Social Work Spotlight - Episode 40: Tony

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

In this episode I speak with Tony, an Accredited Mental Health Social Worker and founder of the Child Protection Party, which came about due to his commitment to working with families who have had their children removed. Tony has worked in generalist and gambling rehabilitation counselling services, was a founding member of the Confronting Violence and Abuse Group which provided a team of group facilitators to work with men who have been violent and abusive. Tony also worked as a facilitator with the Northern Violence and Intervention Program, has presented the “What to do about anger” program at Relationships Australia, and has written many programs including, Moving On from Separation and Divorce, Step-parenting, Raising Boys, How to Handle Anxiety and Stress, the Game Perspective, Workplace Bullying. He has had an article published in the AASW Social Work Journal entitled, “The Reverse Role Play – An innovative way to work with violent men”.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Homeless2Home program - https://www.housing.sa.gov.au/about-us/our-partnerships/homelessness-service-providers/homeless-to-home-systemThe Oregon Project - https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/oregon.pdfRelationships Australia - https://www.relationships.org.au/Open Arms (Veterans & Families Counselling) - https://www.openarms.gov.au/Child Protection Party - https://childprotection.party/Conversations over Coffee podcast - https://open.spotify.com/show/47LTwiMnhQIewtoH7PJkWeAustralian Institute of Family Studies - https://aifs.gov.au/Australian Centre for Child Protection (University of South Australia) - https://www.unisa.edu.au/research/australian-centre-for-child-protection/Fiona Arney publications - https://apo.org.au/person/13404?page=1-The Slow Evolution of Foster Care in Australia - https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319938998Recipes for Survival - http://peoplesvoicepublishing.com.au/index.php?route=product/product&path=63&product_id=53Ways of the Wicked Witch (Diedre Michell) - https://www.academia.edu/9543745/Ways_of_the_Wicked_WitchWise, Witty and Weird YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXA2moyTWaDkffUHzycUrmAThis episode's transcript can be viewed here:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QLlDKbhoAg5spilzdn9DDF21_vcjN_63CZwHbs2h_ow/edit?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

Hi and welcome to Social Work Spotlight where I showcase different areas of the profession each episode. I'm your host, Yasmaine McKee Wright, and today's guest is Tony. Tony is an accredited mental health social worker and is the founder of the Child Protection Party, which came about due to his commitment to working with families who have had their children removed. Tony has worked in Generalist and Gambling Rehabilitation Counseling Services, and he was a founding member of the Confronting Violence and Abuse Group, which provided a team of group facilitators to work with men who have been violent and abusive. Tony has also worked as a facilitator with the Northern Violence and Intervention Program.

For 10 years, Tony has presented the What to Do About Anger Program at Relationships Australia. Tony has written many programs including moving on from separation and divorce, step parenting, raising boys, how to handle anxiety and stress, the game perspective, workplace bullying and many more. Tony has a strong commitment to social justice which means that much of his private practice focuses on working with the most disempowered people in the community. Tony is committed to finding different ways of working which improve understandings and gives meaning to people's lives. He has had an article published in the ASW Social Work Journal entitled The Reverse Role Play, An Innovative Way to Work with Violent Men. to the podcast, really happy to have you here and have a chat about your social work experience so

far. Thanks very much, Aspen's good to be here. Can I ask firstly when you started as a social worker and what drew you to the profession? Yeah, I began, I guess, 92, 91. It was when I went to university anyway. I started off with Lifeline. So I worked with Lifeline for, as a volunteer for six years and then as a paid staff member for two years of that six years. And, and, I found that prior to that, I didn't have any idea as to what I wanted to do with my life. In fact, I often argue that the first 40 years of my life were kind of like a vacuum, which is a bit odd thing to say because, you know, obviously went to school, obviously had mates, I played lots of sport, and I enjoyed life.

But I didn't have a career. I didn't have a sense of direction. And a friend of mine was a supervisor at Lifeline, and she simply suggested that perhaps I could come and do some volunteer work. So I went and did the course and found out I loved it. In fact, I discovered a certain talent I had for listening and reflecting and so on. And I got a lot of good feedback to the point whereby I wound up supervising other Lifeline trainees. And in the final year, which is my final year at university, I actually ran the training program for Lifeline.

