ALECOMM

"Out of Home Care Inquiry Speech"

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Category: Alecomm Submissions

Below is the speech delivered to the Senate Committee for the Inquiry to Out of Home Care in Brisbane on 17 April 2015.

Good morning senate committee,

I would like to take the opportunity to thank you all for allowing Alecomm to participate in this public hearing. It is with honour we present you our submission, and thank you for taking the time to read it and present us with more questions so we can all work to improve the outcomes for children in out of home care.

The Australian Legislative Ethics Commission is a recognised Australian charity. Our motto is working for the betterment of both government and community. The majority of our resources are currently spent in the child protection industry, auditing casefiles for compliance, advocating for parents, providing some limited legal expertise and personal support to those affected by the system, and working strategically in various areas to enable positive change, so that children and their families can have better outcomes.

For the record we receive no funding, so are not dictated as to how we may react or respond by any parties and can show a complete bi-partisan understanding of the out of home care system in Australia.

With us, families know they are not alone and they are not being singled out to have their children removed because of who they are – it is because of what the system is and has been allowed to become.

We give our clients strength and knowledge, compassion and understanding, and we are there to ensure that they do not take their own life whilst they are fighting for that of their children’s.

Some staff are on-call 24 hours per day.

So firstly, I would like to thank all the co-contributors to our submission, the 150 parents, children and family members who went into great detail to explain their personal experience - which has enabled us to provide a much broader system overview than we could have hoped.

Staff from outside organisations such as the National Ethnic Disability Association, Canada Court Watch, and John Hemming – a wonderful MP in the UK who is determined to stomp out corruption in child protection also, and our board who worked tirelessly for months to be able to provide you with what we have, including former board member Mary Moore. I would like to thank them all for their contributions, and enabling us to be here today, as a voice for the family and children of those affected by the system.

What is Community Services?  Community Services is an act of help or assistance.

This is what the words Community Services mean. Not humiliation, degradation, belittling, controlling and minimising. Community services is supposed to be that. Helping, assisting, bettering, enabling, healing. The list goes on – but none of that applies here – because in the governments own words ---

--- We don’t have to abide by policies or procedures, they are a guideline only, and

--- We don’t have to follow international human rights treaties, because although we have ratified our agreement with the UN, and have a human rights commission etc, --- we refuse to enact the appropriate legislation.

To sum it up, there has been no bigger myth perpetuated upon society than the “we do not remove children unless all other options have been exhausted, and we only do it as a last resort” statement. Anybody that has experienced this system knows this is just not true.

Caseworkers seem to spend more time on facebook and support sites seeing what’s being written about them when people are fed up with their incompetent unlawful actions, rather than investigating cases and providing support and intervention as a first response. If the taxpayers knew that their hard-earned cash was being spent supporting caseworkers rummaging through facebook they’d be outraged. And they should be.

National privacy legislation has gone out the window so caseworkers can punish parents they deem to be tarnishing their good name or attending rallies and protests against the departments unethical work practises. Maybe if they were doing the job they are paid to do, there wouldn’t be so many people posting disparaging BUT TRUE comments on facebook and victim support sites in the first place.

It’s disgraceful and a violation of our basic human rights.

SPEAKING OF BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS …

Newborn babies are being removed from hospitals at 20 minutes of age. No intervention, no support, not a peep from caseworkers until the minute they walk into your labour room and take the newborn from their mothers breast.

Mothers are then sent to maternity wards, just as they were in the 50s and 60s and displayed there, and taunted, without their baby. Whilst babies are being denied their right to their mothers breastmilk and their bonding with the only person they know.

These babies are being denied their mothers colostrum. It is well documented that colostrum forms part of the child's immunity system that it requires for life. Dogs, horses and other animals are not separated from their mothers until they are weeks old, yet an innocent human being is treated less than a dog and being denied such valuable nutrition. This is not right. It needs to be addressed immediately.

