Kate: Walking out of a hospital and not having given birth, with someone else’s baby, is a very humble moment. You don't have the sore boobs or anything like that and all the bits that come with labour, but you know that someone is entrusting you to look after their baby while they get the help or sort out whatever they need. It's just so rewarding.

Kylie Grey:Kate is one of a dwindling number of foster carers in Australia. And as the number of carers declines, the need is growing. There are currently 40,000 Australian children living away from their biological parents for their own safety. They are part of what is broadly known as the ‘out-of-home care system’, which includes foster care, kinship care and residential care.

The system, by its very nature, is fraught with difficulties, and it is struggling in every state and territory. Today, almost 20,000 children need foster parents, and they are increasingly hard to find.

Julian Pocock: With an aging population there are fewer people who are available to take on the role of being a foster carer. Secondly, through issues like family violence, mental health, substance misuse—particularly alcohol misuse—we have many more children needing to be removed from their families and placed in care.

Kylie Grey:Julian Pocock is the head of public policy for the Berry Street organisation in Victoria, which has been involved in child welfare since 1877.

Julian Pocock: There was a review of foster care some time ago in Tasmania, where a departmental official, with a note of exasperation, reported to their minister that despite their advertising in local newspapers, they simply couldn’t attract more foster carers. And they pointed to the lack of financial support they can offer to carers, the complexity of the department's own systems, and the challenging behaviour of the children. All of those things are still true today; the sad part about this is this report was done in 1920.

Kylie Grey:Foster care agencies are actively looking to recruit from groups in the community who were not encouraged in the past: same sex couples, young people and singles. They’re desperately needed to take over from the current, aging generation of carers, like Sue O’Connor.

Sue O’Connor: Foster carers telling foster stories, that’s what encourages more people. And we desperately, desperately need more carers to come in, and we need younger carers—we are all getting old. (Laughs)

Kylie Grey:Caring for children whose ages can range from a few days to teenagers is a big and expensive undertaking.

Julian Pocock: The cost of caring for a 10-year-old child with the most basic level of needs within the system is about $265 per week. Now, in Victoria we pay those carers $165 a week. And that means that it just isn’t financially viable for many of the people who have the goodwill and the interest and the time to be carers. They just can't afford to do it.

Kylie Grey:Foster care payments, which vary from state to state, barely cover the cost of raising a child. Some of the biggest reforms to child welfare in a generation are on the table, including a tax-free wage for foster carers, extending the age at which foster care support ends, and making it easier to adopt children.

The New South Wales Minister for Family and Community Services, Pru Goward:

Pru Goward: They need their own history, they need permanency, they need to be able to call somebody ‘Mum’, they need to be able to act up and know that mum is still there at the end of the day and isn’t ringing the foster care agency saying, ‘Take this kid back I can’t manage him.’

Julian Pocock: The reality is that young people exiting the care system are still over-represented in juvenile justice, they’re still over-represented in the homeless sector, they carry with them a burden of disrupted schooling and often poor educational outcomes.

Kylie Grey:Today, Background Briefing talks to foster carers, biological parents and children within the system, as well as those employed to help and protect them.

I’m Kylie Grey.

Kate: We’ve been very lucky. We’ve had very good babies so far.

Child: And we give him toys. New toys.

Kylie Grey:The names of some of the people in this program have been changed to protect their identities.

Almost half of all the kids in care in Australia are in New South Wales. More than a quarter of all the children in New South Wales juvenile prisons have come from care. These are the children that families and the child protection system have failed.

At the Reiby maximum security juvenile justice centre in Sydney Background Briefing met Ted. He was seven when he was made a ward of the state and put in the care of DOCS, which is now the Department of Family and Community Services.

Ted: I’m 15 and I’m at Reiby. I left my mum when I was about five years old and I went to live with my nan. And my nan never used to feed me if I got in trouble, so I used to smash her window to get in to get some food, me and my brother. She just put me in DOCS from there, about 7 years old, and ever since then I’ve been in DOCS.

Kylie Grey:And what’s it like being here at Reiby?