Wow. So while I was at Lifeline, I was at Lifeline, I then decided to go off and I had to go back to high school. So I was 35, 36. I went back to high school because when I was at school, I never passed an exam. I saw myself as pretty stupid, I guess. So the year going back to high school is probably the toughest year of my life because I had to reinvent myself and I had to face the challenges of sitting for exams,

which I found very traumatic. Anyway, I did do well enough to get into social work, which is where I wanted to go, and went to University of South Australia and muddled my way through my social work degree. I hardly ever get anything. I used to get excited when I got a P1. So fortunately, I got enough of them to get through. So I didn't see myself as an academic at all, but really loved what I was doing. I was very passionate about being a student as a matured.

year-age student with a reasonable amount of experience. I certainly had an up bringing where I just lived politics because my father was very, it was mayor of Woodville here in South Australia for a number of years and he attempted to get into Parliament on a couple of occasions. So I was pretty entrenched in political views, had my own views, which were moulded and changed as a result of doing my social work degree, actually. I was quite right wing prior to doing social work. I now class myself as a social work socialist. So see things far different now than what I used to. Yeah. So that was kind of like the beginning. So imagine you would have had to be incredibly determined to go back and do all of that and step way outside your comfort zone in the

first place. Did you feel as though as you were going through the social work course, then you had a clear direction or an indication as to what sort of social work you were most interested in? Yeah, I always want to do therapeutic social work because I've done all that work with Lifeline. Clearly, counselling was where I wanted to go. And I started a private practice prior to leaving university when I was seeing a number of clients at my home while still studying. I really enjoyed the opportunity to, and actually it's kind of like an experiment. I think, I think it's social work. The great thing is we could do all these experiments and no one knows we're experimenting. Yeah.

You can test out these questions and directions and stuff. That's why they call it practice, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I did a lot of experimenting in those first few years and found that I had relative success. My first placement was actually in child protection with a family new services. I think it was back then in Adelaide.

And I had my own view as to what child protection looked like back then. and my experiences were molded by the people that I was working with. So I was a student and I was working with a lot of other social workers, obviously. I can remember walking into a lunchroom and all the social workers, well, most of them were talking in derogatory terms, in terms of the clients they were working with. They were talking about them being feral and a whole host of other stuff. And I thought, well, that doesn't fit with me. So I had to go at them.

And so from that moment on, I had developed this reputation as being someone who was prepared to make a stand against my own profession, I guess, in terms of the way we address people and the way we think about people. And that's kind of permeated. I mean, that was the beginning point, but over the years from much of the other work that I've done has permeated through most of the way I think about social work, that we need to confront those in our own profession. about the things that we disagree with. And that was as a student you challenged. That was as a student, yeah. So very early, I made up my mind that I was developing. So I was still developing my values, though,

Jasmine, to be honest. And I guess that was an innate value that I had, that we need to treat people with respect, even when we're speaking about them and they're not there. So from that point on, the next placement was in the gambling rehab program, which had just started in Australia at that time. I wanted to be there because it was a therapeutic setting. And I started to work with an agency which I admire these days.

And I did back then too, but I was with a supervisor. My supervisor was one of the worst social workers I've ever met. So when you're thinking about me confronting a group of social workers in the environment which I'm only a student. I'm guessing you didn't hold back. I left. I raised a complaint with a university supervisor and told him, what was happening. I said, I can't work there anymore. This woman's atrocious. And so I shifted to

the same gambling program, but with Anglicare out at Salisbury, which is in the north of the metropolitan area. And that was a much better placement. The two people that I was working with were fabulous, and I learned a lot from them that were in the team. And the manager herself was pretty terrible as well. And I went up in conflict with her, and eventually after six and a half years of that, I left. When I was doing my social work degree, I thought I wanted to do therapeutic counseling, hence the reason why. I also decided that I was going to work in. The first placement was going to be in the place I least wanted to work. Okay. And so that being child protection, there's an eye in that given what I'll tell you about my story later on. Yeah.

But yes, and then my second placement, I wanted to be in the place which I wanted to work in. and then I was offered a job prior to finishing my placement with the gambling rehab program with Anglicare. Yeah. And how did that gambling program and your experience within that inform the next steps that you took? Good question. Thanks for asking that. It was important because I was told when I first went there that we're only dealing with gambling, which is fine. But then I came to realize...

How can you just deal with gambling? That's right. It's spot on. And this is where the manager came in. So the manager had, I don't want to differentiate between degrees, but she had a Bachelor of Social Science degrees. She was a community worker, and she's pretty good at that. But when it came to understanding what social workers do, she had no idea whatsoever. So she said, she told me on this one occasion that we were to work just on gambling. I had no idea what that meant, because I could see that there are all these other massive problems that were associated with the reasons why people were gambling in the first place.

