Foley: Chloe recommendations not tough enough
The state’s former Deputy Premier Kevin Foley says radical recommendations from a coronial inquiry into the death of four-year-old Chloe Valentine do not go far enough.
Coroner Mark Johns recommended broadening adoption provisions in the wake of the young girl’s death at the hands of her negligent, drug-abusing mother Ashlee Polkinghorne and her boyfriend Benjamin McPartland, who are both serving at least four years in jail.
Johns concluded that with a lack of suitable alternatives, “permanent removal to adoptive parents must have a place in South Australia’s child protection system”.
He did not propose a model, but advocated removing to state care children born to parents with previous convictions for murder, manslaughter or criminal neglect of a child.
But Foley, who has advocated similar measures since leaving office in 2011, says the law “should go further”.
“I think Mark Johns is very brave and correct (but) we shouldn’t just be about taking children from parents guilty of manslaughter,” he told InDaily.
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“It should be from parents who might have demonstrated their complete incompetence and inability to raise children, putting children’s survival at very real risk.
“We need to advance the debate to one where we should be more willing to put the children’s rights first and get kids out of dangerous homes, and put them up for adoption to loving, caring families.”
Foley has previously advocated a “three-strikes” policy on child protection breaches, but says now: “I’d probably in a perfect world make it a two-strikes policy.”
“I’m on the radical side (of the debate),” he said.
“I’d move fairly swiftly.”
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Foley, who was Treasurer and Deputy Premier for almost 10 years from 2002, believes such a radical option is unlikely to form part of the Government’s response to the coronial inquiry “because the do-gooders and left-wingers would just scream from the top of the State Administration Centre that this is akin to the Stolen Generations”.
“I don’t think references to the ‘Stolen Generations’ carry any weight any more when it comes to society looking to rescue children that are really vulnerable,” he said.
“Civil libertarians would find this abhorrent, but how long are we going to allow children to remain in vulnerable homes facing death or a life of misery, when there’s a perfectly acceptable alternative, a proper home, a loving home, a safe home?
“The question is, at what point could we or should we remove a child?”
However, Foley – who was frequently at loggerheads with the public service during his time in Government – surprisingly came to the defence of Families SA social workers, who have been the subject of public ire and condemnation by the coroner.
Johns singled out the efforts of several individuals who had failed Chloe, and collectively rued the “broken and fundamentally flawed” culture and practice of the embattled agency, demanding “nothing less than a massive overhaul”.
But Foley argued: “As a society, we’re too ready to blame the public services and critical care workers, and I find that very disappointing, because they’re doing the best they can to pick up (after) the evil of society: that is, parents that are just flagrantly reckless in the way they manage the development of their children.”
“What greatly bothers me is we spend too much time blaming public servants for not doing their job, and too little time blaming the parents for not doing their job,” he said.
“It’s grossly unfair to continually blame public servants and social workers for not doing their job in picking up after the sheer incompetence and danger that parents are putting their children in … parents that have demonstrated a sheer inability to raise children, putting them at risk of death and serious danger – and there’s many of them out there in society.
“I feel very sorry for the care support workers within Government, who are getting in many ways grossly blamed for the ills in modern society; we as parents are the ones that should be taking a cold hard look at ourselves.”
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