Networked Knowledge - Media Reports - South Australian Baby Deaths

[This page has been prepared by Dr Robert N Moles]

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The cases of Dr Charles Smith, Ontario, Canada
The Carol Matthey case in Victoria, Australia
The Kathleen Folbigg case in New South Wales
The Sally Clark case in the UK
The UK case of Angela Cannings
Professor Sir Roy Meadow, UK
Dr Alan Williams, UK
Dr Allan Cala, NSW and South Australia

14 November 2007 the Daily Telegraph Editorial stated: “Royal Commission the only hope”.

It said enough. The sequence of outrages involving the NSW Department of Community Services has gone beyond all limits. No option remains but for an immediate royal commission of inquiry into the department's evident collapse. The Daily Telegraph does not make this call lightly. Demands for royal commissions have been devalued over the years by politicians seeking to corner rivals or score cheap parliamentary points. It has become a knee-jerk response to failings far more slight than those emerging almost by the day from DOCS casebooks.

This newspaper calls for a commission following weeks of revelations so disturbing that, unless addressed by a royal commission, the normal human reaction may be to turn away in horror and wish them away - thereby allowing the wretched abuses we've been reporting to continue to occur. That cannot be allowed to happen. The Daily Telegraph, as much as is within its power, will not allow it to happen. For the ultimate test of a society is not found in gross domestic product, or affluence, or even in literacy and education. The ultimate test is how we treat our children.

And any impartial observer witness to the shocking cases of cruelty and neglect exposed over the past month would find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than we are failing that test. We are today living in a state that, over the past month, has been the scene of child abuse so extreme it amounts to torture. There is no other word to describe, for example, the starvation death of a seven-year-old girl. We are, to put it bluntly, in a hell of a state. Note the use of the word "we". Although a royal commission would focus on DOCS, such grave circumstances can only arise through more generalised community failings.

Likewise, it is literally impossible to credit individual DOCS workers with the incompetence or callousness that would lead to the cases we're now encountering. At work are three primary forces: abandonment of parental concern, societal wreckage, and systemic flaws within DOCS that render it unable to answer those issues. Premier Morris Iemma and his predecessor Bob Carr have already thrown record amounts of cash at DOCS, but to no effect. Iemma's only course now is to put this troubled department under a royal commission's microscope.

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