What the Tasmanian Liberals will do:

Provide a special allowance for informal grandparent carers raising their grandchildren and fund a grandparent support network.

The Tasmanian Liberals believe that grandparents raising their grandchildren are unrecognized heroes and deserve greater financial support and assistance.

A Hodgman Liberal Government will provide funding of $5.3m over 4 years to –

• provide informal¹ grandparent carers with a ‘special allowance’ of an average $7,913 per year per child.  This allowance will be payable fortnightly and be equivalent to the allowance received by other kinship carers in Tasmania;
• provide ongoing funding to the well-established Grandparents Raising Grandchildren network to provide support and advocacy for grandparents, independent of government; and
• ensure the continuation of other existing government-funded support programs, including the Relative Care Assistance contingency fund.

To be eligible for the ‘special allowance’, informal grandparents will be required to satisfy a number of criteria, including evidence of ongoing care of the child/children as a primary carer, police checks, a qualifying waiting period, attendance at family conference and family wellbeing workshops and a formal needs assessment of the child/children involved at the outset of the ‘special allowance’ application or on request of the grandparent for children who have been in informal care relationships for some time.

A Hodgman Liberal Government will also work proactively with the Australian Government to address the situation where informal grandparent carers are sometimes unwilling to apply for family payments for fear of losing their grandchildren.

We will also seek their assistance in improving access to legal aid to carer grandparents seeking formal custody of their grandchildren.

The current Uniting Care GRG (Grandparents Raising Grandchildren) support network is funded by the Australian Government, but this project will cease on 30 April 2010 with no replacement funding yet identified.

Why this policy is needed
In Tasmania, informal grandparent carers receive a total of $1,696 a year – or just $4 a day – from the State Government in Relative Care Assistance financial support.

In contrast, those providing care to children under formal kinship arrangements receive support ranging from $6,842 to $8,985 (average of $7,913) annually – or around $21 a day - dependent on the age of the child/children involved.

At 30 September 2009, there were 224 identified informal grandparent carers, with 303 children, receiving Relative Care Assistance – approximately 126 grandparents and 164 children in the south, 50 grandparents and 74 children in the north, and 48 carers and 65 children in the north-west.

There were 156 formal kinship/grandparent carers with 242 children receiving Formal Kinship financial support.

It’s a daily struggle to pay for school needs, counselling needs, food and the bills of everyday life … grandparents should be among the preferred option of care but the Government is not providing us with the services or financial support needed.
(Grandparent, Sunday Tas, 12/7/09)

The majority of grand-parent carers are aged over 55 years of age and rely on the age pension, disability support pension or are self-funded retirees.

In the past four years alone, the number of children in Tasmania in out-of-home care as a result of abuse or neglect has increased 31.9% to 830 children².

This includes children living in formal care arrangements, but not children living out of home in informal caring arrangements, with no involvement of the courts or State child protection authorities.  The majority of this ‘informal’ yet full-time, primary care, is provided by grandparents.

In Tasmania, only those grandparents carers caring for children under formal guardianship arrangements, where the courts and State child protection authorities are involved, receive financial payment based on an equivalent rate received by foster carers, although all grandparents are eligible to apply for the suite of family payments provided by the Australian Government, no matter what their legal status.  It is understood some informal carers do not apply for these payments for fear if they do so, children will be taken back by abusive or addicted parents wanting to retain those benefits.

A 2009 research project in New Zealand found 86% of children in grandparent care reported significant improvement although they had had serious physical and psychological problems before coming into that care arrangement.  The report attributes this to the stability of care provided and the commitment of grandparents to those children.

The Tasmanian Commissioner for Children has said grandparents raising grandchildren with or without legal formalities were disadvantaged compared to foster carers³ and the President of the Foster Carers Association of Tasmania, Ken Abery, “totally agrees that custodial grandparents continue to be undervalued by governments”.⁴

The Government is making a saving at the expense of grandparents.
(Commissioner for Children, Paul Mason, 12 July 2009)

After 11 years of Labor...
In 2003, Labor MLC, Lin Thorp, chaired the joint Parliamentary Committee on custodial grandparents which made 28 recommendations including addressing the appalling situation where grandparents received significantly less in financial support than other kinship carers undertaking the same role.

In November 2005, former Health Minister, David Llewellyn, announced the Government had “requested a high level working party to be convened about how Government could respond to the recommendations”.

In 2009, at a meeting with Grandparents Raising Grandchildren (GRG), Minister Thorp said she would like the issue of financial assistance to informal grandparents to be a national issue.

...almost nothing has been done by the government, except a little bit of tinkering around the edges.
(Editor, Prime Times, Ron Limb, Issue No. 18, Summer 2009)

* beginning 1/1/2011

1. Informal grandparent carers are those grandparents who are providing full time care to their grandchildren. Inevitably informal grandparent carers have stepped in to provide safety and security to their grandchildren in the event of abuse or neglect, when parents have addictions and other problems that impact on children, or have died (although this number is few).  The grandchildren have not come to the attention of child protection authorities and are not subject to guardianship orders.
2. DHHS Progress Report, November 2009 (figures to end of September 2009 – increase from 629 to 830.
3. Sunday Tasmanian, 12 July 2009.
4. Sunday Tasmanian, 26 July 2009.