There are no two ways about it child protection in Australia is a disaster. In June 2008 I wrote in the Australian about a case where a woman with seven children under seven moved from South Australia to share a publicly owned house with three other adults , twelve children, five dogs, two rabbits and a pig. The house was visited by the child protection case workers who failed to find anything wrong even though a number of the children were suffering from abuse. The case became a cause celebre in Adelaide and some senior officials eventually moved on, although nothing much was done about the faulty system.

In Queensland a woman who was witness to a brutal home invasion in which she was repeatedly raped and three people were murdered, including her partner, lost custody of her three children a week after the event took place. The children were removed until the age of eighteen.

The recent Bath report, a copy of which was obtained by the Australian documented the death of a girl in foster care, from septicaemia, while she was sitting against a trailer in the backyard. The foster carers had turned her out of the house because she was a incontinent as a result of the blood poisoning. While she was in the yard she had been visited by case workers who had left her there, the day before her death. In South Australia a child from the Northern Territory was found starved to death in the back of a car.

Dr Bath who is the Children's Commissioner in the Northern Territory said in an interview on ABC's P.M. Program on 11 February that child protection has fallen down the list of government priorities. In the case of the Northern Territory this because the Government has changed its priorities to accord with those of the Rudd Government's “Closing the Gap” programme. This does not include child protection as a priority.

Although there have been numerous reports and inquiries into child protection little seems to be done by way of new policy implementation. Media reports are often counter-productive in that they sensationalise the cases without drawing attention to the systemic problems. The result is that the case workers who have exercised the judgements that led to the terrible outcomes, become victims of a witch hunt. This simply makes it more difficult to recruit and retain case workers. In most cases it is not the case workers faults. They should not be forced to make judgements in these circumstances. In the article that I wrote for the Australian I mentioned a legal acquaintance of mine who had been a lawyer acting in child protection cases. She had acted to remove two children from parents who were heroin addicts and who were injecting their children with heroin to put them to sleep at night. After a long series of cases the children were removed and placed in foster care. Some years later my acquaintance was working for the coroner when a case involving the deaths of children in foster care came up. Sure enough the names of the two children she had fought to remove from their parents were among those who died in foster care. It was enough to make her leave the law.

Protecting children entails early intervention with families. Families have to be treated as a whole, and every aspect of their life that may cause stress needs to be dealt with. This requires sequenced integrated case management that is beyond the compass of a single case worker. People associated with the Irish Social Services Department have developed a sophisticated software programme that guides case managers through the process and reduces the element of risk. This software hs been used all over the world with significant improvement in child protection and as a consequence reductions in costs to the taxpayer. It is under consideration in Australia along with the idea of national children protection network that will stop children falling through the cracks when they move jurisdictions.

However if we are going to achieve change children will have to be given a higher priority.