30 years of cutbacks in mental health services, 30 years of cutbacks to welfare and public housing while full time jobs are destroyed, to be replaced with part time casual labouring. Exhorbitant housing costs. Cutbacks to child protection services, forcing experienced staff out while requests for intervention are rising. Official indifference played a part also.
It's these conditions which are also behind the spate of family murder/suicides.
Baby’s death on Australia’s Gold Coast points to worsening social conditions
By Gary Alvernia
29 November 2018
A passerby made the horrifying discovery last week of a dead baby girl, nine months old, washed up at Surfers Paradise, a prominent tourist beach on Australia’s Gold Coast. Though the plight of the infant’s parents, a homeless couple, had been known to police and government authorities for months, they have now been accused of criminal neglect and the father has been charged with murder.
While the immediate cause of the tragedy may be complicated, a picture has emerged of the desperate poverty gripping layers of workers and youth in Australia, caused by decades of attacks on public services and living standards carried out by successive governments, Labor and Liberal-National Coalition alike.
The tragedy is all the more revealing because the Gold Coast embodies the obscene poles of wealth created by capitalism, with homeless families living in tents, near sewers and under bridges, close to some of the most expensive homes in the country.
Police say they believe the baby drowned after being thrown into the Tweed River at Tweed Heads, about 30 kilometres south of Surfers Paradise, and was carried onto the beach by ocean currents. Police soon arrested the couple, describing them as “known to the police,” and later charged the father, a 48-year-old indigenous man, with murder. The mother, a 23-year-old former university student, underwent treatment at a mental health service, but police refused to rule out charging her with murder as well.
Police told a Gold Coast court the father had a history of “street offences” and mental health issues, including schizophrenia. He was living on a meagre disability pension. At one point, the couple and two infant children were known to be living in a tent on beach dunes. These facts alone are a damning indictment of the lack of mental health and homelessness services.
It quickly emerged that both parents suffer from mental illness, and had, for months, been living homeless on local beaches and in parks. Concerned residents, both in Queensland’s Gold Coast, and Tweed Heads, in the neighbouring state of New South Wales, had long asked authorities to assist them, only to be bureaucratically brushed aside.
The death has had a strong impact in the Gold Coast and Tweed Heads communities, which include substantial working class suburbs. It appears both parents had attempted to give away the baby to people—even random strangers—reflecting a state of desperation and psychological instability.
One Gold Coast resident, Erin Sorensen, posted on her Facebook page that she had informed the police of the situation two months earlier, saying: “It was winter and the dunes were freezing every time the sun went down. I didn’t think that was good for a baby or toddler… I reported it straight away and monitored the following week. And if authorities did the job correctly this little girl would still be here!”
Another resident wrote to the Gold Coast City Council in May, expressing similar fears as the family spent winter nights sleeping on a wooden platform in a park. At night the baby could be heard crying. A council official wrote back after five days, telling the resident to raise the matter with other authorities as it was not a council responsibility.
One anonymous person asked the Gold Coast Bulletin: “Why was the baby left with the parents—just why?” Child Protection Services (CPS) in Queensland were made aware of the family’s situation but took no further action, despite subsequent complaints, after the father reportedly turned away a social worker.
Tweed Heads resident Willem Ungermann said the baby’s parents frequented the park near the Jack Evans Boat Harbour, where the baby was allegedly thrown in the river. Homelessness had “got very, very bad over the last two years,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
Homelessness, exacerbated by the exorbitant cost of housing, has become an increasingly urgent problem in Australia. With hardly any new public housing units being built, and waiting lists expanding dramatically, individuals and entire families are forced to seek assistance from relatives, friends and charities.
According to an ABC Fact File in August, the number of homeless people Australia-wide had risen to 116,400 homeless—the highest level ever recorded. The rate of homelessness had increased by 14 percent since 2011, or from 47.6 per 10,000 people to 49.8. Young and indigenous people were over-represented, with 58 percent of the homeless aged 34 or younger and 20 percent indigenous.
In the Gold Coast alone, an estimated 1,700 people were homeless in 2016, representing a 27 percent increase compared to 2011. The true number may be greater. Homeless advocate Kathleen Vlasic told the ABC that the high volume of transient people and tourists in the Gold Coast could make homeless people difficult to identify. “They can wander through Surfers and they’re not really going to stand out like a sore toe,” she explained.
Reverend Jon Brook, whose charity provides free meals, said dozens of homeless people are forced to stay in unsafe conditions and areas such campgrounds, dilapidated buildings or boarding houses. He noted an increase in multi-generational homelessness, with some homeless families consisting of three generations.
Incidents of children being harmed or killed as a result of the worsening social conditions are being reported across the country in rising numbers. Requests for child protection interventions increased by 25 percent in 2016–17 alone.
Wendy Coe, a former coordinator of a non-profit homeless service on the Gold Coast, wrote in a letter to the Brisbane Times: “A baby is dead. A family is in ruin. A brother will never see his sister again. It is a tragedy unfathomable and yet it was highly predictable.”
Coe said she was first alerted to the fact that a homeless couple with two little children was “sleeping rough in Surfers” six months ago when a friend copied her into an email she sent to a Gold Coast city councillor. However, Coe was unable to assist. “I know there is nowhere for a family to go for crisis accommodation,” she wrote.
The response of the Queensland state Labor government has been characteristically inhumane. Rather than address the issues of homelessness, mental illness or poverty, it has vowed to increase criminal sentences and broaden the definition of murder to include manslaughter.
These measures will succeed only in vilifying desperate parents and obscuring the horrific social conditions that lead to such tragedies. The deaths of children are a malignant byproduct of the austerity measures and cuts to welfare, championed by all state and federal governments over the past forty years.
