Businesses profiting from the care of children removed from their parents need to be banished and the system returned to the public sector after the release of a new report, said the union which represents child protection caseworkers.

Media reports outline a range of ways for-profit providers are gouging the system to make money out of vulnerable children including a scheme where real estate owned by directors was leased back to their own provider at above-market rent.

Other providers have created for-profit legal entities within their business structure, allowing them to subcontract services to themselves at inflated costs.

It’s time to return child protection to the public sector, says Stewart Little, General Secretary of the Public Service Association. 

“Care of children removed from their parents should never have been outsourced by the former liberal government, it was always a bad idea, and now that has been proved,” said Mr Little.

“Kids deserve to be in family-like environments, like with foster parents, not placed with for-profit entities which spend their whole time trying to wring as much cash as they can out of each child.

“This was never a place where privatisation should have been tried, but the former liberal government was obsessed with it and now we have to clean up their mess.

“Our members, child protection caseworkers, have been yelling this from the rooftops for years but the former liberal government was obsessed with bringing the free market into the care of vulnerable kids, they just put their hands over their ears.

"I applaud Minister Washington for identifying what’s been happening in this sector and for beginning the process of returning care of vulnerable kids back into the public sector. 

“The experiment has failed, the former liberal government’s outsourcing of the care of the most vulnerable kids in the state to for-profit providers has now been shown to be bad for kids and to have cost taxpayers more."