Ted: To tell you the truth, it’s not bad, it’s not good. DOCS come and take your kids away and, like, that’s not meant to be how it’s working. You’re meant to live with your family, not with DOCS.

A long time ago I was with a foster parent, but I didn’t like it because some bad stuff happened to me. Like I got hit and that, so I didn’t really like the foster houses.

Kylie Grey:You got hit by your foster parents?

Ted: Well, foster father hit me because I kept on running away from him. So I asked if they could put me in, like, a refuge instead. With all the other placements I’ve been in, like the refuges, I ran to my mum.

Kylie Grey:When you run back to her, what happens?

Ted: She lets me stay there if I don’t have anywhere to stay, but she rings my carers to make sure, like, my carers can come and get me two or three days after. So I can stay with her for a bit but I can’t stay with her for a while.

(Music)

Kylie Grey:Ted was keen to take to me to the place where he finds peace, a small chapel inside the prison.

Ted: This is where Wednesdays and Sundays we come in here and, like, talk about God and that. These are photos of all the other kids who’s been here, who’s come here for the past years and that. I probably know most of them, but anyway… If I come and work here one day, just lead the kids through a good path because I’ve been through all this stuff.

(Music)

Kylie Grey:For many of the boys here, Reiby offers education and training they’ve never had before, courses designed to give them skills that will help them when they get out. Sixteen-year-old Danny is learning how to be a barista. He lived with his nan, but when he got in trouble with the law at 11, a decision was made by the courts to declare him a ward of the state until his behaviour improved.

Danny: When I was younger the courts actually put me homeless and they said, ‘Well, if you can’t reside there then you’re going to have to go somewhere,’ because they wouldn’t let me reside with my nan because I was getting in too much strife around the area. They declared me homelessness and then juvenile justice put me in a refuge. I’ve been in and out of this place since I was, like, 10 years old for breaches and stuff like that.

Kylie Grey:Danny is serving an eight-month sentence. He remembers his nan’s reaction in court the day he was sentenced.

Danny: Because my nan started crying in the courtroom and that. She found out I was being on drugs and that, and then she was really sad and I just… just made me think that I’ve got to get my life together now.

Kylie Grey:Was that ice or dope…?

Danny: Yeah, ice and pot. Stuffs your life up, even a short amount of time of using it, it does.

Kylie Grey:The ice does?

Danny: Yeah. It just feels like the devil’s in you when you take it. And you go and do some mean stuff and you do regret it when you are sober. And when you think about it—like, when you’re in your room in here in lockdowns you think about it every minute… or I do. I’m remorseful for what I did. And I don’t like being remorseful. I want to just live a normal life, a happy life. I don’t want to have to have to feel that remorse of doing something bad.

Kylie Grey:At the end of our conversation, Danny told me his girlfriend is pregnant and their baby boy is due in January.

Danny: Yeah, I’m happy about that, because then it gives me something to wake up to myself and making sure that my kid doesn’t think this is normal, coming in here and doing this stuff, ‘cos it ain’t.

Kylie Grey:There’s a strong likelihood that boys like Danny and Ted will reoffend or end up homeless after they leave Reiby. After being removed from their biological parents, many children endure years of trauma as they move in and out of different types of care. This is where the child welfare system fails children like Danny and Ted.

Several of the reforms being proposed for foster care are aimed at making it much more stable and permanent, for the children and the carers. One proposal is to professionalise foster care by paying carers a wage. Julian Pocock from Berry Street:

Julian Pocock: Ensuring that if a carer were to take on the full time care of a child, that they would after tax have an income equivalent to what a childcare worker might have.

Kylie Grey:In September, Berry Street and the University of New South Wales produced a paper, ‘Reforming the Foster Care System in Australia’. It calls for a move away from a voluntary system to a professional one, where foster carers would be paid and trained, just like a social worker or childcare worker is now.

Julian Pocock: So, you know, not less than about $55,000 per year. So something that provides people with a reasonable living income and enables them to work full time in their home, caring for these children.

