Complexity, culture and the politics of care

The Child Safety Commission of Inquiry handed the Queensland Government 52 recommendations. The government’s response accepted, or accepted in principle, 48 of them. A pretty strong response. But acceptance isn’t impact, and impact is the only measure that matters to a kid in care.

That’s the shift Queensland actually needs, and it’s urgent. A system built to react to the next crisis and a system built to proactively foster a child’s wellbeing are not the same thing, and right now we mostly have the first. None of this is as unglamorous as the investment that actually keeps a kid out of care in the first place — things like Intensive Family Support, sitting with a family before a removal is even on the table. It doesn’t make a headline. It’s still the one dollar that matters most. Every recommendation, every dollar, either moves us towards the second or it doesn’t. That’s the only test worth applying.

Worth a quick bit of history, because it matters. This is the fourth state inquiry into Queensland’s child protection system in under thirty years, all within the last forty: Forde in 1999, the Crime and Misconduct Commission in 2004, Carmody in 2013, and now this one. And that’s just the headline four — Queensland’s own Audit Office counted a further twelve reviews and evaluations of the system between 2013 and 2020 alone, producing 612 more recommendations on top of Carmody’s. Different premiers, different parties, different governments, same conclusion every time. Swap Labor and LNP in that list and nothing changes — which is the point. This isn’t partisan. It’s structural, and it keeps outliving whoever’s in office when it surfaces.

Politics and policy aren’t the same thing, and every one of those inquiries sits on that fault line. Politics rewards fast, visible wins — a commitment, a press conference, a number that moves before the next news cycle. Policy is slower and mostly invisible to voters — an org chart redone properly, a licensing system that works, data that tells the truth, budgets that fund actual outcomes. When the two move together, a minister looks good and kids are better off at once. When they don’t, ministers get hurt — sooner or later someone asks why the number hasn’t moved, and “the reform is still bedding in” is a rough answer in Question Time.

Minister Camm isn’t new to this brief — she was Shadow Minister while the LNP was in opposition, so she came into government having already watched this system from the outside, not blindsided by what she found. Since taking the portfolio, she’s fronted the cameras, published the residential care numbers, and taken the heat in Parliament. Credit where it’s due. But a minister doesn’t deliver impact — a department does.

And here’s a structural point worth further attention. This portfolio is enormous — families, seniors, disability services, child safety, and domestic and family violence prevention, all under one minister. That’s four or five jobs in one. Either machinery-of-government change splits child safety out, or an Assistant Minister is appointed to share the load. No minister, however capable, can give a reform this complex the attention it needs while carrying all of that at once.

Underneath her, the department pulls in two directions — investigating harm and building family trust, squeezed into one team — spread across regions that each run their own budget and their own way of doing things, so good policy from Brisbane can arrive regionally as little more than a suggestion.

Here’s the part that worries me most. Departments under years of scrutiny close ranks. Not a metaphor — an observed pattern. Protecting their own way of doing things, protecting each other, softening the version of events that invites follow-up scrutiny. Not dishonesty. Self-preservation. There’s already hard evidence of it: residential care numbers dropped while inspectors were actively watching, then crept back up once they stopped. An organisation behaving one way while watched, another once it isn’t — arguably the single biggest threat to whether these 52 recommendations show up as real impact.

Then there’s service commissioning, where budget logic and child wellbeing logic have quietly pulled apart. Government buys out-of-home care in two main ways: OSD, longer licensed contracts that build quality care, and IPS, a short-notice, fee-for-service arrangement meant for the rare, complex case that can’t wait. IPS was meant to be the exception. It became the default because the annual budget process kept failing to appropriate enough for OSD to meet known demand — when money runs short mid-year, the fastest fix is another IPS contract, not a better one, and a licence hasn’t even been a condition of getting paid. About three-quarters of out-of-home care spending is now outsourced this way. Tighten the licensing tier, add a pre-qualification framework — which is underway, but still measures financial risk, not child wellbeing. Not deliberate. Just what it looks like in practice when a financing model is designed to fund outputs, not purchase outcomes.

Which brings it back to measurement, because none of this means anything without it. Compliance tells you a form was filed. It doesn’t tell you whether a child slept without fear last night. Until Queensland can measure that difference, case by case, “accepted” and “improved” will keep getting treated as the same thing. They’re not.

So, here’s the scorecard that matters — not whether government accepted the recommendations, but whether, a few years from now, there’s harder evidence that kids in out-of-home care in Queensland are genuinely safer, more stable and flourishing. That’s the only number that was ever going to count.