Standard letter to write to your Minister/Senator

Hello Everyone Thank you for your ongoing support. I have drafted a standard letter to write to your federal Minister or Senator to raise awareness of the gap in the PLP for foster and kinship parents. Get to it! And thank you once again!! We can do this!! To the Honourable Minister for /Senator for …. I am writing regarding a gap in the Federal Government’s Parental Leave Pay (PLP) Rules. This gap denies foster and kinship parents from accessing the PLP. I am concerned about the exclusion of foster and kinship parents and the impact it has had on recruitment and participation of working parents to provide a safe and loving home to Australia’s most vulnerable children in the community. The key is to get the best outcomes for vulnerable children in the foster care system is the bonds that are able to be formed and kept when the child enters care. A significant factor in achieving this outcome is the ability to minimise the number of placements for children in care. Critical to this is having enough foster and kinship parents to meet the circumstances of each child that comes into care. Recruitment and retention of foster parents is crucial in being able to realistically achieve the desired outcome. This is where opening the PLP to foster and kinship parents can play a part. The spirit of the PLP is to give working parents an additional 18 weeks paid leave from their employment to bond and form attachments with their children. This is just as important, if not more so, in a foster or kinship placement. It is also important to note that the payments under the PLP are for the parent, to financially assist them to have more time at home with new children. The subsidies paid by the state or territory governments to foster or kinship parents are specifically for the living expenses and education of the children when they enter the foster care system. This is a distinction that is not made by the 2009 Productivity Commission report on PLP which disregards all its own advice on the therapeutic needs in favour of exclusion based on state and territory responsibility. Research has long shown the importance of the bonds and attachments that are established during the first few years of a child’s development. Any delay or damage to these bonds can cause irreparable harm for a child, causing developmental and attachment issues that then need to be managed for life. Making a change to PLP to incorporate foster and kinship parents can aid in recruiting carers to provide stable and loving homes where these bonds and attachments can be made, thus improving the futures of children who enter the foster care system. Many foster and kinship programs insist on a primary carer being at home for the first 12 months when children under the age of five are placed with them. A major reason for this is to safeguard the development of bonds and attachments between the children and their primary carer. This in turn helps mitigate the effects of trauma related to any abuse or neglect suffered by the children as well as that caused by separation from the birth family. In recent years, there has been significant awareness about the positive impact of speeding up the permanency process, i.e. adoption of vulnerable children from the foster care system. Closing the gap in the PLP rules would support and work in conjunction with this initiative by enabling working parents to take on vulnerable children who will be in a better financial position when permanency or adoption is considered. This would reduce vulnerable children moving through several foster placements and decrease the social costs to Government and the community in the long term. We seek your support in ensuring PLP is available to all eligible foster and kinship families who are taking in and caring for our most at risk and vulnerable children, giving them access to a permanent and stable loving family. Your sincerely