VIctoria Legal Aid and the Law Institute have raised serious concerns about tough new child protection laws that will come into effect next month, giving parents two years to get their acts together before permanently losing custody of their children.
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The laws will be retrospective, meaning thousands of parents currently subject to a Children's Court order could have just months to prove their ability to look after their children. Others will automatically lose that chance.
The changes will increase the number of children the department can place up for adoption, limit the powers of the Children's Court of Victoria to review decisions made by the department, and make it easier for children to be permanently removed from their parents' custody.
Legal groups are concerned that support services parents have to complete before their child is returned to their care, like men's behavioural change programs, are overburdened and subject to lengthy waiting lists.
The Law Institute says it is unfair to prevent children being returned to their parents due to lack of resources or waiting lists to access services.
Legal Aid's child protection program manager, Lucia Danek, said waiting lists at men's behavioural change programs were several months.
"Those arbitrary timeframes are overlaid on a system that is exhausted," she said.
Legal Aid's family, youth and children's law executive director, Nicole Rich, said the Department of Health and Human Services was doing its best, but the Children's Court should retain its oversight of department decisions.
"We know that no government department ever gets everything right, and these are really serious decisions, and we need to make sure that every decision is properly scrutinised."
Deb Tsobaris, the chief executive of the Centre for Excellence, a peak body representing nearly 100 child and family services, said the new laws would address the problem of kids floating around "from placement to placement".
But she agreed that more services were needed to support parents trying to have their children returned to them. "We're all worried about that."
Fleur Ward, a lawyer who represents families in the Children's Court and is chairwoman of the Law Institute's children and youth issues committee, said the change "amounts to the permanent, systematic deprivation of children from their parents".
"You can't create these timeframes and not empower the courts to take into account these waiting lists. How can you have a timeframe ticking against people if they're up against waiting lists they have no control over?"
An Auditor-General's report last year found the number of children reported to the Department of Health and Human Services had increased by 92 per cent in the past seven years, to more than 82,000 in the 2013-14 financial year.
Auditor-General John Doyle found that DHHS's early-intervention system was characterised by "systemic deficiencies" and a lack of oversight, and the failure to keep or analyse proper records from the agencies it relies on to deliver early-intervention services to children and families.
"The department does not know whether the services provided are effectively meeting the needs of vulnerable families," Mr Doyle found.
The government says it will review the changes in six months.
