COTA Australia is the national policy vehicle of the eight State and Territory Councils on the Ageing (COTA) in NSW, Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia, ACT and the Northern Territory.
COTA Australia has a focus on national policy issues from the perspective of older people as citizens and consumers and it seeks to promote, improve and protect the circumstances and wellbeing of older people in Australia. Our submissions always incorporate the views of our members developed through various consultation mechanisms.
For this inquiry we put out a specific request to our members and other older people to tell us about their experience in taking primary responsibility for their grandchildren. We asked people to identify the two or three things that would have made or would make their lives easier. We received responses from across the country and we would like to thank the people who took the time to give us their stories.
Grandparents have always played a significant role in the lives of their grandchildren, providing support and practical assistance as required. It is not a new phenomenon for grandparents to take primary responsibility for grandchildren but the numbers have increased and the reasons for them taking on this role have changed. It is difficult to get an accurate estimate of the number of these grandparent carers because of the range of formal and informal arrangement that characterise grandparent care. The SPRC research report of 2013 estimates that there were somewhere between 8,050 and 63,520 grandparent carers in 2006 depending on the definition of care. 1 We do know that in 2012, 41,000 children and young people were the subject of care and protection orders issued by child protection authorities and more than half of those were place with kinship carers who were more often than not their grandparents.
Children are being raised by their grandparents because their parents are either unable or unwilling to care for them. The reasons for this are many and complicated but in the stories we have heard, and in informal consultations, we were told that they often include substance misuse, mental illness, family violence and the complete breakdown of the relationship between the children and their parents.
There has been some work done on this issue at both Commonwealth and state level. In 2003 COTA National Seniors3 (as it was then) undertook a project on behalf of the then Minister for Children and Youth Affairs looking at what grandparents identified as the challenges and how these could be addressed. A copy is attached for the Committee’s information. From the evidence in the SPRC project reported in 2013 and the feedback to COTA for this submission, many of the challenges identified in that report still exist and the proposed solutions would still apply.
