"Parents need to parent."
You'd struggle to find someone that completely disagrees with Premier Mark McGowan's comment that parents have a key role in keeping their children out of trouble.
But there's a whole lot more to it when it comes to youth crime and damaged children and their families.
Leaders who have long worked in the space of children's health and safety say the problem is often that parents simply don't know how to parent.
They were not parented themselves, they say, and so telling them to parent their own children is pretty much foreign to them.
Mr McGowan made the remarks after being asked about youth crime, alcohol-related violence and children roaming the streets in the Goldfields town of Laverton, 360 kilometres north-east of Kalgoorlie, and other regional towns.
He said the government was already doing its bit, employing more police officers and investing more in early intervention and other community support programs.
But he said it was a shared responsibility and parents and families needed to "step up".
"It's a partnership with families," the Premier stated.
"Parents need to parent. The state is not a parent. Parents need to parent, and we can't make excuses as to why people don't parent."
Not easy for some families to 'step up'
Commissioner for Children and Young People Jacqueline McGowan-Jones agreed but said that did not mean it was always possible.
"The challenge we have about saying it's a parental responsibility as well, which is absolutely true … is where parents may not have been parented themselves," Ms McGowan-Jones said.
"[They] may have been institutionalised themselves, whether that's through living at a [government] boarding school, being incarcerated, living in out-of-home care in a residential care facility, any number of ways that they may not themselves have been exposed to parenting, means that they don't know how to parent and we need to help them get those skills."
Especially when those skills have been lost over generations.
Stolen Generation's lasting impact
As Bringing them Home WA chair Tony Hansen points out, 57 per cent of Aboriginal people in Western Australia are connected to the Stolen Generation, which has had a huge and ongoing intergenerational impact.
"Many of these parents today, were part of an institution where they were never loved, never cuddled, they were never taught how to be parents, never taught how to take on the responsibilities of nurturing a child as well, because they were isolated, segregated," he said.
They left those institutions with trauma embedded in their lives and no sense of family, let alone how to parent.
State government figures show 57 per cent of children in out-of-home care in WA today are Indigenous — yet just 6.8 per cent of all WA children are Aboriginal.
Indigenous youths are also massively over-represented in juvenile detention.
The Department of Justice says more than 70 per cent of young people at the Banksia Hill juvenile detention centre are Aboriginal.
Wungening Aboriginal Corporation chief executive Daniel Morrison said there were sometimes five generations where children were removed from their parents.
"These children have grown up within a institutional setting, whether it be out of home care space, where they are wards of the state, or they've been grown up in the youth and juvenile detention centres, where it's not appropriate, not relevant for a nurtured environment," he said.
On top of that, nearly 90 per cent of all youths in juvenile detention have a severe neurodevelopmental impairment, including about 60 per cent with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder, according to the Department of Justice.
Those children may themselves become parents, with no or few parenting skills.
Premier 'out of touch'
Jackie Oakley, the former chair of Derbarl Yerrigan Health Service and founder of Nanas for Kids, which supports children in Banksia Hill, said the Premier was "out of touch with Aboriginal Australia" in terms of parenting and family structures.
Ms Oakley called for a greater recognition of the role grandmothers often played as the main carers in Aboriginal families, and the need to harness their influence for change.
She said parents whose children were at risk of being removed should be listened to, to build their parenting skills and capabilities.
"Look at the gaps and see how you can work together and agree on what strategies or services or whatever are needed for them to access, so that they can deal with the gaps in terms of their capabilities," Ms Oakley said.
More funding, but spend still low
Mr McGowan said the government was already putting "more resourcing into social programs to intervene in families where there are potential or existing problems in managing their children".
The government announced $75 million extra funding for child protection in the last budget, including programs to strengthen families and reduce the high rate of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care.
There was more money for early intervention and family support in parts of Perth and trial programs in the Kimberley and the South-West, as well as extra funding for the Target 120 program to reduce youth offending, which has an intensive family support element.
Additionally, an Aboriginal Family Led Decision Making pilot program was launched to keep Aboriginal children connected to family and community and help Aboriginal families whose children are at imminent risk of being put into out-of-home care.
Despite these efforts, the 2022 Family Matters report, part of a national campaign to eliminate the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care by 2040, was not glowing about WA.
It said the state's proportion of child protection spending directed to family support and intensive family support services remained "alarmingly low" at just 5.6 per cent.
"Western Australia has consistently directed the lowest proportion of its child protection funding towards family support and intensive family support services of any jurisdiction over the past five years," the report found.
Call for grassroots approach
Mr Hansen said the state government's programs and its 2021-29 Aboriginal Empowerment Strategy were well-intended but there would be better outcomes if agencies worked with the parents more directly.
"I think there's opportunities, but I think we need to come to the grassroots and sit down with the community, and sit down with the leaders in these communities," he said.
Wungening's Daniel Morrison agreed, saying the community's views were often "falling on deaf ears".
"We've got a whole range of community leaders, advocates, academics and families that are involved in the criminal justice system and supporting people and families," he said.
"They need to be at the table in regard in regards to coming up with solutions that are coming from the community for the community.
"And without that being done, you're just throwing money into thin air because it's not really meeting the root causes of the issue."
Ms McGowan-Jones said of the roughly 100 young people in juvenile detention, some 20 per cent had come directly from state care.
She said that meant the state had direct responsibility for them when they committed offences, not their parents.
"I've seen some issues where children and young people have been in out of home care since they were young children 5,6,7 years of age. And as they hit their late teens, they are a danger to themselves and others," Ms McGowan-Jones said.
"If they'd been in the care of the state for 11 years, surely that should have improved their life, and not ended them up in youth justice."
