Those who work in the social service sector in Alice Springs, as I do, know this fact intimately: there is an incredible amount of money funding our response to a community who have incredibly little.
Our system watches as desperate people stumble and waits for them to fall before extending a paternalistic hand or one gripped around a gavel. Only once crisis strikes comes a swath of expensive support services or an inhumane prison system.
We are building prisons before houses, funding health services but not health, and responding to trauma instead of preventing it.
I’ve worked in various therapeutic support services with “at risk” youth in touch with the justice system for the last nine years, which brings you up-close with our struggling underclass.
When doing this work, you become a member of a group of “stakeholders” from various services that form a “care team” for the young person. At the extreme but not uncommon end of the spectrum, a care team may include a Support Worker from a Youth Support Program at an NGO; a Community Corrections (NTG) Case Worker supervising their parole or bail; a Behaviour Support Practitioner; a non-mainstream school attempting daily at-home pickups; a multidisciplinary team of allied health professionals conducting assessments; a Disability Support Worker from the NDIS; a worker from a Diversion Program; and a Government Child Protection Practitioner who oversees all of this.
Dizzying amounts of money and resources swirl around a young person who survives on their portion of their caregiver’s $493 per week parenting-payment.
If the efforts of the team fail and the young person is incarcerated in a Youth Detention Centre, the tax-payer will cough up a further staggering approximate $900,000 a year, according to the NT News, to detain them in a system that has been proven to further criminalise young offenders (and increasingly so the younger they are).
The well-intentioned and often highly skilled care team will meet occasionally for updates and to finesse the care plan, but in many meetings I’ve attended, the bulk of the stakeholders have next to no traction with the young person and several will have never laid eyes on them.
Even if a Support Worker achieves regular contact with their clients, their engagement is unlikely to meaningfully resemble the work their respective programs set out to do, as the clients’ much more pressing need to survive takes precedence.
A Social Worker, working for an NGO on a good salary, is likely to find themselves supporting their client and their family to access, for example, an “emergency relief voucher.” This involves picking them up........