During Estimates hearings on Wednesday 31 July 2024, I asked the Minister for Child Safety, Minister for Seniors and Disability Services and Minister for Multicultural Affairs and the Director General of the department about the care of young kids in the child safety system, in particular, the use of commercial accommodation.
You can read my questions and their full responses below, or in the official Parliamentary record of proceedings (Hansard) here.
Mr BERKMAN: I want to start with a question in relation to my question on notice about children in the child protection system being housed overnight in commercial accommodation like hotels and motels. I understand the month-by-month breakdown could not be provided but that, in total, 130 children spent 643 nights in this type of accommodation last financial year. Are you able to confirm how many of those children were under 12 years old and how many were under five years old?
Mrs MULLEN: I will ask the director-general if we have that data. I am not sure that we do.
Ms Mulkerin: I will have to check whether we have that breakdown. We use commercial accommodation for a whole raft of reasons. It can be a carer and a child coming from North Queensland down here to the south-east corner for medical treatment. We will put them up in a hotel or motel, so that is counted as commercial accommodation. It could be families who live in the south-east corner and they are having contact with their child or young person who lives in North Queensland. We might pay for the accommodation for the whole family to have contact.
We pay for commercial accommodation for children and young people who live out west who might come in to the coast to access specialist treatment. It is a whole bundle of issues. Sometimes if we are moving a young person or a child from the south-east up north and they are moving to a particular placement closer to their country—for example, out in the cape—they might fly from here to Townsville, stay overnight in accommodation with a carer or a youth worker before going on to their community. It is used for a whole raft of things—which is that bucket of funding for those young people and children and their carers and families.
Mr BERKMAN: That makes sense. Along those lines, I am interested in instances where it might be required as longer term accommodation. Do you have any data on whether any of these children spent more than a week in hotel or motel accommodation? How long they might have spent in that accommodation and how common that is, I suppose, is what I am looking for.
Ms Mulkerin: It is not a common practice here in Queensland. In some other states it is common practice. It is not our practice here. That is why some of those residential care numbers are larger because we count it and we categorise it differently than some other states do about those emergent places. We usually use, as I said, commercial accommodation either for moving children or families from one end of the state to the other for treatment or contact. Occasionally we have used commercial accommodation if a young person is in a placement now where the carers are asking for some respite, so we might organise for the young person and a youth worker or a carer to stay very short term somewhere else before they return back to their placement. It is usually for very short periods of time really for the purposes of navigating the size of the state.
Mrs MULLEN: In terms of the 2023-24 financial year, what we found is the department spent around $261,027 on commercial accommodation, which is well down on the $550,000 we spent the previous year. I think that shows that expenditure on commercial accommodation is trending down due to the work our department is doing to secure other more suitable accommodation and timely options for placing young people in those emergency situations.
Mr BERKMAN: Minister, are we able to come back to the question of how many under 12s are in commercial accommodation?
Mrs MULLEN: We will see if we can get that figure for you before the end of the hearing.
Mr BERKMAN: This is an adjacent question to come back to. If that data is not collected I would ask why that is the case, given the review of residential care last year specifically identified concerns about children under 12. Despite your comments about the variety of circumstances, it strikes me that would be interesting or useful data to have. That is a statement, not a question. I will move on.
[...]
CHAIR: Member for Maiwar, we only have around 30 seconds left for a question.
Mr BERKMAN: I was interested in how many residential care workers have reported a change in work eligibility and have been required to be stood down while investigations were undertaken. If it is easy enough, could you include in the answer as well the current time lines for notification of eligibility
issues and investigations?
Mrs MULLEN: I am not sure that would be information we would retain. It would be up to the individual providers who would have that data.
[the Director General later returned to the question]
Ms Mulkerin: In relation to the member for Maiwar’s question about the number of young people aged under 12 placed in a commercial accommodation, we do not have that data available as it is managed locally. It is not a corporate data that we have available.