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 record keeping in relation to the experiences of parents with disabilities within the child safety system.
You can read my questions and their full responses below, or in the official Parliamentary record of proceedings (Hansard) here.
The QAI’s report Child Safety’s policies on parents with disability raised concerns. Minister, does the government intend to start gathering data on how parents with disability are impacted by the Child Safety system?
Mrs MULLEN: In my role as the Minister for Disability Services it is an area where we do see a cross-section of not only young people with disabilities but parents with disabilities as well. We know, for example, that over one quarter of our children and young people who are subject to ongoing child protection intervention do have a disability. We have a group of parents with lived experience who meet with me on a regular basis. That is organised through the Family Inclusion Network. As parents, they speak to me about some of the challenges with that lived experience. They have raised issues of parents who may have disabilities themselves and issues around cognition and sometimes understanding some of the decisions that Child Safety is making which may be challenging to them.
We really listen to those voices. We want to ensure that we are making the system the least difficult for those families and parents. Whilst I do not believe we have a specific measure, I will ask the director-general in terms of any work we might be doing in this space. We look at all of the experiences of parents with lived experience, and disabilities is one of those areas that does come up.
Ms Mulkerin: I have also had a discussion with our colleagues at QAI about the practices and policies, and we have undertaken to work with them. We have given them access to our policies and practices, and we will work with them about making sure that our practice is robust, respectful and considered about parents with disabilities. As the minister said, we do have a high proportion of children with disabilities in our care. We are very mindful of the issues around understanding the work, the language that we use and the complexity of the system in which we are working. Families have to interact with us. We are just a couple of months out from implementing a new replacement for our current case management system which will allow us to gather a lot more data across the board about families and children so we can supplement the corporate data we currently have. I will check whether our new ICT system has an identifier for parents.