Older children are ripped screaming from their parents arms, by scores of police officers, armed with weapons – because a DoCS worker has filed a piece of paper, ticking all the boxes that purport that the children are at an IMMEDIATE RISK OF HARM.

They need no evidence, no substance and no investigation. They need one single piece of paper. That’s all it takes to destroy a family, just like that.

If you have read our submission, you will have before you the hundreds of issues that are preventing children and families from having better outcomes. You will know where many of the issues lay, and it is not a lack of funding or a lack of staff or that staff need more training.

It is a complete and total failure of all parties concerned in the welfare of children to actively follow the law, the guidelines and policies and procedures. This is trumped by a further failure of our oversight agencies to ensure that legislation, policies and procedures are being abided by, and when they are not to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law, those who are breaking it.

·        Caseworkers routinely remove children without investigating the accusations and allegations first.

·        Judges rubber stamp removal orders for caseworkers without even having fully read the affidavits of all parties – they even state this in court.

·        Children’s lawyers – they’re the middle man in the trafficking of our children – and basically gift children to the department without a care in the world.

Most of the time they never meet the child, and was recently acknowledged by the Australian Institute of Family Services – so HOW can they be expected to act in the best interest any child?

On the rare occasion they do meet the child, they ignore the child’s wishes in any case, much to the sadness of the child who just wants to return home to his loving parents and family.

Yet these lawyers take an extremely huge portion of the money in the child protection budget – and they do it with a smile on their face --- as they send innocent children to total strangers, where that child has a much higher chance of dying, being sexually assaulted, being physically assaulted, and having a lower life outcome in general.

Government statistics prove this, and are available from our website.

The government has had endless inquiries and royal commissions, it changes its names frequently, spends millions of dollars obtaining reports and then millions more telling the world how it is going to be better through another program.

Whether it be Keeping Them Safe or Stronger Families, or In Safe Hands, IT WILL NEVER WORK. And children in out of home care will continue to have poor outcomes until it does what every other successful business in the world does.

LISTENS TO THE END USERS.

I have never seen any system so arrogant as the child protection system, it’s the only system in the world that doesn’t take feedback from end users to enable itself to continue to improve both efficiently, financially, morally and ethically.

It’s the only system that continues to ask it’s profiteers what should they do to improve ? They’re asking the people that benefit from keeping children in care, and yet expect to improve the system.

Do you think Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (RIP) asks the suppliers of his phone and ipad components how they can make their computers better? I don’t think so. They ask their customers, the users, the people that want or need their products, what THEY can do to make their products and services better.

And the results you see today compared to twenty years ago is astounding. Look at our technology and what it can do now compared to back then. There is an improvement. There is an amazing improvement and its not because they went and asked the suppliers what to do.

But not child protection. Not in a century has child protection asked’ or really listened to it’s end users and asked how it can perform better and what they can do to make the user experience better.

They continue to ask the people that profit – the caseworkers, the lawyers, the judges, the court reporters, the out of home care providers, the foster carers, and those who have alternative agendas such as Debra Lee Furness with her pro adoption campaign.

Somebody that doesn’t have a clue on the realities of the child protection system, but has the influence to push for a fifty year setback for our children and families by campaigning again for adoption so her colleagues and herself can acquire a child easier in the Australian market. And please don’t misunderstand me, Alecomm has tried numerous amounts of times to discuss with Ms Furness the issues surrounding the current child protection system and how its failure is what is making so many children AVAILABLE so to speak, for adoption. She has never responded.

In my opinion, if you care SO MUCH for the poor children, then why not use your fame and money to actually help the children. Help the children stay home with their families where they belong. Not help yourself to other people’s children because they don’t have the money to afford the kind of legal representation you need these days to fight to keep your child against a department that has an unlimited war chest and a desire to win at all costs.

With research and inquiries designed to suit the agenda of those who profit, you are not going to get an improved system - a better system. It will never happen.

You will continue to get a system that costs more and more, and takes more children than ever before, which it is --- no matter what name you give the system, or what new fang-dangle program you spend another hundred million dollars on.

