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.