CHLOE Valentine wasn’t killed by just two ferals. Also guilty is the feral culture that millions of us helped create.

So it’s not enough that we’ve jailed Chloe’s mother, Ashlee Polkinghorne, and her brutal partner, Benjamin McPartland.

Nor is it enough the we blame South Australia’s child protection service, Families SA, even though it was given 20 separate warnings that Chloe was in danger yet — shockingly — did not save her.

No, we must confront the values we’ve allowed to take root that helped make modern Australia so toxic for this four-year-old.

The bare facts are now well known.

In 2012, Chloe was living at Ingle Farm with Polkinghorne and McPartland, who thought it would be a great joke to force the four-year-old to ride a motorbike three times her weight.

They made her ride it repeatedly over three days, even though she couldn’t stop without falling off the bike, or under it. You can hear them laughing at her in a video.

Chloe fell unconscious, but as coroner Mark Johns noted in his report last week, Polkinghorne and McPartland waited more than eight hours to call an ambulance, and meanwhile “occupied themselves by using Facebook, doing some internet banking, searching the internet as to what to do when a person was rendered unconscious, and smoked cannabis”.

Chloe died. A forensic pathologist said she’d seen such terrible bruising only once before, in an adult.

Coroner Johns’ report is passionate and critically important.

Read it, because it challenges many lethal conceits of a society that increasingly values pleasure above duty, self above family, freedom above responsibility.

First of all, of course, it exposes our farcical faith that government officials can deal with the collapse of the family unit now that we’ve destroyed social taboos against divorce, drugs and casual sex.

In this case, how often Families SA was told Chloe was in trouble, and how feebly it reacted.

The reports of friends, relatives, police and charity were consistent. Polkinghorne was often drugged and drunk — a prostitute who lived in filth and flitted from one violent boyfriend to another.

She was so selfish she’d rather get stoned than mix formula for her baby, who was just fed tap water instead.

media_camera Chloe Valentine died from injuries sustained after she was forced to ride a motorbike over and over by her mum and mum’s boyfriend.

And the reports agreed that Chloe was filthy, neglected and often dumped by her mother on acquaintances.

A policeman twice noticed Chloe out at night near a shopping centre, in a stroller pushed by a 16-year-old boy.

A hospital noted that another of Polkinghorne’s friends brought Chloe to hospital with gastro and her mother did not call in the two days her daughter was treated.

The coroner’s report also exposes how much child protection workers had been marinated in our no-consequences culture, endlessly “helping” a lazy manipulator.

They helped Polkinghorne find three supported accommodation options, gave her taxi vouchers and arranged daily government-subsidised childcare, even though she wasn’t working. They even drove Polkinghorne to her jailed boyfriend.

Their most astonishing “help”? They got a taxi chauffeur to drive Chloe back to Polkinghorne well past midnight from a friend’s house. (No social worker went with the toddler to make sure she was safe.)

No wonder Polkinghorne treated those who helped her with unwavering contempt.

Up to three-quarters of parents supervised by Australia’s child protection services are thought to have problems with drink and drugs, and Families SA was repeatedly warned that Polkinghorne’s own drug use endangered Chloe.

One friend was so worried that she taped Polkinghorne, clearly high, rambling that “I look after her better …. when I’m f … like, when I’m on gear”.

Yet Families SA not only let Polkinghorne keep Chloe, but failed to use its legal powers to at least insist she go through drug counselling in exchange.

And when Polkinghorne broke her promise to stop taking drugs, there were no consequences.

Instead, her case officer wrote up a “safety plan” under which Polkinghorne agreed that when

she got high, she’d at least “arrange for a non-substance affected adult to provide care for Chloe”.

The coroner noted dryly: “It was suggested to (the case worker) that this almost amounts to an implicit condonation of the consumption of alcohol or drugs but he did not agree.”

Adding to Chloe’s danger was another toxic value — our absurd insistence on rights over responsibilities. And over sense.

One Families SA worker even refused to tell Polkinghorne that she and Chloe had moved in with a registered sex offender. The worker had discovered the man’s record simply by searching the internet, yet she and her boss decided that warning Polkinghorne would still breach his privacy.

Or take the reaction of another Families SA case worker when Salvation Army officers inspected a house they’d supplied Polkinghorne.

Finding her away, they’d opened the unlocked door to find a rat-infested pigsty.,

Polkinghorne’s case worker hit the roof ... not with Polkinghorne but the Salvos, accusing them of trespassing.

Coroner Johns was astonished that the case worker had sided against officers, pointing out this “merely served to embolden (her) further in her defiance of authority figures, including Families SA itself”.

Mr Johns’ report also notes how our modern welfarism turns some children into possessions — even meal tickets.

In this case, “Chloe represented nothing more to (her mother) than a means by which her income could be enhanced by obtaining support payments not available to a childless person”.

Finally, Mr Johns is savage on one more foolish fetish — our insistence that children should almost never be adopted, and rotten parents be given endless chances.

The statistics tell this sad story. Just 114 Australian children were adopted in 2009-10, compared to more than 8500 in the early 1970s.

Or put it this way: Dr Jeremy Sammut, of the Centre for Independent Studies, has calculated that if we had England’s annual rate of adoption of children in care, we’d have had 1700 adoptees.

Or if we had the adoption rate of the United States, we’d have 4800. Not 114.

Coroner Johns cannot hide his anger: “The pendulum has swung too far in protecting the ‘rights’ of dysfunctional parents ...

“It must be a standard approach for workers to always act in the child’s best interest only.”

Always and always. Rest in peace, Chloe Valentine. May we all learn to better protect children just like you.

BLOG WITH BOLT

Originally published as Tragic Chloe a victim of toxic culture