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Letter from New South Wales.

In New South Wales more than half of looked-after children are cared for by relatives. Yet, writes Nigel Spence, they do not get state help despite them having been subjects of state intervention.

As a federation, Australia has different child protection and out-of-home care legislation in each state and territory. Currently, the status of children cared for out of home is the focus of debate in various states and territories.

Between 1996 and 2000 the numbers of children and young people in out-of-home care in Australia rose from 13,979 to 16,923 - a 21 per cent increase. This followed a substantial process of de-institutionalisation during the 1980s and 1990s that saw the closure of many residential care facilities. The result has been more reliance on foster care and kinship care.

In New South Wales kinship care now accounts for more than half of the 7,000 children who are in out-of-home care. However, the state legislation - the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998 - had until recently excluded children in the care of relatives from the definition of out-of-home care. Consequently, those placed with relatives were not eligible to receive services or monitoring - unlike children placed with foster carers.

This arrangement has been widely questioned and debated in NSW. The main argument for including these children within the formal out-of-home care system is that the state has intervened and thus state guardianship has been taken on.

If children in kinship care are excluded from out-of-home care, then they lose out on agency supervision and support, after-care services, and in NSW, case planning and review processes monitored by the new Office of the Children's Guardian.

However, it has also been argued that compulsory monitoring of children living within their family networks can be damaging, disempowering for the families and will place unnecessary strain on limited resources. A crucial aspect of the debate has been the implications for Aboriginal children who are over-represented in out-of-home care and who are most often in kinship care placements. All have been anxious to avoid any negative impact on a community that already has a deep suspicion of child welfare professionals.

Amid the kinship care debate a Permanency Planning Amendment Bill was introduced by the NSW Labour government to strengthen permanency planning policy and practice, including more frequent use of adoption. While the objectives of this bill were widely welcomed, many details of the bill were challenged and ultimately changed.

These debates came together when the NSW conservative opposition, in a surprise development, successfully moved to include an amendment in the bill to change the definition of out-of-home care to include certain groups of children in kinship care. The permanency planning legislation with the kinship care amendment was passed by parliament but has yet to be enacted. The minister for community services has stated that the sections on kinship care will not be implemented until the numbers and the cost implications are fully understood.

Nigel Spence is chief executive officer of the Association of Children's Welfare Agencies, NSW www.acwa.asn.au  

Background

- Australia covers 7.7m sq km (over 31 times the size of the UK) and has a population of 19.4 million (about one-third of the UK).

- Ethnic groups: Caucasian 92 per cent, Asian 7 per cent, Aboriginal and other 1 per cent.

- New South Wales has a population of about 6.2 million of whom more than 4 million live in the greater Sydney metropolitan area. There are 1.7 million children (28 per cent of the population) aged between 0 and 19 years.

- There were 73,000 notifications of child abuse and neglect received in NSW in 2000 of which about 13.5 per cent were substantiated.

- Aboriginal children and young people are over-represented in out-of-home care. More than a quarter of all children in out-of-home care are indigenous. Aboriginal children and young people are nine times more likely than other children to be in out-of-home care.