Turner Judy: Urgent Debates — Department of Child Youth and Family Services—Report  
Turner Judy: Urgent Debates — Department of Child Youth and Family Services—Report  
[Volume:613;Page:9949] 
JUDY TURNER (United Future) 
: 
 I stand on behalf of United Future to express our huge regret that we even have to be speaking on this matter today. I commend the Office of the Commissioner for Children and Shannon Pakura from the Department of Child Youth and Family Services for the very honest reports they have written about the tragedies we are talking about today. The circumstances of Saliel Aplin and Olympia Jetson prior to their deaths were nothing short of diabolic. Let us not for a minute assume that families of this level of dysfunction are rare. I appreciate that the Commissioner for Children has today in the newspaper challenged us as communities to ask ourselves questions about why we hesitate to report why we hesitate to act and why we stumble over the question of children in our neighbourhood about whose safety we are unsure of. I have been a classroom teacher and I have known times of having serious doubts in my mind about what was going on in some children’s homes and of being unclear as to when to act and when not to. We need to start to empower people who work directly with children to have the confidence to take the steps that need to be taken. 
I am interested in why some groups I have spoken to in community schools and community groups have been reticent about approaching the Department of Child Youth and Family Services with some of their concerns. The reason is the double-edged issues that have gone on with the Department of Child Youth and Family Services. In this situation we look at what has obviously been a huge under-reaction to the situation of Olympia and Saliel and cases like James Whakaruru. But what has made people resistant to approaching the Department of Child Youth and Family Services and referring children to it is the huge number of cases where there has been an enormous over-reaction. 
I have recently met with social workers that knew of a family of eight children. The mum was not coping very well. There had been some concerns and the Department of Child Youth and Family Services went around to investigate. The house was a mess. The children were removed on the basis of neglect and 18 months later they are still not back with their family despite the fact that the principles in the Children Young Persons and their Families Act state that children should be returned to their families where possible. 
I am concerned about the pressure on the Department of Child Youth and Family Services being the final stop and place of last resort. I am also concerned about the huge expectations on social workers who work for that organisation on a wide range of cases and about the levels of criticality they have to respond to. We believe that child protection should be investigated by a team that has at the end of an investigation two clear options. One is that they should uplift the children for their protection if that is deemed necessary. We also believe that when children are uplifted the families from whom those children have been uplifted should be supported and encouraged to become a safe place to which those children can be returned where possible. The other option is that families can be referred to one of the many fine community-based organisations that serve our local communities: to Family Start; to Family Help and the amazing work it does with high-risk families in Christchurch; to Te Aroha Nui in Palmerston North; to the Nest run by the Salvation Army in Hamilton; and to the many branches of the James Family supplied by Presbyterian Support Services. For social workers at the end of the line it is hugely important to have that option of being able to refer cases that they do not think are serious enough for children to be uplifted. 
When we look at Olympia and Saliel’s case we find that there were social workers who had a long-term involvement with the family—and we applaud the fact that social workers should be able to work long term with families but they should not be the same people who are called on to investigate when there is a worry about children’s safety. We look at the involvement of police in this case and find that they focused too much on the safety of adults during the 6 years of call-outs to domestic violence incidents. When we look at the school the two children attended we find that one child was suspended and a request was made at that time by the mother for counselling for the child. There was disclosure by the other child of violence and a reluctance noted by the school by that child to go home and we find that the neighbours were acutely aware of the level of domestic violence that was going on next door. A specialised investigative team with a clear mandate to find all the pieces of the jigsaw would have been able to assemble the picture very easily. 
 Instead we have social workers who in responding to a vast array of cases with a wide range of criticality rating from the call centre are easily able to overlook or misread the facts. We have busy schoolteachers who cater for a large number of children and their diverse needs but who do not have all the information at their disposal. What is of most concern about these findings? Yes there are policies and procedures in place to deal with complex cases but they were not followed. The department said that the normal checks and balances of care and protection systems did not operate in this case and we need to be assured that those checks and balances are properly in place. There is the problem with familiarity and United Future believes that if we were to have a specialised team that focused just on those high criticality cases with an investigative role to bring together all the pieces of the jigsaw that are often out there we might not be facing the situation we have today. The police who completed 12 family violence reports and referred the girls’ mum to the Women’s Refuge would have referred the children to the Department of Child Youth and Family Services if they had for a minute considered the children to be in immediate danger. The problem is that the Masterton office of the department believes itself to be under-resourced. However the department is not able to evaluate even whether it was underfunded because there is no workload assessment tool to see whether social workers are overworked. We believe that the need for that assessment is urgent. 
I finish by making the point that the case of these two girls and the appalling manner in which they died is I believe the tip of the iceberg. There are literally thousands of children in this country who have been shifted from school to school from house to house and from home to home—as we heard the previous speaker read out from the report. They are probably as at risk as those two girls were. We must do everything in our power as members of Parliament to change the environment in which social workers teachers and the police work. We must also be party to theCommissioner for Children’s call for community responsiveness in order that neighbours will take the courageous step of making the reports they need to make. We need to look very seriously at the way we are delivering our services and United Future will support any initiative to that end.