Disservice to children

Everybody understood what was at stake for those Aboriginal mothers who abandoned their responsibility to their children: the welfare agencies would come and take away the kids.

Even in 2008, that's an entirely reasonable fear. According to the Wood report into welfare services in NSW, released in November, children are being removed from their homes at a rate never before experienced by the Aboriginal community.

Where do they go? Until recently, many of them would have gone into the care of the organisation that hosted yesterday's party.

The Aboriginal Children's Service was formed in 1975 by female members of the Wiradjuri tribe of central NSW who had become concerned about children going through the court system and being removed from their families to be cared for by white people or Christian charities.

During the past 33 years, the organisation sheltered thousands of Aboriginal children. It opened offices in Redfern, Wagga Wagga, Cowra and St Marys. It saw itself as the premier organisation for Aboriginal foster care, keeping black children out of white homes. But not any more.

This year the NSW Department of Community Services stopped funding the organisation. The last cheque, for $92,668, was paid in the 2007-08 year. This financial year, there has been nothing.

"We're basically broke," says Betsie Coe, who organised yesterday's party and who volunteers at the service three days a week. "We keep the doors open but we've been stripped of the right to place kids in foster care. I haven't been paid since June.

"So basically you've got a situation where you've got DoCS saying, 'Oh yeah, we really want to look after Aboriginal kids, we want to keep them close to country and with their kin,' but basically, they've written us off. They've taken everything off us and we don't exist as far as they are concerned."

DoCS makes no bones about why this is so: it says the Aboriginal Children's Service may want to sell itself as a culturally sensitive, decades-old organisation of female elders dedicated to Aboriginal children but in fact, for 10 years or more, it has provided a woeful service, housing children with foster parents who were neither registered nor trained and in homes that were chronically overcrowded and where the lives of children were at risk.

In a confidential report on the service, seen by The Australian, DoCS says there is no way the service can be allowed to operate in Redfern or anywhere else. It cites a case in which a girl, aged about 15, was attacked and killed by her boyfriend in 2002 after she fled the home of her foster parents and nobody checked on her whereabouts.

Although the service received more than $1million a year in government funding, the review says it did not train its foster carers and had "no clear guidelines for the regular review of carers; no clear guidelines for ceasing to use carers; and no training for carers to minimise the risk of children and young people being harmed". Carers didn't know how to encourage self-esteem in children and received no training in how to manage "challenging behaviour", which included things such as smashing furniture and assaulting other children. There was no training for potential suicides and no liaison with the children's schools. There were "no written procedures to actively find children who had run away", the review says, and no counselling for children who were found and returned to care.

The report says the service had serious problems with its accounts, including cashflow problems in 2004 that prompted an appeal for more money. It was deregistered by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission in 2002 for failing to lodge financial statements and it had been fined by the Australian Taxation Office.

It was "in danger of taking shortcuts, making serious mistakes or simply overlooking important work" and seldom performed "to a level of quality that could be called satisfactory, let alone best practice".

Also of concern is the way the service is run. DoCS says the structure of the organisation reeks of nepotism and jobs for the boys (or, in this case, for the girls). The board is stacked with powerful women from the Wiradjuri tribe, almost all of whom are related to one another. They include a senior elder, Val Weldon, a citizen of the year in Wagga Wagga, and her daughter, Dorothy Whyman.

Other members of the Weldon family on the board include Yvonne Weldon, once a manager of the Aboriginal policy unit at the NSW Department of Ageing, and Anne Weldon, a former member of the Aboriginal Housing Board.

Then, too, there are the Haroa women (Frances Haroa is listed as formerly having been on the board, as is her sister Rosarina Haroa) and the Coe sisters. (Betsie Coe runs the service and her sister, Beverley Coe, previously ran the service. They, too, are related to the Weldons.)

Between them, these women managed a budget of about $1 million a year. Annual statements show that the business received $1.1million in government grants in 2006 and $1.14 million in 2007, yet DoCS says the service was doing nothing right.

Board member Ann Weldon is the first to admit that the service wasn't up to scratch.

"We did need to improve," she says. "But what we needed was more money, not less. My belief is that this is a political decision, to deny Aboriginal people their rights. They did this because we are a group of Aboriginal women and they did not want to give us the money. They make a lot of noise about not wanting another Stolen Generation but, when it comes down to it, they are taking more kids than ever and supporting white organisations to do it."

Weldon admits that many of the service's foster children were living in homes with too few bedrooms and in poor condition, but then, so do many Aborigines, and those are the homes to which Aboriginal foster children must go if they are to be kept close to kin.

The DoCS report reminds her of a time gone by, when welfare workers would visit Aboriginal homes and run white gloves across the mantelpiece to check for dirt.

"The review (makes me feel as if) someone has again come in with white gloves to judge us in line with the standards of another culture," Weldon says. "Our years of tireless work and cultural wisdom seem disregarded and dismissed as meaningless."

Betsie Coe agrees, saying: "This is basically like creating another Stolen Generation. We placed kids with extended family and with kin. They say, oh, one of the kids was killed, but she wasn't in care when she was killed and, anyway, how many have DoCS lost?"

The dispute over the Aboriginal Children's Service and its future highlights a key problem in child welfare.

On one hand, there are too many Aboriginal children in care - 4500 in NSW and counting - and, on the other, there are too few Aboriginal homes able to take in an ever-increasing number of kids.

University of Sydney anthropologist Gaynor Macdonald has studied the DoCS report on the Aboriginal Children's Service and believes DoCS erred when it cut the funds.

"They say the service didn't reach the standard. But what is the standard? It's about expectations," she says. "It's true that many of them (on the board and the staff) were related, but they are a kin-based people. They work incredibly effectively when they are allowed to work as kin.

"DoCS might look at it and say that's nepotism, but it's quite violent for Aboriginal people to be told they can't work alongside their kin."

She says the money given to the women was not excessive.

"One million (dollars) does not go far with 15 staff, four branches and a huge geographic area to cover," Macdonald says. "To have received no increase in funding for over a decade is extraordinary, given the increases in wages and petrol prices over that time.

"By 2007, ACS received on average about 18 times less than equivalent Aboriginal-oriented organisations set up by DoCS itself to service other parts of the state."

The dispute over funding and the future of the Aboriginal Children's Service also comes as DoCS tries to absorb the Wood report into child welfare, which in November recommended 111 changes to the system.

Retired judge James Wood QC conducted his inquiry after the shocking deaths of two children, one an Aboriginal boy whose body was found in a suitcase in a lake.

The report notes that Aboriginal children are vastly over-represented in foster care. Almost everyone agrees that if these children can't be at home, they should be with other Aborigines, a community that has little capacity to absorb them.

It is common for elderly aunts and grandmothers to be asked to take four or five neglected and abused children, lest they end up in white homes.

In a statement to The Australian, DoCS says it is committed to Aboriginal organisations that want to keep kids in the community. But it says it had no choice other than to cut the funding to the Aboriginal Children's Service because it had "serious and entrenched deficiencies and did not meet minimum NSW out-of-home care standards".

"The department formed the view that ACS, even with additional support, was notable to provide the satisfactory level of care required by each child and young person currently in its care," DoCS says.

"The subsequent decision against the renewal of funding to ACS was supported bythe commonwealth and was taken as a lastresort."

Source: www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24815414-5006784,00.html