Kylie Grey:Berry Street is hoping that a wage for foster carers will be one of the reforms soon to be announced in Victoria, where the state government is due to release a five-year plan for its out-of-home care system. The veteran CEO of one of the leading child protection charities, Barnardos, agrees that foster carers need to be paid more to look after children who are in their care 24/7.

Louise Voigt:My name’s Louise Voigt. I’m the CEO of Barnardos Australia. I’ve been CEO here for more than 30 years.

Money. The most important thing that we could possibly do is up the rate three, four times that we’re currently paying. Our foster carers are considered to be volunteers. Well, thanks very much, but how many families can afford to have the woman in the household staying at home, not earning money? If women are working, there isn’t that whole band of women who are able to provide the sort of volunteer roles that previously have occurred.

Kylie Grey:The idea of professionalising foster care is well received by many carers. In rural New South Wales, Gen and her husband Joel have fostered four children.

Gen: When looking at professionalising being a carer, I think that it’s a great idea for carers who have good motive, obviously, because it does legitimise the position of a carer at home. If you are a stay-at-home carer, then you still feel the pressure to go to work and do all that, whereas I know that lot of carers often have between four and 10 children at a time—it really does make work impossible. So I think that that is fantastic; however, I think that obviously there’s the other side of it, that people attracted by the money may not realise what it involves and how actually complex and what a big job it is.

Kylie Grey:Professionalising foster care would also mean access to training in how to deal with children’s trauma. That training was not offered to Gen and Joel by the New South Wales Department of Family and Community Services. They had to seek help privately.

Gen: We had looked up and talked about how to do deal with grief. And the resources that we could access were about grief from death or divorce; this was something completely different, where the parents and the family were still alive but couldn’t look after them. So we did struggle to get our heads around that and what we should be doing to properly support them.

Kylie Grey:How did you manage that?

Gen: It was very much trial and error. It was pretty much every night after dinner for the first few weeks they would be in tears. And there would be stories that were quite shocking to us that they thought were quite normal considering just the level of trauma, and complex trauma, really, that they’d gone through.

Joe Tucci: We as a system have to get much better at being able to prepare carers for a specific child coming into their care.

Kylie Grey:Joe Tucci is CEO of the Australian Childhood Foundation. It conducts trauma counselling for children who have been taken into care, as well as programs for foster parents.

Joe Tucci says a lot more carers would stay in the system if they’re given training in how to understand and deal with the trauma these children have experienced.

Joe Tucci: To understand what the children’s background is, their experiences are, and what they need. And also to prepare the child for what it’s going to be like coming into that family. And if you get that equation right, you start a placement off very well and it’s more likely to not break down.

(Music)

Kylie Grey:There is also a push to extend the financial support given to foster carers. At the moment almost all financial support ends when the child turns 18.

Dante: This is Footscray. It’s probably not the best area, but it’s very close to shops, very close to public transport, so it’s pretty good. It could be a lot worse, that’s for sure.

Kylie Grey:The peak body for out-of-home care in Australia, CREATE, has been lobbying federal and state governments to extend foster care payments to carers until a child turns 21. They would also like to see intensive programs and resources available to all children after they leave the care system; after all, nearly 80 per cent of young adults in Australia still live with one or both parents until their mid-twenties.

Four years ago, peak body CREATE released a report on children leaving care at 18. It found at least one in three were homeless in the first year and almost half were involved with the juvenile justice system.

Dante: (Showing Kylie the house) It’s a nice kitchen. It’s a bit small, but it does the job.

Kylie Grey:Dante left his biological parents at 15.

Dante: And I generally do all the cooking…

Kylie Grey:He was in foster care before being placed in refuges and residential care. By the time he turned 18, he was homeless.

Dante: Just before I was 18. Yeah, I stayed with a friend for a while and then left, because it’s like after a while you don’t… like, it’s a bit hard to always stay at friends. It’s like you kind of drain on them, so you don’t want to do that. From that I was homeless again and then…

Kylie Grey:Where do you spend the night?

