If the Northern Territory government had adopted the recommendation of a 2010 board of inquiry, it could have stopped an exponential increase in child protection notifications, the NT royal commission has heard.
On the third day of its first public hearing, the inquiry into the protection and detention of children in the Northern Territory heard from Muriel Bamblett, the chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency and co-author of the 2010 Growing Them Strong, Together report on child safety in the NT.
Adequately funding family support services to prevent child abuse and neglect is a “no-brainer” but governments have consistently failed to do so, Bamblett told the commission.
The royal commission, called by the prime minister in response to national outrage over mistreatment of children in detention, has been tasked to examine the past decade of child protection and detention issues. Aboriginal children are vastly overrepresented in both systems.
This current hearing is examining the many reports and inquiries already conducted into child protection issues and has heard a common refrain that very few were adequately acted upon by governments.
Bamblett said the NT’s statutory child protection system has only one response: to judge people as “bad parents” and take their children away, rather than providing support and services in the early years.
The NT government had never invested in a comprehensive service system, she said, and that contributed to high numbers of child protection cases, which continued to grow after the board finished its inquiry.
The number of children placed in out-of-home care increased by 215% in the 10 years to 2010.
“It’s a no-brainer, you have to invest in families to keep children safe,” she said.
“If the NT government had implemented our recommendations around putting in services to the front of house, I think those numbers would absolutely have been reduced.”
Bamblett said it was a “shame” and “embarrassing” that the NT, with one of the biggest Indigenous child welfare issues in the country, did not have a specific Indigenous child welfare services agency, despite the report recommending one.
Current systems failed in part because they did not work with Indigenous communities to find flexible, appropriate solutions, she said.
She said the housing shortage in Aboriginal communities must be addressed as a priority, or “the situation wouldn’t change for Aboriginal families”.
During the investigation, which Bamblett stressed mainly visited communities of the highest need, houses with 20 to 30 people were often encountered.
“Imagine being a young parent, having a baby and coming home to a house where there are 20 people living … How would you ensure the safety of the child when everyone’s co-sleeping?”
During the investigation she learned of female victims of family violence locked up in shipping containers with no mattresses, ostensibly for their protection, and children facing the court system with no legal representation.
“That wouldn’t happen in any other state or territory,” she told the commission.
“It basically says that a lot of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory don’t enjoy the same basic rights as Aboriginal people everywhere else in Australia and, to escape the poverty of neglect and disadvantage, they have to leave the Northern Territory and go elsewhere,” she said.
The inquiry found widespread fear of the child protection system among Aboriginal people and some communities also dealt with high levels of gambling.
“It was a response to boredom,” she said.
Bamblett cited one example where card games often went for days and $10,000 could be won in a single hand. It was reported $60,000 could go through an ATM after pension day but only a third might be spent at the local store, she said, and the community still lived in abject poverty.
She said there needed to be investment in things “which made the community feel good”, such as movie nights, to engage communities with alternatives to gambling.
The report also found an overwhelmed mandatory reporting system which “inundated” the department of children and families with child protection notifications.
A number were viewed as not needing investigation but still tied up resources and staffing, and created a backlog of notifications, which Bamblett told the commission “would certainly place children at risk”.
Earlier this week the commission heard evidence of falsified reports that saw notifications finalised without investigation in order to ease the backlog.
She said the Growing Them Strong, Together report encountered widespread inadequate funding but also instances of underspending.
“It just defies understanding that you’ve got a system that’s imploding because of resource implications and yet there’s an underspend,” she said.
They discovered duplication, inconsistency in approaches, and a lack of communication and coordination.
There was more success when services were engaged on the ground, delivered by community controlled organisations, she said. But, in her experience, Indigenous organisations struggled to get government funding compared with non-Indigenous organisations.
The commission continues in Darwin.
