line, let us consider the foster care system. It has declined dramatically under this government. It is to no-one’s surprise that the low care allowances are a central factor contributing to the drastically decreasing number of foster carers in Victoria. Foster carers play a critical role in the out-of-home care system, and when children do not have a suitable relative to go to, being looked after by a foster carer is another option. But without foster carers – and there has been a huge decline in them – children in out-of-home care would have to be placed in residential care. Research shows that bringing up children in a home environment is best for them. That is why so many orphanages were closed many, many years ago, to allow children to grow up in a home environment. But if we look at residential care, it is a real issue. As we all know – I hope we know – residential care in this state is a less than ideal option for vulnerable children. At the grassroots my constituents have confided to me that residential care is now a place where young people and children become victims of sexual abuse and various other forms of abuse, and it is in these settings that children become involved with drugs, alcohol and crime. Without these places, quite frankly, we find that children might be able to thrive. Children might be taken out of a neglectful situation and put into residential care where they are sexually abused, and that has a huge impact on their lives and can cause so much trauma that it can be very difficult for them to turn around from that. So it can end up being one of the worst places.

This is an area where we need to have more research done, and I think it is important for us to follow the Auditor-General’s recommendations to strengthen foster care capacity. There obviously needs to be rigorous understanding of what a good foster care home looks like, but we need to increase the capacity. Finding 2: there are cohorts of children who systematically have poorer experiences in out-of-home care – (Time expired)

The PRESIDENT: I just want to acknowledge in the gallery the federal member for Perth Patrick Gorman. Welcome.