Dante: Oh, there’s like a mill, abandoned mill, which I knew from going to school. There’s like a bed sort of thing that—I don’t know—someone left it there, or anything. It’s not exactly clean, but, you know, it’s all right. I stayed there. I know… When I was 18 I spent heaps at the casino, just like not gambling or anything, but just like walking around in the casino.

Kylie Grey:The Berry Street organisation in Melbourne is one of the few agencies to offer intensive support programs for children as they are leaving care. Stand By Me is a pilot program for young adults from 18 years to 21 years who have left care and may otherwise have nowhere else to go. The team leader is Kerry Antonucci.

Kerry Antonucci: The idea of Stand By Me is that we’ll engage with the young person, get to know them whilst they’re still in care, but remain engaged and working with them when they leave care. So there’s someone to support them over that transition period and to give them that support that they need as they try to negotiate the early days of independent living.

We’re having the project evaluated by Monash University to try and show through these individual case studies just how important it is to have that support post the care period, particularly with a relationship of someone you’ve gotten to know and trust and can be there for you—and can actively seek you out.

Kylie Grey:(To Dante and Alex)It’s quite nice isn’t it…?

In the suburb of Footscray, the Whitehouse is home to four young adults who have recently left the care system. As part of the Stand By Me program, Alex and Dante have dedicated case workers who help them find jobs, offer counselling and drive them to appointments, much like a parent would do for an 18-year-old.

Alex: I’m Alex the lion. (Whispers) Alex the lion—roar!

Kylie Grey:Alex is 20 years old. She’s got work at a bar and is saving for her future. She has no contact with her biological parents or her former foster carers, and there were many.

Alex: I think five, five to 11, I was in one place, but then after that it sort of skyrocketed. I think the… people always want young kids, they always want the younger… The younger they are, the better they can fit in. They’re not as set in their ways. I think as soon as you’re older it’s a lot more of a challenge for them to place people, and that’s fair enough because who wants to have like three 14-year-olds running around? That’s just crazy.

Kylie Grey:And what about now? Who do you talk to if you’ve got a problem, or who do you turn to?

Alex: Well there’s the Bible… no, I’m kidding (laughs). I do turn to people that are here, occasionally, like Tamara and Rebecca. They are great supports for me, personally, especially because they are at an age where they’re a little bit higher than me, but they’re not as old to be from a completely different generation—like, their experience is relevant. I think that is important.

Kylie Grey:Most people that Background Briefing spoke to in the welfare sector believed that extending the period of support for children in foster care until they are at least 21 years old would help them—and potentially save public money, otherwise spent on other last resort services if they become homeless or imprisoned.

(Baby crying)

While Alex and Dante are leaving the foster care system, baby Thomas has just joined it. He was taken from his mother in hospital and made a ward of the state. Thomas is now with Kate and Daniel, short-term foster carers. They will look after Thomas until he goes to another foster home sometime in the next six months. It was Thomas’s bath time when I arrived at Kate and Daniel’s home.

Kate: Most people think we're actually crazy. I would have had ten of my own kids, but physically you have to give your body a rest. My hat goes off to those women who do have several multiple births. But I had five healthy children, and since I was little I've always wanted to have big families. And we started enquiring again in the July, started our course in the September, and we had a baby by the middle of February.

Daniel: It was scary.

Kate: It was very quick and I think it worked for everyone here in the family, and it’s the best thing that's happened, you know?

Daniel: It’s taught our kids a different level of compassion and understanding. And for us as parents it has actually taught us to be better parents, because the course we did went into how we did things and it actually helped us as parents. So we became better parents out of the course, in my opinion. It was surreal when we got baby number one.

Kylie Grey:From here, baby Thomas’s journey through the care system could take him on a number of different paths, including foster care, adoption, kinship care or residential care, and possibly back to his birth mother.

Right now, Thomas is in good hands. But unless major reforms are implemented, his chances of having a secure, stable upbringing are not good.

Foster care families with a stay-at-home mum like Kate are harder and harder to find. Modern Australian families are dramatically different to 30 years ago. Today, one in four Australian women work and adult children are staying at home longer.

