Victorian Budget 09 - Investment in child protection
The Victorian State Budget was announced today without too many surprises for the community services sector. We have been campaigning for some time to see increased resources directed to child protection and out-of-home care. We were therefore very pleased to see an announcement of $160 million to increase capacity, to offer better support to children and young people in care and to improve the response to child protection emergencies. Most importantly, we have seen a commitment from the Brumby Government to investigate new ways to deliver care to the most traumatised and challenging children in state care. The Government will recruit 100 new live-in carers to provide intensive one-on-one care to children who cannot safely stay in residential care with other children due to their behaviour. This will offer better chances for those children to address serious issues associated with severe abuse or neglect and it will protect other children from their potentially harmful behaviour. But it also opens the door to employ professional carers to address the declining number of volunteer carers. There are currently about 5000 children in care in Victoria and we expect that number to rise to 6000 by 2013. At the same time, the pool of passionate volunteer foster carers available to offer a home to these children is dropping. In a perfect world we would like to continue relying on our excellent volunteer carers to provide loving and nurturing homes but the reality is very different. Without exploring options like professional care to supplement volunteer carers, we will see a deepening of the crisis that led to children being housed in hotels and other temporary accommodations for short periods when appropriate care could not be found. We look forward to working in partnership with the Victorian Government to continue to improve the way we care for the most vulnerable children and young people in our community.
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