The Tasmanian Government today welcomes the Commissioner for Children and Young People's Health and Wellbeing Report as another valuable tool for the community and Government to monitor the health and wellbeing of our children and young people.
While bringing all previously released information together in one document provides a useful dataset, it is important to note that this data is more than 12 months old and therefore does not reflect the significant increase in resources for child protection in the last two State Budgets.
The Hodgman Government is actively redesigning a child protection system that failed under the previous Labor-Green Government, through a whole-of-Government redesign.
In the 2017-18 Budget alone, we are investing an additional $51 million into child protection and launched a new Youth at Risk Strategy.
An additional 31 positions have been funded under Child Protection redesign. On top of these 31 positions, Child Safety Services are recruiting six additional Child Safety Officers, four Court Coordinators and two Team Leaders to operate our new Intensive Family Support Service - with all 12 new positions working on, or directly supporting, the front-line.
All these additional positions in Child Safety Services go to the heart of responding to the challenges highlighted in this report.
We are a year into the redesign of the system, and while significant change in some areas will take more time after years of neglect under the previous Government, it is pleasing to already see improvements such as the reduction of the waiting list for family violence counselling.
There is no higher priority than protecting our children. We know that providing children with a safe and caring environment is critical to breaking the cycle of neglect and abuse, which is why we have a target to halve the cases of serious child abuse by 2022.
The Hodgman Liberal Government will continue to rebuild our child safety system to improve the lives of Tasmanian children, young people and their families.