In New South Wales, the government wants to solve the problem of the foster care merry-go-round by relaxing the state’s adoption laws.

The New South Wales Family and Community Services Minister, Pru Goward:

Pru Goward: I have met kids at 19 or 20 who have had 20 placements, 20 families to live with. Why do we wonder when those children are more likely to be homeless, more likely to be illiterate, more likely to be unemployed, more likely to be in juvenile justice, and more likely to have had a baby at 13 or 14 themselves, when they’ve never attached, when they’ve never known trust, because they keep being moved.

So, yes, what is in crisis, I think, is the need for children to have a safe home. And I think in the great departure from the orphanage model of 50 years ago, we lost sight of the importance of providing a form of open adoption that would enable children to stay in touch with their birth family, with their relatives, but also gave them a permanent home.

Kylie Grey:The minister’s office told Background Briefing that cabinet has approved the proposals and the New South Wales government hopes to introduce the adoption changes by the end of the year.

New South Wales will be the first state to actively encourage open adoption of children in the out-of-home care system. Under open adoption, the legal responsibility for the child is transferred from the state to the adoptive parents, and the child’s birth parents, siblings and extended family have contact, as opposed to the more common process of closed adoption, where they don’t have contact.

Pru Goward: I’m not saying every week. Barnardos thinks that three contacts a year is enough. And, you know, as children become adults they make their own decisions about who they go to and who they turn to. And if they have managed to sustain a relationship with their birth parents and it has been a happy and productive one, you can be sure that the birth parent will see that child again and will remain part of that child’s life. And that’s wonderful for that child, because the child’s got a family, a real family, around it. And unlike most of us, who have only got two parents, they might have several.

Kylie Grey:Pru Goward is hoping the adoption changes will encourage more carers to come forward and consider adopting. And she expects other states to follow suit.

Open adoption is possible under current laws but has been much more difficult to achieve. The changes would make open adoption quicker and easier, and prioritise adoption as a permanent solution for kids in foster care. The CEO of Barnardos, Louise Voigt, was one of the first to call for open adoption.

Louise Voigt:For a long time adoption was demonised—and for some very, very good reasons. While in America or the UK, maybe, they could start to look at some of the benefits of adoption in an out-of-home care system, that was nearly impossible here with our history with the Stolen Generation, and then, of course, our truly dreadful history of babies being ripped from women who were simply young and unable to support themselves so easily at a time where there was little financial support for unmarried girls in the society.

Kylie Grey:While open adoption may become more common, it is not an option encouraged for Indigenous children in care. The Indigenous community is still recovering from the scars of past separation policies.

The National Body for Indigenous Children in Care, or SNAICC, has its own initiative, called Family Matters: Kids Safe in Culture. It’ll be holding community consultations across Australia to identify what needs to be done to stop the high numbers of Indigenous children still being taken into care.

(Sound of children playing)

Barnardos has had an open adoption program since 1986. Irene and David Barclay applied seven years ago, and they adopted twins Angus and Skye just before their third birthday.

Irene Barclay: When we had Angus and Skye come, it was very exciting for us. It was great to have that feeling, that you were a family. And Angus and Skye were very quick to start calling us mum and dad, so it was very nice to…

David Barclay: Yeah, it was… We were no longer the odd couple. We would go places and there would be families with their children, and we were the only ones, basically, that didn't have the children.

Kylie Grey:Skye and Angus were removed from their birth mother at the age of nine months. They were initially placed in temporary foster care. Now, as part of the legally binding open adoption agreement, the children see their biological mother and three siblings about four times a year.

For the Barclays, the open adoption of Skye and Angus has completed the family they longed for but weren’t able to have. For the children, it’s a chance to have a stable, loving home, a good education, and overseas trips to places like Disneyland.

But the first few years of Angus and Skye’s life were traumatic, and Irene and David had to work hard to help the children recover.

David Barclay: Angus and Skye were from a broken family, a dysfunctional family, and that family got broken down. But when a family breaks down doesn’t mean there’s another family to pick the pieces up, and we wanted to be that family for them—as simple as that.

