ALECOMM

Date: Friday, 5th March, 2010 Time: 1.00 pm - 3.00 pm
Venue: The Balcony Room, Parliament House, North Terrace, Adelaide

Families SA has a long and established history of failing families in SA. Almost every Minister has failed to take the Department's bureaucrats to task. Each has defended the bad practices of social workers within the department, who are typically unable to account for their assessments, decisions & actions. Invariably, their interventions are not officially recorded nor notified to the family & families are given no rights of defence as the practitioners hide behind confidentiality & secrecy & cases are kept from public scrutiny.

Spin-doctors defend every case of malpractice as another example of how allegedly “understaffed or under-resourced" the Department is to justify its own empire-building. We reject this notion. We say the Department is wasteful, vexatious & resistant to complying with its own Manual of Practice & the Acts which are supposed to regulate its practice. Higher complaints authorities defend Departmental malpractices, claiming to have no authority to act or direct the Department. We reject this also and point to a culture of corruption within these institutions which have become complicit.

‘The Foster Generation’ is made up of children who continue to be wrongfully removed from good people - a practice that has become entrenched for almost three decades. Often this is done on little or no wrongdoing on the part of the family, usually triggered when they question or complain about bad practice, poor service, breaches of Duty of Care or breaches of Youth or Family Court Orders.

This forum seeks to bring together concerned families and carers to examine the ever escalating frequency with which Families SA appears to be destroying families & vulnerable children using four different approaches, including:

• The wrongful and forced removal of children from natural or extended families (including siblings) or Foster Carers after stable placements have been established.

• The propensity for the Department to create repetitive, multiple, unstable or destabilising placements that are often entirely avoidable.

• The propensity for the Department to place children in families distantly removed from immediate relatives & kinship carers (including Grandparents, God-parents and significant others).

• Ignoring repeated notifications for intervention where abuse and neglect is readily ascertained, including leaving young children (including runaways) with drug-addicted or dysfunctional parents or carers.

For more information, please join Ann on Facebook and sign Ann’s on-line petition, “Stop the Foster Generation” at: http://www.gopetition.com.au/online/34116.html

Limited places so RSVP is essential by 4th March, 2010.

For further information, please contact Matilda Bawden on 8237 9541 or email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.