And so she wanted us to refer. So if someone came in, for example, with a divestive violence issue or child sexual abuse issue, then we were to refer them to another service. And all I could see was all these people coming in, having a chat about the fact that they've been gambling and then having to send them off to some other service. I thought, well, that was crazy

because we just wind up with a whole host of different services but these people are telling the same story over and over again. I couldn't see how that was going to benefit the client at all. Now, given that I was only new to counselling, I guess, or social work as such, because I just left. I just finished my degree. What in the hell would I know? I decided that whatever issue was presented to me,

I would consider trying to understand that issue and research in that issue. And one of the things that came to me quite often was actually childhood sexual abuse and how that it impacted them and the trauma created and so on. So I went up doing a lot of reading on working with people that have been sexually abused or kids that have been sexually abused. And of course, just working with clients themselves, I came to understand and started to experiment, I guess, around some of the ways we could work with these people. And I learned.

I learned from them, actually, about how to work. So that, my practice developed because I was listening to clients. I was not walking away from any issue. I mean, the stories were horrific. It was an experience that clearly I'd never had. But I came to understand how I can work with them better. and I think I was pretty effective as a result in terms of having to meet the issues around their gambling.

At the same time, though, because I had this mindset, Asman, that I was older, I was a mature student by this time I was 40. And I decided that I had to gather as much work as I could to develop and broaden myself as much as I can. So early in the piece, I'd no sooner finished working at Lifeline, which was my final year of university. I lumped a job with an organisation that was called Cope. And then now actually they've amalgamated with Relationships Australia. They used to be part of a Relationship of Australia, long story. But they provided, it was called the Centre of Personal Education. So they were

providing a whole lot of range of courses for people around anger management, anxiety, stress, divorce, separation, a whole host of things they were providing. And I started working there on an Anger Management Programme, Programme, with another social worker. Fabulous, fabulous. young woman. And she taught me everything I needed to know. I can still remember my first session, which was a nightmare, not knowing what to do, what to say, how to address these issues and so on. Until they eventually became Relationships Australia, and I started working with them. So I was on contract. So I was working with Anglicare during the day, Relationships Australia and Cope in the evenings. And then Relations Australia won a contract with

Department of Veteran Affairs, working with Vietnam Vets. And then I started to run a program for Vietnam Vets, a lifestyle program, which I wrote, which incorporated a lot of the other stuff I've been doing with Relationships Australia. And I'd take holidays, and during my holidays, I would go off and run these week-long courses in a hideaway somewhere in the L.A. hills. But my goal was always to learn as much as I can, as quickly as I can, because I always thought that I was late to the job. So I packed as much as I could in and hardly saw my family. Making up for a lost time then. I was. So I wrote over a period about eight years, I wrote 25 programs and most of those programs were written for Relationships Australia. So I think

I delivered almost every possible program over that time that they had. Yeah. And thoroughly enjoyed it. The other thing too was I didn't have all that much in group work skills. I did some work with Lifeline, and I did run the program there. And that introduced me to group work, which was fantastic. But running groups on a weekly basis on certain subjects was something that I found extremely challenging, but loved.

It was, I regret. I don't do that much of it. I don't do any of it really these days. I kind of regret that because it was so much fun. Given that it took so much of your time and your energy and took you away from your family, but also took you away from any sort of holiday or relief that you would have had or respite,

and so much of the work that you were doing would have been really heavy and quite draining. What sort of support did you need in that time to be able to sustain that? So I had a friend of ours, the person actually introduced me to life flight in the first instance. She was fabulous. So I had her, I had my wife.

And my family actually was relatively new family. I had a divorce just before I decided to go off and go to school again. Yeah. That was a moment in my life that was pretty traumatic. And then remarried and had a couple of kids. So at this particular point, I had two young kids. My wife was at university as well. She now teaches at uni.

She's got a doctorate. She's an academic and she's got an interesting story in itself. What does she teach? She teach sociology. Oh, okay. So not too far removed. No, but we're even closer because she was a foster kid and she's written a book, which is the book on foster care in Australia. So that ties in with a lot of the child protection stuff that I wound up doing much later. So there's a lot, there's a lot happening to put it mildly. Yeah. Dee was still studying. So I had a breakdown in answer to your question

because at one point when I was at Anglicare, this is in about the fifth or sixth year, there was a time where a lovely woman that I was working with, social workers, so there was three social workers in the team. And she got married, so she was away for a few months, I think. And then the other guy that was working with us, he got another job. And so there was just me. And I was seeing 35 clients a week, expected to keep my case notes up to date. and then the manager there said, look, I'll appoint this other guy who's got a,