Irene Barclay: Angus and Skye really came not knowing any nursery rhymes or songs or colours. They had a lot of balance issues; they weren’t able to walk very well. Angus was very withdrawn into himself and really didn’t talk to anybody, and Skye threw a lot of tantrums when she first came.

David Barclay: They couldn’t walk to the letterbox without falling over three or four times before they got to the letterbox at the front gate. So the first year, every day, basically, Irene and her mum took the kids to a park—balancing beams, and working on the fixtures and skills of balance and motivation and—what’s it called?—coordination.

Kylie Grey:When I visited them, Angus and Skye, who are now six, decided to put on a show.

(Sound of children performing the show)

Kylie Grey:The ‘open’ part of the adoption hasn’t always been easy. Irene says the meetings with Angus and Skye’s birth mother were uncomfortable at first.

Irene Barclay: She was a bit apprehensive about me and she used to call me ‘that carer’. So if she had something for me, she would give it to Angus and Skye and say, ‘Go and take it to that carer.’

But she’s very friendly with me nowadays. And always when we go for access visits she tends to come and sit with me and chat with me and I show her photos of the children throughout the year and I give her copies of the photos. And she actually said to me, ‘At least some of my children have a hope for the future now.’

Kylie Grey:Background Briefingdid try and get in touch with Angus and Skye’s biological mother, through Barnardos and her case worker, but we were told it would not be in the best interests of her three children in foster care.

In New South Wales, the government plans to introduce rigid time frames for deciding whether children will be restored to their birth parents before they are adopted by a new family. Under the current proposal, for children under two, the birth parents will be given six months to show they’re able to care for their child again. If the child is over two years old, the birth parents will be given 12 months. These provisions have upset some in the welfare sector, who say that’s not long enough to allow birth parents to restore their ability to be good parents.

Minister Pru Goward says the provisions are in the best interests of the children.

Pru Goward: We talk a lot about the rights of parents; this is actually about the rights of children. We should be putting children at the centre of what we are doing here. And, yes, six months for a woman who has got a serious drug addiction and a serious history of domestic violence, it is not a lot of time. But if you are removing a child that early, you can be sure there’s been prior history.

Because for every day that you leave a child in a home where there is serious drug addiction, there’s needles on the floor, there is poo in the corner, there is nothing in the fridge, the child is filthy, the milk gets adulterated, there is a prospect that the child takes the heroin, and the domestic violence is a horrendous factor for a child to see between its parents or between its mother and the new boyfriend, every day you leave a child like that, you damage that child.

Kylie Grey:New South Wales Minister for Family and Community Services, Pru Goward.

In April 2008, Becky’s two children were removed by the New South Wales Department of Family and Community Services. A violent partner and Becky’s drug use were the reasons her children were taken. I met Becky at her mum’s house.

Becky: Anyway, so DOCS would visit me and they were quite happy with me. I had a good case worker. They were happy with me. This came from nowhere, I had no warning.

I always had like a little nanna nap at about 1 till 2. I’d always have a little lie down with her, ‘cos if I’d breastfeed her and put her down, she wouldn’t sleep. And so I’d always doze off with her and put my phone on silent. And I woke up at about 3 and I had all these missed calls from, like, private numbers: ‘You’ve got to ring the school. You’ve got to ring… DOCS are there. DOCS are there. You’ve got to ring the school.’ So I rang the school straightaway.

I got out of the house within, like, three minutes. I just changed her nappy and I put her in the pram and walked out the door. And they were there already and they had him the back of a car, a white car. And I just said, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ And they gave me their piece of paper.

Kylie Grey:The Department told Becky they would have to take her daughter as well.

Becky: Straightaway she knew something was wrong and just started crying. And I thought, you know, I could either do this a shitty way or I could do it a good way, and I don’t want these kids to get upset. And they drove off. And I stayed in contact for a few hours and she cried the whole time and she didn’t stop crying for hours.

Kylie Grey:The children, then aged six and one, were first placed in short-term care, then in foster homes.

