Look These Children in the Eye and Tell Them the Cheapest Option Is All They Are Worth

Please stop speaking to Queenslanders as though caring properly for these children is the spending problem.

We pay our taxes expecting our money would help to shelter the vulnerable, heal traumatized young lives, and give children who have known nothing but chaos a fighting chance. We did not pay our taxes so your ministers could boast about balance-sheet “savings” carved out of a child’s bedroom, while hundreds of millions pour into Olympic infrastructure, political marketing campaigns, and stadium vanity projects.

What has your government truly saved?

You swapped acronyms from IPS to OSD. You shaved numbers off a procurement spreadsheet. But you don't account for the cost when a child's world implodes because their home was defunded. You don't calculate the cost when the key worker who spent two years earning that child's trust is forced out because the new tender doesn't cover their wage.

And you certainly don't measure the cost of the trauma, the emergency department visits, the youth justice cells, or the devastating grief when a child under your watch does not survive.

In your department's offices, moving a child is casually called a "placement change."

To that young person, it was their home. It was the bedroom where they finally stopped having nightmares. It was the kitchen where people knew how they took their toast. It was the only patch of stability they had left on earth.

Did anyone in your government look those kids in the face before signing off on their eviction? Did anyone ask their workers, their clinicians, or their families? Or did a bureaucrat simply look at a balance sheet and decide that a vacant bed at a cheaper provider was good enough?

If the care your government is commissioning right now would not be acceptable for your own children, it is not acceptable for Queensland's children. Our Children!

Please do not stand in front of television cameras and tell the public you have "listened to Qld." And please do not blame the previous government. You hold the power right now. You sign the cheques. You set the price on these kids' lives.

Please do not insult Queenslanders by dismissing this as an emotional complaint or a sector dispute over funding, just a provider trying to save their funding.

We have the records. And we are calling your bluff.

We can show the placement histories proving how settled these children were before contracts changed.

We can show the care team advice and clinical warnings submitted before proposed moves were forced through.

We can show the correspondence documenting grave safety concerns and how transitions were handled.

We can show the documented beginning of the collapse of our frontline workforce and care capacity as funding was stripped away.

I am prepared to place every single one of those records before an appropriate independent reviewer tomorrow, while fully protecting the identity and dignity of every child.

Let the Department bring its records to the same table:

Bring each child's comprehensive assessment. Bring the recorded statements of what the child and their family actually said when told they were being moved. Bring the documented reasons justifying the disruption of a settled home. Bring the matching decisions that placed these children into cheaper beds. Bring the risk mitigation plans that supposedly guaranteed they would be safe. Let those records be examined together. Put them side by side under independent scrutiny. Let an examiner see what the frontline warned would happen, and what the Department chose to do anyway. If your decisions were safe, defensible, and made in the best interests of these children, you have nothing to fear from opening those files. If you refuse, Queenslanders will know exactly why.

You Can Shut Me Down, you can take our young people and find a reason to end my agencies contracts as a price for speaking out. However You cannot Shut Me Up. Do not think that stripping a contract, cancelling a service, or pulling the administrative levers of power will bury the truth. I will speak, and I will continue to speak until someone hears it. I will keep screaming into the silence of your department until the voices of these children break through your talking points. You can defund our houses, you can rewrite the procurement rules to push us out, but you cannot buy our silence while children in your care are in danger. Every single child who was uprooted, every child who was told their home was no longer viable because of a spreadsheet, their voices do not disappear just because a contract ends. I will carry them into every room, every media outlet, and every public forum until this government is forced to reckon with what it has done.

Children who have survived abuse, neglect, and profound trauma are being shifted around like surplus stock so a government can claim it cut spending. The frontline staff who hold these kids through their darkest hours are burning out, screaming into the void, and being told by bureaucrats to do more with less.

Every single Queenslander should be furious that our State's most vulnerable children are being treated as a balance-sheet deficit to be trimmed.

We are not asking for a boilerplate departmental statement. We demand direct, public answers from you, Premier:

Which specific recommendation from Commissioner Paul Anastassiou KC advised your government to force children out of stable, settled homes before his final report was even delivered?

Who signed off on the safety assessments declaring that reduced staffing, slashed clinical hours, and cut-price residential models would keep these children safe?

Will you personally visit the residential homes affected by these contract cuts, sit down with the kids being moved, and tell them to their faces that the cheapest option is all they are worth?

Do not stay quiet to keep the peace. We know the fight is tough and the risks very real but no amount of money, No job, no career move is worth selling out our kids. Wrong is wrong and If we don’t speak up and raise it then ‘wrong’ will continue to be at the cost of the very people we work to protect. If this was your child, what would you hope the system /community would do to ensure they are safe and protected? Fight for them, for their rights to be upheld as currently they have no voice with out us.

Document everything. Write down every single shift that goes unfilled, every clinical service cut, and every forced move. Put the risks in writing and copy the Department, the Ombudsman, and the QFCC. Make the paper trail undeniable. When this system breaks further, do not let them claim they didn't know.

Qlders Please be their shield. Refuse to accept that a vacant space is more important than the child expected to fill it. Do what they need us to do to protect them- as we all would want our community to do for our own kids if we as parents could not be their protector!!!

Premier, the public is watching. The sector is watching. And the children you were trusted to protect are waiting to see if you have the courage to answer."