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My First Week in the QFCC

My First Week in the QFCC

Amplify Blog

Engagement Officer Jodie shares their experience working at QFCC.

 

Hey everyone! My name is Jodie (she/they), and I’ve just started working at QFCC as an engagement support officer. I am a Wakka Wakka woman who used to be a youth worker. I’m so passionate about the wellbeing of young people. You’ll be seeing more posts from me as I share my views as a young person with QFCC.

I’m going to talk today about what I have learnt so far about QFCC after working here for one week. QFCC – the Queensland Family and Child Commission – is a Queensland Government commission with the goal of influencing change that improves the safety and wellbeing of Queensland’s children and their families.

QFCC was established in 2014 in response to the final report of the Queensland Child Protection Commission of Inquiry. That report is often called the Carmody Report after its Commissioner, Tim Carmody. Everyone knew that there were a lot of problems in the child protection system, so the enquiry ‘was tasked with reviewing the entire child protection system root and branch to find out whether it is still failing our children, and, if so, why,’ according to the Carmody Report. The Carmody Report’s findings showed young people were still being harmed by the child protection system, and it made recommendations to try to fix this. One of its recommendations was to create an independent body to ‘monitor and report on the overall performance of the child protection system.’ The government passed a law to create that body, which is how QFCC was created.

QFCC has a few departments which do different jobs. I work in Youth Participation and Engagement. Our job is to work directly with young people and amplify their voices. We want young people to have the most say they can on the decisions made about them. Other departments work on reviewing and researching child deaths, watching over the youth justice and child protection systems, advocating for the rights of First Nations children, and government relationships.

Part of QFCC’s work is writing reports about how well children’s rights are being respected in Queensland and how things could be done better.  Recently, QFCC released the Queensland Child Rights Report. It found that the rights of young people in Queensland are often not being respected. The report showed that there are serious violations of the rights of young people who are in jail, First Nations young people, and young people who are in out-of-home care. The report wants the government to change laws it’s made that violate the rights of children, raise age of criminal responsibility to 14 years old (right now it’s only 10!), and make a Children’s Plan to guide how to best help young people. This is only part of the work QFCC does, but it is one important way that it influences change.

Overall, QFCC can’t force anything to happen. They don’t have a way to punish or control the government when it makes laws that violate children’s rights, and they can’t make laws about how children need to be treated. But by engaging with young people, amplifying their voices, and speaking out when bad things happen to young people, QFCC helps to make Queensland a better place to be a young person.