Becky: What I’ve got going now is quite good. I’ve got overnights and weekends and I’ll probably be spending four days with my kids alone together over Christmas. And we’ve been doing that since January this year. I don’t want to go to rehab and not have that. I was in rehab last year. I didn’t get to see them. The whole time I was there, they just wouldn’t bring them there.

Kylie Grey:Becky told me her eldest son is doing well at school. But she says he has never stopped asking when he can go back to his family.

Becky: I think it would benefit him enormously. And then he would know and he could go to bed at night knowing that finally someone’s done something to me, because all I’ve been asking is to get out of foster care.

I would like him to be a little bit angry at me. I think that would make me feel better, you know? But they’re safe. They haven’t been hit. That was my biggest fear. Yeah.

Kylie Grey:Becky says she wished she’d had more support before the children were taken. More help for families whose children are removed should be a policy priority, says the new National Children’s Commissioner, Megan Mitchell.

Megan Mitchell: When a child goes into care—and sometimes it’s not just the clean thing that they come into care and then they stay there for 18 years. For many children they go in and out back to their birth families and when they leave care, they go back to their birth families.

So I don’t think that we can ignore the birth family in all of this. Whatever that issue was that led to that child being removed—like substance abuse or domestic violence or mental health issues—we need to be addressing that as well. Because ultimately that child will, most likely, go back to that environment. And if we haven’t addressed those issues in that family, the child and their siblings will still be exposed to all of those things and therefore we grow the system yet again.

Kylie Grey:Megan Mitchell believes one way to reduce the number of children in out-of-home care is to work on keeping families together.

The Benevolent Society is one organisation that’s currently running programs to help families who are at risk of having children removed. CEO Anne Hollands:

Anne Hollands: The Resilient Families program that we have is very intensive work with very risky family situations. They are actually families where a child has already been notified to the authorities, so what we try and do is move in, in a very intensive way, 24/7 support for a period. We work with the family for up to a year very, very intensively with therapeutic and educational support. But we think there needs to be work done even earlier.

Kylie Grey:The Benevolent Society produced a paper this year called, ‘Acting Early, Changing Lives: How Prevention and Early Action Saves Money and Improves Wellbeing’. It said programs need to work with families for more than 12 months to have a lasting impact.

Anne Hollands says too much investment goes into last resort facilities and not enough goes into early intervention programs.

Anne Hollands: A lot of our resources are caught up with building prisons, having kids who can’t read in juvenile justice institutions, and funding foster care. What we need to look at is transitioning some of that money and spending it earlier, in the knowledge that if we do that, then we will reduce costs, for example in the prison system, if we’re able to do this. But it does need a lot of political will and a preparedness to work in the long term. And you need to have bipartisan commitment to do that, because it’s no good changing your policy every three years.

Kylie Grey:Megan Mitchell says there has to be more focus on helping people become better parents, because bringing more and more kids into state care is not sustainable.

Megan Mitchell: In the Australian context, one of the largest reasons for removing children and placing them into care is because of neglect and an emotional abuse. That’s been rising over the years. And in those circumstances, that’s ultimately preventable, and that’s about helping families who may not have had good parenting experiences themselves, is helping them understand what it is to be a good parent, what the skills you need are to be a good parent and to keep your children safe.

At the end of the day I think it's absolutely unsustainable that we keep growing an out-of-home care system instead of investing in early intervention and prevention for children in the family context.

Kylie Grey:Back inside the Reiby juvenile detention centre, Ted dreams of having a supportive family.

Ted: I ran to my mum, I ran to my dad, I ran to my aunties, ran to my mates. Yeah.

Kylie Grey:It’s hard, huh, for you?

Ted: Yeah, it’s pretty hard for me, just like not being with my family and all that.

Don’t ruin your kids lives and stay healthy and that and you won’t get your kids taken away.

Kylie Grey: Thank you…

Background Briefing’s coordinating producer is Linda McGinness. Research by Anna Whitfeld. Technical production by Mark Don. The executive producer is Chris Bullock. And I’m Kylie Grey.