Opening statement

I would like to thank the chair and the members of the committee for inviting the Australian Foster Care Association to appear before this hearing today. The Australian Foster Care Association (also known as AFCA) is the national peak organisation representing foster, relative and kinship (including grandparent) carers and the children and young people they care for through the child protection systems in Australia. AFCA is an independent, not-for-profit organisation operated with voluntary personnel.

There are approximately 10,000 foster, relative and kinship carers in Australia caring for over 26,000 children and young people who are unable to live at home with their families. Many of the children come from backgrounds trying to cope with mental health, chronic illness, substance abuse issues and poverty. Some enter the care system due to abuse and neglect issues whilst others enter the care system because their families, for what ever reason, are unable to provide the necessary care for them. This is particularly so for children with severe disabilities and major behavioural and mental health issues.

The carers of children and young people who are in the child protection system are volunteers recruited from the community. They provide voluntary care 24 hours a day, seven days a week without receiving any of the benefits of an employee. Contrary to evidence you have received in another submission, they are NOT paid to provide this community service. They volunteer to forgo the same tangible benefits that other carers forgo when they care for a family member. In addition, foster carers also have to undergo training and screening, adhere to a myriad of additional legal obligations and restrictions that do not apply to families in the general community, and live their lives in a gold fish bowl as they are monitored by many paid workers who are a part of the child protection systems of this country.

In return, these carers receive a modest subsidy from their state governments to partially offset the cost of caring for the community’s children. The research shows that these subsidies do not cover the full cost of caring for the child, and in some cases do not even cover half of the cost of caring for the child. (The research I am referring to here is the McHugh research cited in our submission and the most recent research on carer subsidy payments published by AFCA in October 2008, copies of which have been provided to the secretariat.)

The children who are placed into the child protection system include the most needy and disadvantaged children of our society. None of them are so called ‘normal’ children, and most need additional support, therapies and medical interventions that are time consuming, specialised and costly.

My brief today is to speak to you on behalf of the carers of children in the child protection system only, and I wish to make it clear that in doing so, I am in no way inferring that any of the children with special needs or disabilities who are cared for within their own families are less deserving. Those families are doing it tough and are as needy as the group I am speaking on behalf of today.

Even within the child protection system, there is no such thing as a typical carer. Each child in care has his or her own diverse needs, and hence the carers’ needs are also diverse. Many placements are complex and challenging and some require very high levels of support. Because of the overlaid complexities of caring for children within a 2 tiered legal framework, balancing the needs of birth families, the child in care and the carer’s family, in addition to meeting the child’s caring needs, there are many other challenges for foster carers in navigating the policies, procedures and legislation of Commonwealth, state and territory jurisdictions, and in accessing the services available to carers.

Recent consultations with carers have raised some additional issues that AFCA has been asked to bring to your attention as a part of this inquiry, in addition to those raised in our submission.

It is now roughly 20 years since most children’s homes and institutions were closed in this country and their residents were moved into foster care. There are some carers who generously agreed to take on the care of the severely disabled children from those homes and others who have continued to take on new placements for similar children since that time. As those children age out of the child protection system between 18 and 21 years, we find many of the carers are still caring for them. The carers are from older age groups as many had raised their own families before starting to provide care through the child protection system and they are now having to address the issues of what will happen to the young person who has in effect become a member of the family when the carer passes away or is no longer able to care for the young adult.

Carers of very high needs children and young people often have great difficulty in accessing adequate respite. These children and young people have been placed in care because of their special needs. The needs of a child or young person with a disability are additional to their general care and protection needs. It is important that these children and young people have continuity of care with their primary carer/s, but when respite is needed so that the placement remains viable, and is then not accessible, these placements break down and the child or young person has to be moved to another placement, often with very little scope for transition planning and at great distress to the child or young person. Such practices constitute systems abuse of our most vulnerable community members.

Many children and young people in care have major behavioural and mental health needs. The time needed to care for these children and young people often precludes carers from staying in the work force. Like other carers, foster carers also have difficulty in accessing Commonwealth carer payments for children and young people with such disabilities.

Carers also experience the loss of many intangible benefits – opportunities, time, forgone earnings etc; to the extent that the indirect costs of fostered children have been found to be around four times the value of the direct costs (McHugh, M. (2008)). When carers choose to care for the community’s children, they often do not realise and are not informed about the personal cost to themselves in providing this community service, nor that this can become a life time commitment. Consequently the carers regularly forgo access to income streams, leave entitlements, workers compensation and superannuation. This in turn penalises the carers with a loss in capacity to provide for themselves both now, if they become ill or injured, and in the future, particularly when they reach retirement age. These issues have been well documented by Dr Marilyn McHugh in her Ph D Thesis Costs and Consequences: Understanding the Impact of Fostering on Carers and associated publications.

Carers who have left the work force to care for the community’s children have also conveyed to us their frustration at their inability to contribute to their own existing superannuation funds when they have been able to save small amounts from their family budget. It is not fair that these carers are treated the same as employees with the attendant legal obligations and processes applied when there is an issue about the standard of care being provided on a voluntary basis to the community’s children, but that their significant community contribution is not recognised for the purposes of them being able to contribute to their own superannuation fund or make payments that may let them access the superannuation co-contribution.

It is generally acknowledged these days that the child protection system in Australia, like many similar systems overseas, is in crisis. The number of children entering the care system in the last 10 years has almost doubled. At the same time, the number of carers has almost halved. The resources available for child protection, like the resources available for disabilities, mental health, substance abuse and related fields can not meet the current demands. Child protection clients often need these other services in conjunction with child protection services and are often caught in a gap between the two functions when trying to access them.

From the time when mandatory reporting was first introduced into this country we have seen a change in the community mind set from adopting community ownership of child protection issues to one of saying ‘it’s the government’s problem’. Similar trends are seen in other human services areas. Such a community position is unsustainable. The media’s moral hysteria campaigns addressing a very small number of identified cases in the sector, terrible as they are, have also created a multitude of bigger issues for the child protection sector ranging from poor morale, inadequate workforce, lost carers, insufficient placements through to redirecting support away from meeting childrens’ and carers’ needs to heavily increased compliance monitoring.

It is time that the issues of providing for the needs of the community’s most needy and disadvantaged, and the support of their carers, was reframed nationally from being ‘the government’s problem’ to being ‘the community’s problem’. To do this, we need the leadership and support of Commonwealth government. There is also scope for the Commonwealth government to take a leadership role in this area, similar to what it is doing in child protection, to create standards, recognise and promote carers’ rights, and ensure that the services that are needed are accessible.

Foster, relative and kinship carers provide a significant service to the community. Without them, many of the children and young people in care would most likely have to return to institutional care – an option which is expensive for the community and not in the child’s or young person’s best interests. In return for this community service, carers need support and assistance from their community and governments. Adopting the recommendations contained in our submission would go a long way to providing that. We do not believe that any of the recommendations are major expenditure items, but we do believe their implementation would make a significant improvement to our current systems. They will also support those who do the caring – those volunteers who care for, and about, the community’s most vulnerable children twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

On behalf of all foster, relative and kinship carers, I would like to thank the committee for providing this opportunity for us to present the carers additional views today and to respond to any questions the committee may have relating to our submission.