View the video recording of this speech here
Record of Proceedings, 30 October 2025
In making comments to this report No. 16 of the Justice, Integrity and Community Safety Committee, I would like to thank the committee for its work in compiling this report. The committee is very ably chaired by the member for Nicklin, Mr Marty Hunt. Welcome back for the 58th Parliament. Congratulations on your appointment as chair. I would also like to say thank you to the Queensland Family and Child Commission for the work they do in highlighting important issues in the child safety system in Queensland, overseeing the Child Death Review Board and undertaking a range of other activities within their remit. In particular, I would like to thank the commissioners. As a former member of the Legal Affairs and Safety Committee, which was chaired by another member of parliament, the member for Toohey, in the 57th Parliament, I had a number of opportunities to ask questions of and interact with those commissioners. The member for Toohey did not do too bad a job of chairing that committee—not as good as the member for Nicklin does on this committee, of course. The member for Toohey was not a bad chair. I thank him for his work in the 57th Parliament, which of course relates to the financial year 2023-24 that we are speaking of.
Whether we are talking about the financial year 2023-24, the previous years that led to this report, or, indeed, the present day in relation to child safety matters, some things never change—especially in relation to Labor never accepting responsibility for their failures. They will try time and time again to rewrite history and to whitewash themselves of their abysmal failures in government, just as former child safety minister Shannon Fentiman was washing child safety data. I still remember the day when the former minister stood in this place and said they were washing the child safety data, as if it was something that had to be cleansed of bad things before it could be released for public consumption.
The failures we are highlighting and the issues we are talking about in this report from financial year 2024 have a genesis, as it were, in the early years of the Palaszczuk-Miles government. One cannot discount the history that led to the failures we are talking about in financial year 2024: the washing of child safety data before it could be released for public consumption and a variety of other issues as well.
Another issue covered in this report was blue card reform. The previous speaker in this debate spoke about blue card reform. Members of the committee in the 57th Parliament, the Community Safety and Legal Affairs Committee, will recall that we highlighted the issues with the blue card system and also the massive backlog of recommendations that had been made to the former government over many years that were not implemented, including in relation to kinship carers that the previous speaker, the member for Jordan, referred to. We welcome the fact that there was some change on that front very
late in the term of the former government—probably within the financial year 2024—but it took an enormous amount of time for that to be undertaken, like everything did when it came to the former Palaszczuk-Miles government. They just dragged their feet. We referred to the explosion in the cost of residential care. The number of children in residential care was highlighted by this report. It took the cost from $200 million in 2014-15 to over $1 billion in this financial year, and it would have been a similar amount—a very high figure—in 2024.