PSA "Turkeys Christmas" appeal not in the best interest of CYF Review
The call by the Public Services Association to include Social Workers in an independent CYF Review is akin to asking
turkeys to vote on the validity of an early Christmas, says Steve Taylor, a Counsellor and Social Services Outcomes
Researcher who has worked with a number of families “brutalised” by CYF.
“In CYF, you have an organisation birthed in an industry that penned its own legislative guidelines in the original CYF
Act of 1989.
The Act is made up of 469 clauses stretching across 424 pages, and despite a host of amendments over the past 26 years,
the CYF Act is still absent of any meaningful accountability for CYF Social Workers who get it wrong”.
After years and years of CYF practicing in a way that has resulted in ongoing and sustained familial damage, and with
the toxic and wholly ignorant blessing of Minister after Minister across the entire political spectrum to practice in
such a way, the corporate cult that is CYF is finally having a blowtorch thrust upon it, and not before time”.
“The most laughable aspect of the PSA’s blearing about the absence of Social Workers on the independent panel is the
claim that the panel will lack expertise – this coming from an organisation that accepts membership from CYF Social
workers, around half of which don’t even have a degree to practice Social Work”.
Minister of Social Development Anne Tolley is to be applauded regarding her decision to conduct a review of CYF, and I
would hope that a part of the review would be the introduction of a meaningful accountability process, because for 26
years, CYF Social Workers have been acting with legislative and at times horribly neglectful impunity”.
ENDS