When Sonya Enkelmann started work as a project manager for out-of-home reform in Tasmania's Communities Department she soon had something of a reality check.
"I was told by a senior policy person that nothing would change and that I was wasting my time," Ms Enkelmann said.
"I remember looking at them and going, 'Well if we take that approach we might as well give up now. But they were right.'"
Ms Enkelmann worked in the role for three years from 2017–2020.
On Friday she gave evidence to the Commission of Inquiry into the Tasmanian Government's Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Institutional Settings.
She said it was the first time she had worked in child safety and what she encountered was a system under strain.
"There's a hesitancy for genuine, open consultation when I was there, there's much more interest in trying to maintain control of the message, which I think is a sign of an organisation that's under stress," Ms Enkelmann said.
The department is responsible for children who are removed from their homes and placed into foster care.
"It's understandable that there can be fear and reluctance to hold yourself open but, to be honest, I suspect that we actually perform better than we think we do in some ways, that it isn't always doom and gloom," Ms Enkelmann said.
"We have a lot of great outcomes for children and young people in out-of-home care because of those children and young people, their own resilience and their own capacities, and the people around them: the carers, individual workers — we have some stirling individuals in the system and we achieve some wonderful outcomes because of that.
Ms Enkelmann told the commission that case workers, whose job includes supporting carers and children in out-of-home care, had "ridiculous" workloads, which meant they were not able to support the children or carers adequately in many cases.
She said there was a high turnover of case workers and that while the nature of the work was difficult, dealing with out-of-home children was not what was driving them away.
"My sense in terms of talking to people was … that it wasn't the children and young people that were the issue or that the whole process of working in that environment. It's actually the organisation, the system around it that's the frustrating thing," she said.
A lack of support for carers and children can cause further problems for already vulnerable children, Ms Enkelmann said.
"If it is the case that we're not supporting our carers effectively, and the child ends up having a breakdown in the home, or multiple breakdowns in the home, then we are, as a system, magnifying those vulnerabilities to child sexual abuse, to grooming behaviours.
"That's is the worry that I have, that we don't meet children's needs early enough and, when we don't do it well, we can actually magnify those unmet needs and those vulnerabilities in the future.
"There is always going to be homes that unfortunately will break down for some reason, but I think at a system level where we're having this consistently, I would see it as a sign of system failure.
"We're failing those children and we are failing those carers, and for the workers [in the department] it's equally frustrating because they know that they could have done better, that they could have provided support and they could have prevented it happening in the first place."
When asked about what could be done to improve the system, Ms Enkelmann said:
She said the frustration for people working on the frontline was not about change, but that they do not see change happening where it matters.
"There's all this talk of change and change fatigue, but nothing actually changed on the frontline where it actually really counted in terms of resources for kids, or resources for carers, or capacity for the workers to actually be able to do their job," she said.
The commission of inquiry is holding six weeks of public hearings over the coming months.