And it will never get better.

The rate of children removed will continue to rise, as it is at an exponential rate, and the rate of children dying both in and out of care will continue to rise, but we will not know this.

Because Pru Goward has made the accountability of children dying in care extremely difficult to monitor by mixing children who died in care, with those who were “known” to the system.

This is the woman that used Fairfax media to campaign and tell Australia how thousands of children will be returned home under her care. The same minister who seen another 20,000 children taken from their families, a large majority of them was because the mother was the victim of domestic violence.

The same woman who is now the NSW Domestic Violence Commissioner.

The same woman who reintroduced Forced Adoption to this generation, whilst similarly apologising to the last generation for exactly the same thing.

Parents must be provided with support and services, with intervention and compassion, to enable children to safely remain at home.

Caseworkers MUST be forced to abide by every single piece of legislation, policy and procedure set before them – or they must be punished and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law – because our law states that any child removed without lawful authority is KIDNAPPED, and carries a ten year prison term.

As audittors of child protection casefiles, we are horrified at the complete disregard of caseworkers abiding by the law, and the amount of children that are unnecessarily being placed into foster care as a result.

Any child that has been removed without lawful authority MUST be returned immediately, with a thousand apologies and an unlimited amount of resources supplied until that family has recovered and healed as best they can after what they have been experienced.

And believe me, you do not get over child protection. Once they have been in your life, you are never the same. You do not think the same. You do not feel the same. You are afraid to answer your phone, afraid to answer the door. Afraid if your child sustains any type of injury, even if it is at school – because you know that could be the catalyst to losing child again. AS a result, many people fear taking their children for medical exams when a child is innocently injured, because doctors and nurses routinely report parents to docs stating the injury is non-accidental.

Even after disproving injuries that may have been falsely diagnosed by medical staff, the department do not return your children. Many of our clients have lost children due to being falsely accused of medical abuse.

People should not have to live like this. The government should be afraid of it’s people, not the other way around.

We are not going to push for another independent oversight authority – because it’d be a pointless useless waste of taxpayer funds. I am not going to push for registration of caseworkers, because it’s been tried overseas and it does not work.

The only thing that will work, is ensuring compliance with law by everybody involved in child welfare, both in and out of home care. And legislation that requires proper intervention and support prior to removal must be enacted.

You may think that there are complaints mechanisms that people can use if they believe they have been wronged by the system. So I shall give a quick overview of how those systems really work …

Complaints about caseworkers to higher child protection officers are routinely sent back to be handled by the same caseworkers – and the complainants (usually the parents) are then penalised with either reduced contact or no contact at all with their children – either way the situation is then made more difficult by complaining about an injustice. As a result, the children are abused emotionally by being denied access to their parents.

The state ombudsman will refuse to intervene in matters, and their excuse is they will not get involved if there are court proceedings happening. The fact of the matter in many cases is the it would not be in court if the caseworkers were forced to do their job correctly and investigate, and to provide intervention and support or whatever else the family required to enable the child to remain stay at home.

The ombudsman shirks its responsibility to the community.

After the court proceedings are complete, and this can sometimes take three or four years or longer – the ombudsman then says, it’s been too long and they refuse to investigate again.

Basically, the ombudsman’s discretionary powers are useless, as are most other oversight authorities, and combine this with the fact they just cannot be bothered, they serve no purpose to assist in caseworkers or anybody else involved in child welfare doing their job lawfully to ensure that only children truly at risk of abuse or neglect are removed from their home.

There is also ICAC, and the federal police and the state police, all of whom ignore parents with the “it doesn’t fall into our criteria” excuse, or they just lie and many times they do not even respond.

The situation remains similar through to the magistrates – when clients argue that docs workers have broken the law, the judge dismisses the complaint, or excuses their actions.

If you complain to the Legal Services Commissioner, about your lawyer or the docs lawyer or children’s lawyer breaking the law (that is if you know anything about the law) the Legal Services Commissioner generally refuses to act also – many times quoting that the docs lawyer or children’s lawyer has no duty of care toward another party.

