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Outsourcing child protection will put children at risk
Young children will be at greater risk of harm if the Coalition follows through with its plans to outsource Out of Home Care to the non-government sector should it win government.
It is true that there are excessive workloads in DOCS, but this will not be improved by outsourcing vital services to a less accountable, less regulated sector. Passing the buck is not a solution to the problem – it simply makes the problem someone’s else’s responsibility.
The fact is that the NGO sector is nowhere near ready to take on the estimated 24,000 children who will be reliant on Out of Home Care by 2014.
Currently Community Services deals with the more complex and resource intensive families that NGOs do not have the resources to deal with.
If Out of Home Care were outsourced completely, 700 positions would be lost within Community Services.
This would cause many hard-working and highly-skilled caseworkers to leave the profession and we will lose decades of knowledge overnight.
Caseworkers in Out of Home Care are also required to have tertiary degrees, a recommendation from Wood’s report. NGOs on the other hand have no such requirement.”
Taking highly qualified staff with strong experience across all streams of child protection out of the equation is a risk we can’t afford to take.
Community Services is the safety net for children the NGOs refuse to deal with – what will happen to those children if Community Services no longer has a role?
We should be building capacity within government, not transferring responsibility to NGOs. We should be investing in better services – not outsourcing.
Winning, the Cessnock way
If someone told me just a few years ago that I’d be fighting against a Labor Government’s plan to sell a prison, I’d have locked them up and thrown away the key.
But that’s what happened when one day the NSW Government announced a plan to privatise our prison, the Cessnock Correctional Centre. In the beginning we couldn’t really understand the motives and reasons to sell off Cessnock along with Parklea Gaol. But we fought. And on May Day in 2009, we knew our fight against the sale of Cessnock had been worth it.
Who’s protecting the endangered staff in our national parks?
There’s a new threatened species in our National Parks and they’re big, friendly and dressed in khaki.
For some months now a new predator in our parks has hunted down the species known to many as the Park Ranger. The carnivorous NSW State Government has been praying on services, stripping them back and shutting down a number of regional offices. It’s a situation that has seen the number of threatened staff, including park rangers, office managers and field staff scaled back.
100 years on, the State Library does more than house books
As the NSW State Library celebrates its 100th birthday, it’s worth celebrating not only the wealth of knowledge the library houses and multitude of services it offers, but also the significance the State Library has had in Australia’s history.
Not only does the State Library hold some of our country’s most important historical documents, its workforce has also made history – winning the state’s first pay equity case.
GFC puts focus back on government services
For most of the past decade, Australia was basking in the sunshine of good economic times. It was easy to think these good times would last forever.
The sudden collapse of the global financial system last year, however, was a reminder that we take economic prosperity for granted.
It also reminded us of the critical role of government in providing essential services.
We were reminded that leaving things to the ‘market’ means leaving things to chance. And some things are simply too important for that.
In May this year the Public Service Association commissioned a report by independent economics consultancy Access Economics, asking them to determine the impact of the Global Financial Crisis on government services in New South Wales.
The report said that in the next few years, demand for public services would continue to rise.
Read the attached report
And as more people are affected by the GFC, and unemployment peaks, public services will become more important.
- • Health
- • Education and Training
- • Public Transport and Roads
- • Police and Justice
- • Community and Disability Services
The report also warned the State Government against cutting public sector jobs and reducing government services.
In fact, the report by Access Economics actually said that the Government should not be afraid of short-term deficits to avoid the effects of an economic downturn. And that cutting spending during a downturn simply adds pressures to the broader economy and prolongs the time until recovery.
Therefore we need a Government not afraid to make the hard decisions.
If the Government is serious about mitigating the effects of the financial downturn on the New South Wales economy, it should not be afraid to increase spending and go into a temporary deficit.
In other words, shouldn’t privatisation and job cuts be the last thing on any Government’s mind?
With demand for Government services on the rise, maintaining or increasing public service employment levels will also be needed.
We cannot afford to sit back and continue to cut spending, freeze public sector jobs and outsource services at a time when the New South Wales community is most vulnerable, and public services are in most demand.
John Cahill
General Secretary,
Public Service Association of NSW
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