Vulnerable children are at the mercy of the bureaucracy

There is something rotten in the state of child protection in NSW, that much everyone knows. But how is it possible that while the number of children in care in Victoria and Queensland is falling, the number of children in care in NSW has more than doubled? And this when funding has significantly increased to more $1.3 billion.

Where is the money going? Not on frontline services. Millions of taxpayers' dollars are being diverted from shielding at-risk children from serious abuse, to pay for bureaucrats to attend meetings and shuffle paper. As at April this year, there were 1127 bureaucrats employed at the Department of Community Services head office compared with 922 child protection workers across the entire state. Moreover, the head office wages bill is double that for the case workers. But this is only the start of the problem.

The report into child welfare in NSW by retired judge James Wood, QC, details how the Public Service Association has used industrial action to repeatedly block efforts to introduce quality audits to improve casework practices. Wood's report makes many important recommendations which, if implemented, should create a more streamlined child-protection system. But identifying the problems and recommending the solutions are only a small part of the battle.

What we should be concerned about is whether the recommendations will be implemented, subverted or even sabotaged by unions and bureaucrats.

The changes to the mandatory reporting requirements that Wood recommends will help alleviate the bottlenecks in the existing regime. At present, all reports by doctors, nurses, teachers and police about children suspected to be at risk have to be made directly to DoCS. Even in cases where families simply need counselling services from community-based organisations such as Barnardo's, they must first be reported to DoCS. This forces frontline caseworkers to deal with less serious cases at the expense of the more severe ones.

Wood wants new agencies in hospitals, community health services and police to assess whether staff should report a child to DoCS. Only the most serious cases involving children at imminent risk of harm will now be referred to the DoCS child abuse helpline. The remaining less serious cases will be referred to either DoCS-run early-intervention programs or to new non-government counselling services that Wood recommends be created.

The report also calls on DoCS to extend the age eligibility for its in-house Brighter Futures early-intervention program from 0-8 to include children aged between 9 and 14. Under Brighter Futures, the department manages 39 per cent of families that need early intervention. But within three to five years, Wood recommends that 100 per cent of these cases be managed by community-based organisations.

This is a positive development. The community sector is already delivering the bulk of early-intervention services while receiving only a fraction of the funding. Taken together, outsourcing services and the changes to the reporting regime seem like a recipe for allowing DoCS to shrink to its original and intended role of ensuring the safety of children in need of statutory protection.

While these recommendations appear positive and much of what Wood has proposed is consistent with what DoCS argued for in its own submission to the inquiry, the wagons are already circling around the DoCS empire. The PSA has suggested greater outsourcing is impractical because of a lack of community services. Conveniently overlooked is the fact that inefficient DoCS programs crowd out the community sector. Also ignored is Wood's proposal that this transition be staged to give non-government providers the time and opportunity to expand.

Under the new structure, the community sector will be held accountable through performance-based contracts. Yet this could be a double-edged sword. It looks like the department will have oversight of these matters, but the report does not specify the terms on which the non-government sector should be funded. This raises two issues.

If community providers need to constantly seek approval from DoCS for each referral, unnecessary delay and waste will occur. DoCS' standard operating procedure is also to attach self-serving strings to contracts and to restrict funding and limit the capacity of the community sector. This will create considerable scope for backsliding and may give the impression that outsourcing has failed. If we are not careful, in five years' time, the department will argue that it needs to roll out in-house programs once again to fill the service gap it has engineered.

Therefore, the real challenge isn't to admire the design and applaud the logic of the Wood recommendations. It is to ensure that changes are made and that those in charge are held accountable for a reform process inherently vulnerable to bureaucratic subversion and union sabotage.

While it has made the right noises in response to Wood's findings, the big question is whether the NSW Government will take on its bureaucratic and union allies. Keeping the pressure on the triumvirate that runs NSW is the price of an effective child protection system. Otherwise, the latest report on the dysfunction in DoCS will disappear in a flurry of public sector obstructionism, just as previous reform agendas have.

Toby O'Brien is a policy analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies.