Ideas@TheCentre
Scrap the National Children’s Commissioner for children’s sake
The federal Attorney-General, Nicola Roxon, announced this week that the Gillard government will appoint a National Children’s Commissioner.
At an extra cost of $3.5 million over four years, the commissioner is to operate as an arm of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC).
According to The Australian, the commissioner’s role will be to ‘raise public awareness of issues affecting children through discussion, research and educational programs.’ While expected to advocate for the most at-risk children in the community, the commissioner will have no direct responsibility for child welfare. Guardianship obligations and the power to investigate individual cases are already vested in the offices of the children’s commissioners established by state and territory governments.
But according to the head of the AHRC, Catherine Branson, we need not worry about waste and duplication. In fact, Branson reckons even more money should be spent hiring lawyers to deal with the anticipated spike in the number of ‘complaints made under the [UN] convention on the rights of the child.’
As a student of Australia’s child protection crisis, this set off my alarm bells.
To make the overwhelmed state and territory child protection services sustainable and effective, more children need to be removed permanently from the care of dysfunctional families. To ensure at-risk children have stable and loving families, the number of children adopted from foster care needs to increase.
Legal action to sever parental rights has to be taken to free children for adoption when inadequate parents demonstrably fail to address the behavioural problems (usually substance abuse and domestic violence) that impair their parenting skills and damage their children.
Any state government that raises the adoption rate will court controversy. Anti-adoption activists in the social work profession and academia will protest loudly. If the proposed commissioner’s role is established, I predict it will be heavily lobbied to have adoption declared inconsistent with Australia’s commitment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The good news is that such an action will fail. As the adoption advisor to the UK government, Martin Narey, argued in this report last year, child protection concerns trump parental rights and the right of children to ‘know and be cared for by his or her parents.’ As common sense dictates, the paramount consideration is whether adoption is in the best interests of child health and welfare.
Yet this won’t stop the opponents of adoption from trying it on before the AHRC. And the prospect that the proposed commissioner will run legal interference and generate embarrassing media coverage could discourage state governments from undertaking necessary reforms of child protection policy and practice.
So if the federal government really wants to do good for children, it ought to scrap its unnecessary expansion of Australia’s ‘do-gooding’ bureaucracy.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of numerous reports on Australia’s child protection crisis.