In fact, they do. Government regulations stipulate strongly what state lawyers must and must not do and how they must and must not behave – unfortunately the OLSC refuse to enforce these requirements. After all, it is paid for by the same lawyers it is supposed to investigate and keep in line.

The Bar Associations are just as incompetent. And there is nowhere to go, for any person who has had their child taken by the state, that knows that the states representatives have acted unlawfully.

There is no agency concerned with the lack of ethics and morals and blatant and continuous violations of law that happen each and every day. This is all purported to be in the BEST INTEREST OF THE CHILD.

There are laws that need changing to improve outcomes for children, a vast majority of these changes are required because ministers inexperienced in the child protection system continue to listen to the likes of those who profit from child removal. Some of those changes have been included in our submission and we strongly urge this senate committee to take them with the seriousness our children deserve.

If these changes were implemented, and if oversight authorities were forced to prosecute employees that break the law, then children and families could feel a lot safer.

Children wouldn’t continue to be removed unnecessarily from their families and DISplaced into a foster care system that sees them as an extremely lucrative commodity, as are our elderly and disabled.

Children could stay at home safely, and parents could reach out to child protection and community services if they had an issue.

Currently NOBODY in his or her right mind would seek help from the department that views seeking help as “self-reporting” and then uses their engagement with them as an excuse to remove the children.

For the safety of our children, we tell victims of domestic violence to NOT call docs, and to not call the police. Because each time they do, a risk of harm report is made to the department and their efforts to protect themselves and their children are used against them.

Instead of punishing the perpetrator, our system chooses to punish the victims. If it’s not bad enough already being a victim of domestic violence, now if you seek help, you will be punished by the state and have your children removed. This does happen. This is no myth.

And a large portion of women who lost their children to the state did so because they sought safety and help from a system rigged to work against them.

Why does the system continue to reward the perpetrator and punish the innocent? The department takes children from the protective parent and routinely sends them to the abusers or the abusers family. Statistics in our submission prove this, as does the governments statistics on how many children are placed into foster care as a result of domestic violence in the home.

Why does the government continue to spend more money on lawyers, court reporters, foster carers and NGOs, than on giving the family what it needs to be safe and secure?

Because it is arrogant and because it chooses ONLY to listen to those lawyers, court reporters, foster carers and NGOs.

Many of these same NGOs that now profit hundreds of millions of dollars per year by keeping the children away from their families, are those exact same NGOs that are still under investigation by our own government for atrocities committed upon children many years before.

Why would any government resurrect giving innocent children to those that have already exploited, abused and killed children in the past.

Common sense must dictate that the only way to protect children is to ensure they are not commodities. The government is the only authority that should have care and control of any person, because they are the only organisation that is not in it for a profit. (With the exception of the public guardian who currently rake in some seventy million dollars per year by managing other people’s money).

Why would any organisation try to benefit a child, or to restore them to their parents when they are receiving at least $40,000 per year to keep that same child away from their parents? Children that have been especially damaged are worth up to $15,000 dollars per week. Fifteen thousand dollars.

Where are the incentives to help families?

Why is the child protection budget triangle top heavy with foster care and litigation, when best practice principles continue to show better outcomes for children when they are helped to stay with their family.

Why does the government continue to listen to Jeremy Sammut’s spiel that children are needlessly suffering because of the governments will to keep families together, when the government’s own budget show this is a huge lie?

No governments in Australia OR the civilised world are working to help children and families.

You can keep telling yourself that they are, or you can listen to the millions of families already affected by the system worldwide who are all stating the same thing.

And that is : The system is a failure and it is corrupt.

And it will continue to abuse and fail children and families until it listens to organisations that do not profit from the system, such as us, and the families who experience it.

Thank you for providing us this incredible opportunity, and I hope that on behalf of all the families and children involved in out of home care that they are finally given their own opportunity for better outcomes.

Thank you.