Turner Judy: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Turner Judy: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10500] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 At the time that the Social Services Committee considered the estimates for Child Youth and Family the Audit Office was unable to supply us with a report. The committee took advantage of the kind offer of the Minister Ruth Dyson to return after an audit report was provided. Even at that second visit internal budgets for the 2007-08 year were yet to be set. However we did ascertain that extra money was being budgeted for foster care and United Future supports that. 
But of course such an allocation begs the question: what about grandparents raising grandchildren and other kinship caregivers raising children considering that it is often Child Youth and Family that calls on grandparents to step up to the plate? Once it is clear that kin caregivers are going to be the permanent caregivers for a child then the costs seriously kick in for those people. They have a new mortgage on the bigger house they have to buy having previously downsized for their retirement. They have ongoing legal bills counselling costs for the traumatised children in their care plus all the other expenses that are covered by additional allowances for foster parents but those allowances are not available for grandparents. 
So we see grandparents failing to fill their own prescriptions leaving employment to focus on the children and ploughing through retirement savings at a great rate of knots. When will the Government face up to the fact that the failure to invest that little bit more in these families will not ultimately save it a cent? These children typify the category identified by countless research papers as at risk but are responsive to early intervention. 
One of the other concerns of Child Youth and Family is the unacceptable number of times that children in the department’s care are moved around. Although the select committee was told that respite care accounted for some of the movement the department admitted that it was unable to distinguish in its records and statistics between moves between carers respite care and time back with the child’s family. The select committee in its report suggested that differentiating between care options may help identify undesirable and temporary placements that need to be addressed. 
This highlights for me one of the most serious holes in this department’s service at present. Currently there is no independent advocacy for children or their families. There are no independent mediation services and no independent complaints service. If people are reliant on the goodwill of their case manager to honour decisions made in a family group conference reliant on their goodwill to determine how often they get to see their children and in what circumstances then without independent advocacy the imbalance of power is extreme. Constituents whom I have dealt with are too scared to question or complain fearing that a further downgrading of their contact arrangements will occur. They are rarely equipped with the calm and coherent verbal skills to negotiate or appeal decisions made and if they do complain often it is noted evidentially on a file where it can be used against them. 
Nobody resents the statutory powers that Child Youth and Family has but even the police have a complaints authority. The Minister has told us again that the differential response model having been piloted extremely successfully in New Plymouth and Royal Oak will be rolled out across the country. In the opinion of United Future that cannot happen soon enough. The previous speaker was concerned about a lack of consultation with not just community organisations but also iwi. I believe that such consultation would be strengthened with the differential response model as it would allow community groups and iwi to be involved in the decisions made around children. 
To have a department that is drowning in ever-increasing notifications most of which are medium to low-level neglect notifications and at the same time to have competent social service providers and iwi providers who are well able to execute professional interventions where no statutory powers are required sitting around waiting for the Government to trust them enough to pass on the work to them is completely criminal. It is criminal when we consider that a large percentage of the high-criticality notifications are second and third notification cases that deteriorated while waiting for proper social work to be done. Having said that I point out that I do not blame Child Youth and Family staff but I do blame Child Youth and Family policy for this problem. 
The multimillion-dollar questions are these: why is there such a culture of mistrust in the profession of social work and does the department contribute to this mistrust? For instance do teachers lawyers and accountants mistrust the professional standards of those who do not work in the same building as them but are of the same profession? No they do not. I say to the Minister that there is a huge amount of scepticism right now in the non-governmental organisation sector as to whether the department really will roll out the differential response model. In some regions those organisations do not believe that there is the will and intention to repair the relationships that exist between themselves and Child Youth and Family to the state whereby low-level risk work can be passed on to them in order to free Child Youth and Family staff to do the high-risk work we want them to be doing. 
There is a huge difference from region to region as to the quality of the relationship that exists between Child Youth and Family and local non-governmental organisation providers. In some regions there is a culture of active antagonism. I have had reports from the chief executive officers of some non-governmental organisations who have said that they believe that at a local level their Child Youth and Family branch will not cooperate with any ministerial directive for it to pass on work. The staff will pay lip service they will sit in the meetings and nod their heads but they have absolutely no intention of moving towards a place where they can pass on this low-level work to these highly competent providers. I think it is a crying shame that this issue is not being addressed very very seriously. 
If the Minister is serious about engaging in a much more relevant way with the non-governmental organisation sector to have it help provide the work that needs to happen she needs to show equal sincerity in following up on branches that seem to be making slow progress in this regard to find out what the real problem is. The feedback I am getting is that in some places there is huge resistance. I understand that in some sense social work is a young profession. We have created a Social Workers Registration Board and have given social workers 6 years to comply. The ministry itself is working at a reasonably good speed to make sure that all of its social workers are registered and so is the non-governmental organisation sector. 
What I cannot figure out—as somebody from the teaching profession who has enjoyed amazing collegial support and interaction all her teaching career—is why in the profession of social work it depends on the provider one is working for as to what one’s attitude is towards others. I find that really concerning and I believe that the Minister and her department could do a lot towards rectifying the situation. 
 I believe that the differential response model is a step in the right direction. I believe that the evidence is extremely clear that in the places where it has been piloted it has worked extremely well. I am concerned that even in the pilot schemes Child Youth and Family has been very selective and limited in terms of the non-governmental organisations it is prepared to work with. However even putting that aside I think there is the opportunity to reduce the department’s workload which is ever-increasing. Notifications currently go up at a rate of around 15 percent a year. After incidents like that of Coral Burrows the rate jumps 30 percent as people respond with concern to the situations they see around them. We expect the current staffing ratios to cope with this work. 
I also have a concern that Child Youth and Family seems to still be very output orientated. It says that yes its unallocated case rates are down but what I am hearing is that yes its unallocated case rates are down but the quality of the actual social work being done is very very limited. The social workers have made the phone call they have knocked on the door and they can tick the box—the case is no longer an unallocated case—but is there quality social work going on is there quality intervention are family and community groups that already have active roles with these families being included in the decisions that are being made? That is another matter and I have serious doubts. 
I encourage this ministry to use Vote Child Youth and Family Services to start to progress those very vital community relationships. If we want every community in New Zealand to have a true safety net around every child who lives in that community the last thing we can afford to do is to have holes in that safety net created by the fact that agencies that should be working together cannot even get on the phone to talk to each other and work collaboratively around case management. I do not think it matters which agency is the lead agency. 
I compliment the Government on its Vulnerable Families project. I love what I have seen and heard about the project and I believe that it is the way forward. But I also think there is room in that regard for non-governmental organisations to be included in that project.