An inquiry into Queensland's child safety department has revealed significant budget overspending driven by the extensive use of expensive emergency residential care placements. This reliance stems from a chronic shortage of kinship carers, leading to a critical gap between the number of children needing care and available safe placements, pushing costs to unsustainable levels.
Queensland’s child protection services have incurred substantial budget overrun s due to a prolonged reliance on expensive emergency residential care placements, an ongoing inquiry has revealed. This situation arose from persistent challenges in recruiting sufficient kinship carers to accommodate a rapidly growing number of children and teenagers requiring state intervention.
In 2020 alone, the demand for care placements surged to nearly 10,000, creating a critical imbalance between available spaces and the escalating need. Leanne Linard, who served as the Minister for Children from late 2020 to mid-2023, testified before the inquiry, acknowledging a significant disparity between the number of children needing care and the available placements. She stated that by 2019, the capacity for outsourced service delivery was reportedly exhausted. This scarcity frequently compelled the department to resort to emergency and inherently more costly residential care options as the sole means to ensure a child's immediate safety and removal from potentially harmful circumstances. Linard indicated that the department had initially anticipated a decrease in the demand for these intensive placements once COVID-19 restrictions eased. However, this projection proved inaccurate, as Deidre Mulkerin, the former Director-General of the department, informed the inquiry that the numbers of children in care continued to rise instead. The scale of Queensland’s residential care sector has expanded dramatically, now valued at approximately $1 billion, with the state actively utilizing nearly a quarter of these placements. The inquiry specifically highlighted on Thursday that emergency placements used by the department are often up to 40 percent more expensive than standard foster care arrangements, even when managed by third-party residential care providers. Linard confirmed that these short-term and emergency arrangements frequently involved unlicensed providers, leading to an increase in the number of such facilities as more children entered the system. Despite concerted efforts to increase the number of kinship and family-based carers, which represent the most cost-effective care option, the department struggled to fill these essential roles. Linard noted a lack of significant new kinship carers coming forward, with an increase only becoming noticeable in 2022, and even then, the growth was not rapid enough to address the escalating demand. Furthermore, the department deliberately avoided entering into medium-term contracts with residential care providers, as it had prioritized securing guaranteed funding over several years for its kinship care initiatives. This strategic decision led to the reallocation of funds that could have supported more stable residential care arrangements. The department's stated goal was to reduce reliance on residential care, aiming to halve these placements and double family and kinship care placements, with an ambitious target of less than 10 percent of children in the system being in residential care by 2027. Linard acknowledged that this approach resulted in substantial budget blow-outs, with subsequent budgets primarily serving to cover departmental deficits. She admitted that even a significant increase in funding at that time would not have immediately resolved all the systemic issues. The department possessed the authority to request a ministerial guarantee of future funding from the Treasury, which could have facilitated medium-term residential care contracts. However, Linard stated she was never formally asked to initiate such a guarantee, despite being acutely aware of the financial strain caused by the deficits. Commissioner Paul Anastassiou suggested that by foregoing the potential safety net of medium-term residential care contracts in favor of pushing for increased annual funding, the department may have missed a crucial opportunity. This point was further underscored by Mulkerin’s revelation earlier in the week that the department had sought close to $1.5 billion in funding for 2023. The inquiry was scheduled to continue on Friday, with recommendations anticipated by November
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