Queensland is continuing to make headway in its efforts to address the needs of children, according to the Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services 2019 (RoGs).
Minister for Child Safety, Youth Justice and Women Di Farmer said the report showed that Queensland was making progress but there were still improvements to be made to make sure child safety and youth justice systems were as robust as they could be.
"12 new beds at the Cleveland Youth Detention Centre and 16 new beds at the Brisbane Youth Detention Centre will take the pressure off our corrective system", Ms Farmer said.
"Through our Youth Justice Strategy we are looking to keep young people from reoffending."
For instance, RoGS highlighted the positive impact restorative justice, or youth justice conferencing, was having on young people and victims of crime in Queensland.
"While Queensland’s performance cannot be compared to previous years due to the transition of 17-year-olds into the Youth Justice system, the results for 2017-18 are positive with 95 per cent of victims satisfied with conference results." Ms Farmer said.
"We are also seeing positive results in terms of community-based orders with 81 per cent of all orders successfully completed for 2017-18.
"The Palaszczuk Government is looking at evidence-based strategies that work like these to reduce reoffending."
Regarding child protection, RoGS shows that more Queensland children and families at risk are receiving vital early intervention services than ever before.
Ms Farmer said the report showed a 7.5 percent increase from the previous year (2016-17) in the number of children who were receiving Intensive Family Support services.
"We know that early intervention is the key to keeping families and children becoming out of the child safety and youth justice system and our commitment to this is evident in these figures," Ms Farmer said.
"Since 2015, 44 Intensive Family Support services have been established across the state to support families under stress to access the support they need as early as possible.
"We have also rolled out 33 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Family Wellbeing services to provide early intervention and support for Indigenous families."
Ms Farmer said that demand on the child safety system increased with issues like the prevalence of ICE and other drugs continuing to impact families across Queensland.
"There has been a small increase in the number of child safety notifications when compared to last year, as the result of more reporting from mandatory notifiers," Ms Farmer said.
"The increase in notifications means more demand for investigations and we have recognised this by substantially boosting frontline child safety staff to help cope with the demand.
"We are employing an additional 458 staff over three years from 2016-17, including 93 this financial year which continues to help drive caseloads for staff down."
The RoGs report is available on the Productivity Commission website at www.pc.gov.au.
