With a focus on management rather than reform, we have let the ball drop. Countless enquiries and investigations on the back of a tragedy have successively taken us down the wrong path. More significantly they have distracted us from the core objective – to keep more children and young people living safely and able to thrive in their own communities and family.

This is clearly borne out in our Child Welfare data. Where once, South Australia enjoyed a much lower proportion of children removed from families and placed in care, we are now well above the national average. Indeed, over the last 10 years the rate of children in care in South Australia has risen by a staggering 44% - across Australia for the same period, it rose only 6.5%.  South Australia currently has a rate of 11.8 children per 1000 in care compared to a national average of only 8.2. To put this in an international context, South Australia’s rate of children and young people in care is almost 40% more than the UK. In New Zealand with a host of different policy settings they have succeeded in achieving a steady decline in the number of children entering care over the past 6 years.

So where and why has South Australia got it so wrong? For starters, we have been convinced that all we need is a bigger and better performing investigative process to detect and respond to concerns of abuse and neglect. This managerial approach has delivered us a system where now 1 in 3 children and young people will have been the subject of a Child Protection notification by the time they are 18. Surely, this is neither a sensible nor sustainable outcome.

Over the coming months the government will undertake a full review of the Children and Young People (Safety) Act of 2017. It will be important that this stimulates a broader public debate about what we want from our Child Protection systems and responses. It surely can’t be more of the same.

What South Australia needs - and where other jurisdictions around the nation and the globe have headed - is a complete reframing of the approach. One based on doing whatever it takes to keep children safe in their homes and family through the delivery of interventions and supports for as long as needed for families and parents under stress. Nobody wants to see children and young people continuing to live in unsafe households. Whilst the removal of children for their safety is sometimes the only reasonable action to take for far too many families it has become our only real response. Through a failure to implement a system of accessible, durable and accountable family support programs we have effectively consigned too many South Australian children to destiny of spending much of their childhood in State care.

When the current legislation was passed in the dying days of the former Weatherill Government It was on the premise that new legislation would also be tabled in Parliament aimed at ensuring a more robust system of supports for families experiencing vulnerability.

The impetus for this Bill introduced into the Legislative Council in October 2017 was to rebalance the policy response to ensure families and parents could access the help wanted and needed to keep children and young people safely living at home.

Titled the “Prevention and Early intervention for the Development and Wellbeing of Children and Young People” Bill, it offered a legislative framework designed to strengthen families and improve the wellbeing of children and young people.

Sadly, this legislation became a casualty of the change of government and the opportunity to cement into our system a commitment to ensuring all families the right to receive the support and interventions needed to keep children safe and out of care was lost.

Interestingly, at about the same time, a panel of everyday South Australians were assembled to review what the state needed to do to better protect children and young people. After weeks of deliberation and consideration of evidence presented by experts in the field they released the “People’s Policy and Children’s Wellbeing 2018”. In brief, this paper didn’t call for a tougher regime for struggling families or for greater numbers of children to be removed and taken into state care. It did argue for an expansion of in-home support for families with children in their first 1000 days, improving the capacity and coordination of current services and more Aboriginal led and delivered family and community-based programs.

Unfortunately, we are now dealing with the consequences of not acting on either of these opportunities. Whilst our expenditure on frontline children protection investments and out of home care services has ballooned over the past decade (a whopping 209% in just 10 years to just over $0.5B p.a.) our investment in a range of services to support families under stress has largely stagnated.

We are all paying the price for this policy failure - but none more so than the children and young people for whom removal from their families has become an inevitable and costly public policy response.