http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24666534-16382,00.html

November 18, 2008
Article from: The Australian

Adoption or institutional care would help many children

ONCE society placed children from troubled backgrounds in institutions, and as we know from inquiries into abuses long ago, forgot about them. Now we place them with individual fostering families, and at times still forget about them. Some children are removed from their parents for temporary foster care, and later sent back, perhaps several times. Monitoring of all foster households is beyond government resources. Children are returned to abusive or neglectful parents whose behaviour goes unmodified. The annual cost to taxpayers in supporting the foster care in private homes is estimated at about $2 billion. Where is the gain?

In the past few decades, child protection has been dominated by the ideal that children should be kept with their genetic parents as much as possible - the costs of which, very occasionally, have included the life of a child. It's estimated there are about 28,000 children in foster care at any one time. The solution would appear to lie in a mix of the new and the old. By all means leave the child in the parental home if bad adult behaviour such as drug taking can be corrected, and try to do this. If the judgment is made by qualified authorities that the situation is hopeless, then remove the child semi-permanently. Encourage adoption of such children, especially infants. Restore institutional care with well-trained and remunerated staff.

Certainly, allow some vetted and monitored foster families to operate within the system - for a few admirable adults, caring for children is a vocation. Our memories of the wicked old days of institutional abuse now serve only as an example of how better to run taxpayer-funded care. It's likely to be cheaper for the nation and more stabilising for children if institutional care and adoption are more widely available. It would more reliable to monitor care in institutions.

As Caroline Overington has revealed in a series of investigative reports in The Australian this month, governments are paying some foster carers $600 or more a week to look after problem children. Those foster parents probably need the money, but the nation has reached the point, morally and financially, where we need to reassess the system. On the Opinion page today, Chris Goddard of Monash University and Joe Tucci of the Australian Childhood Foundation write: "Child protection is dominated by an ideology that claims it is social, economic and cultural forces that cause child abuse and neglect (with) infants and young children subjected to numerous failed attempts at reunification with their birth parents." Research by their organisations and Access Economics estimates the cost of child abuse last year at $10.7billion, and perhaps vastly more. Why do we need to wait longer to act?


What a load of crap, if the department wasn't so hellbent on taking children un-necessarily then this wouldnt be a problem

It is the Department that is running up taxpayers money, they dont mention that thousands of children also get abused in foster care......

When are they going to report the truth!!!!!!!