Sharp rise in child protection interventions in Australia
By Michelle Stevens
8 October 2018
A report released this year by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare revealed a 25 percent rise over the past five years in the number of child protection interventions—that is, children who were the subject of an official investigation, care and protection order, or out-of-home care.
The statistics in the Child Protection Australia 2016–17 report point to a deepening social crisis, particularly in working class and rural areas, with the worst impact on indigenous families, who are among the most vulnerable layers of the working class.
A total of 168,352 children, a rate of 30.8 per 1,000 children aged 0–17, received child protection involvement throughout Australia in 2016–2017, with 74 percent of these children being repeat referrals. This included 47,915 children, with a median age of nine, who had been removed from their families and placed in out-of-home care as at June 30, 2017. That was an 18 percent increase over four years.
These figures partially mask the disproportionately high rate of state intervention among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, which was 164.3 per 1,000, seven times higher than non-indigenous children.
Indigenous children were placed in out-of-home care at 10 times the rate for non-Indigenous children. For indigenous children aged 5 to 9, the rate of out-of-home care rose to 12 times their non-indigenous counterparts.
Out-of-home care means children are taken from their birth families and placed in the homes of relative or foster carers, or residential facilities or family group homes run by governments or non-government organisations (NGOs).
Many of the carers in these programs are volunteers, paid only rent and board or out-of-pocket expenses. They are not required to be qualified to deal with these children’s complex needs, including past trauma.
Teenagers can be placed in “lead tenant households,” where an adult lives and supervises them in rented premises. Alternatively, they may be housed in hotels or motels.
The high proportion of children remaining in out-of-home care for five years or more—41 percent of the total—contributed to the overall increased rate.
About 1 in 20 children in out-of-home care were living in residential care, ostensibly used for children with complex needs. Some were very young—3 percent of those in residential care were aged under five years.
Residential care facilities can be described as mini-institutions where children are denied the consistency of care and opportunity for a loving bond provided by a parent, permanent carer or guardian.
Moreover, in 2017–2018, according to a Productivity Commission report, almost 6 percent of children in out-of-home care across the country were victims of sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse or neglect. That was only among the reported cases, so the true level of abuse is likely to be higher.
Bernie Geary, the Children’s Commissioner in the state of Victoria for 10 years, until 2015, provided a damning condemnation of residential homes in that state in a report he released as he left his position. After visiting 21 residential care homes, he reported 189 incidents of the alleged sexual abuse of 166 children. That was 1 in 3 of the 500 children in residential care at the time.
The Child Protection Australia 2016–17 report did not ask or seek to explain what accounts for the increase in state intervention, which leads, in many cases, to the forced and traumatic removal of children from their families, for years on end.
The Productivity Commission report showed that police, not doctors, schools or social workers, initiated the greatest number of cases. It also showed that the highest rate of substantiations—notifications found to be true—came from poorer families. This indicates the impact of falling wages, soaring living costs, poverty, unemployment, homelessness and mental health issues, especially on low-income households.
However, another factor has also contributed to the rise in interventions. Governments have slashed budgets and staffing to government-run child welfare departments, and transferred the residential care of children to NGOs and corporate residential care providers, creating a profitable industry. There is now a clear economic incentive to remove children from their families and place them in out-of-home care.
In 2016, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Four Corners” program revealed aspects of this process. It reported that one company, Premier Youthworks, with a revenue of around $20 million in 2015, was paid between $550 and $1,700 per child per day to house and “care” for approximately 80 children. As a proprietary limited company, it was under no obligation to report its profits.
Nationally, there have been over 40 official inquiries into child protection and care provision over the past two decades. Yet the crisis has only worsened. The brutal conditions exposed in state-run institutions have been replaced with a model where similar conditions exist behind the doors of smaller facilities, run by private providers. A multi-billion-dollar government-funded industry profits from placing children into residential care, with little or no transparency to assess the quality of the services provided.
In 2015, the New South Wales state government commissioned an “Independent Review Of Out Of Home Care,” which was not made public until this year. It said the number of children in out-of-home care in that state had doubled between 2006 and 2016, a rate far greater than the population growth of children and young people.
The previously-buried report concluded that the system was “ineffective and unsustainable, not client centred.” Expenditure was “crisis driven and not aligned to an evidence base” and “failing to improve long-term outcomes for children and families with complex needs.” Almost three quarters of cases of suspected abuse or neglect reported to Family and Community Services (FACs) were closed without investigation, even where the risk of serious harm was “high” or “extremely high.”
The review also reported that the average cost per child of out-of-home care had more than doubled since 2012, when the state government began to shift programs to NGOs. It said 60 percent of children in out-of-home care were placed with NGOs and they were staying there longer because the bulk of funding was paid to NGOs “instead of addressing family needs earlier.” Despite this, the state government is seeking to transfer all children’s out-of-home care services to the private sector by 2022.
Child protection departments across the country remain understaffed and unable to cope with the number of cases reported to them. Lack of resources has increasingly led to the ditching of any pretence of addressing the underlying family crises that lead to state intervention. Instead, children are simply removed and offloaded to private “care providers.”
Ten years ago, the last federal Labor government offered a phony apology to the “Stolen Generations” of indigenous children who were taken from their families, shattering their lives. Today new “Stolen Generations” are being created of both Aboriginal and non-indigenous children.
Governments, state and federal, Labor and Liberal-National alike, are divesting themselves of any responsibility for community and family support. At the same time, vulnerable children have been reduced to an economic commodity, worth thousands of dollars a day to NGOs and business operators.
