Protecting the health, safety and wellbeing of Tasmania’s vulnerable children and young people, is a key priority for the Tasmanian Liberal Government.
As Minister for Children and Youth, I am committed to building on this Government’s strong record of action and doing all I can to further improve the safety and wellbeing of our children and young people, and to support the staff work who work to protect our most vulnerable Tasmanians.
Positive impacts continue to be seen from our $51 million Strong Families, Safe Kids reforms, which focuses on supporting families to stay together where it is safe to do so.
The quarterly Human Services dashboard to March 2021 released today shows a decline in the number of children in out of home care.
The dashboard shows a similar number of children in active transition compared to the last update.
All children in transition are actively triaged, with oversight provided by senior staff who will escalate the urgency of allocation as required.
Our suite of election commitments for children and young people will complement work already underway, with an investment of $1.75 million to extend supports for Informal Kinship Carers and $5 million in new stable permanent placements for children in out-of-home care.
We are also investing $15.3 million in youth homelessness initiatives, with a focus on those under the age of 16, and progressing new initiatives to further embed the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle for Aboriginal children and young people in out-of-home care.
The Department of Communities Tasmania is considering how data can be produced and provided on a more frequent basis for future Dashboard releases.
The Dashboard can be found at https://health.tas.gov.au/humanservicesstats/human_services_dashboard
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