I think his degree was in Bachelor of Social Sciences, do you absolutely nothing about counselling. And he was hopeless, absolutely hopeless. It's a lovely bloke, but in terms of counselling and understanding what was going on with clients, he had no idea. Yeah. And so I went up supervising him. And I can remember sitting in the front of the building in which we were working with this manager

and just bursting out in tears. I can't do this anymore. I just can't do this. I was exhausted. I couldn't keep up with my case notes, barely kept up with my clients, had people coming in all the time, answering phone calls. It was a mad time because the gambling rehab program was relatively new. People were accessing it in great numbers, and I couldn't keep up with it, and I just broke down in tears. So I'd go home. Fortunately, I have a fabulous wife who understood what was happening to me, and then every year I will get

berated by the Human Resources Department and Anacres. Because I was always in conflict, the story of my life. I was always in conflict with the manager because I objected to the way she was running the place and I certainly objected to the fact that she offered me nothing. And that consequently she offered the kind nothing either. And that was my focus. I can always remember she once said, you know, what's the most important thing that we do here at this organisation?

She had this triangle, which was the client, Anglicare, or the organisation, and the ASW. And she asked me, which was the most important? And I said, it was the wrong answer, incidentally. I said, the client. You know, the point was that it was supposed to be the organisation. I just thought, bugging the organisation. I'm working for the client. If the client needs me, that's it.

And it was a no-brainer for me, but it was the wrong answer for her. So they used to call me over every year because they were upset. set about the fact that I was working for Anglicare full time and I'd take my holidays, which is my choice as to what I do during my holidays, but I'd go and work with the Vietnam vets. Yeah. And they objected to the way I was working, which is really odd because they never ever sat with me and watched me work. Never.

In fact, I got to the point whereby I thought, this isn't right. Someone should be watching what I did. I had a comment, just fabulous woman. And I said to a lot, do you mind if I video record? what we're doing one day. Got to sign a release of information form, whatever, consent form. And she said, fine, that's right. And I set up a video, which wasn't of her.

It was just of me to have a look at the type of questions that I was asking. And I was horrified because I realized I sat with my knees up, covering my face almost, looked really uncomfortable and was the most least engaging position anybody could ever have if you're counselling. But I never had any feedback from anybody because, everybody was inadequate and the others were too busy and a lot of the time I was on my own. So, yeah, it was a mess. And then eventually, this manager was bullying me. And she said, I've got this story where she comes in and she says, to me at one point,

you know, Tony, there are people in this organisation who just don't like you. I thought, well, fine, who are they? Let's have a conversation. Let's talk about it, right? And it kind of was escalating over time where the organisation, organization didn't like the stand I took around clients and the work I was doing. So eventually I decided, well, I was teaching assertion at the time for RA. So I thought, well, okay, I'll use a bit of my assertive skills. Yeah. He either been lacking, obviously. So I came in and I said to a, listen,

when you say to me that there are people in this organisation that don't like me, I feel distressed, betrayed, fearful and sad. So what I prefer you to do, is I prefer to tell me who these people are so that we can address the issue. Right? So that was, there's supposed to be a four-part statement. And then at the end of that, she says, well, there are people in this place who don't like you. And that was it. And I thought, well, okay, that's it. I disrealized there and then that, you know, there was no way in the world I could even negotiate with this woman. This became a really helpful exercise when I came doing the stuff that I was doing with Relationships Australia around being assertive because I

to realize that there are some people, no matter whether, how good your statement is, you're not going to get the response that you want. And then when you don't get that response, you know where you stand. So I knew there and then that this relationship wasn't going to go very far. And it didn't because eventually I came back from holidays. The day I got back, she slammed a piece of paper on my desk, who said that they wanted to have a conversation with me about a whole lot of transgressions that I've done. So they build up these transgressions. And they they were really nothing. And there wasn't anything that I did that transgressed against me as a social worker. It was all about behavioural stuff. So I left, almost had another nervous breakdown.

I remember crying in front of my wife on the porch at the back, wishing that my life was over. What am I doing? I'm a social worker and I'm in this position. And then I took them to work cover. And then they eventually, once the chief executive came to a work cover meeting, we decided on a really small pay out, which is unfortunate because I should have asked for more. And so from that moment on, I left and I went to private practice. And it sounds like that process as horrible as it was helped inform your approach around supporting social workers to work within or push against the system, right? Absolutely. So that was a very crucial thing to have happened very early on in your career to say, well, it's not me. I'm trying to go about this the right way and I'm new and I'm

In a position where I don't have a lot of power here and I'm being made to feel as though I'm not doing the right thing but not getting any feedback around it. So what was your next step after that after you realised that, no, this isn't going to work? I took six months off and then I decided I was going to private practice. This is long before Medicare. I did have a contract with the Vietnam Vets Counseling Service. So I was doing outreach work for them. And I was doing more and more work with RA. So lots of nighttime work and the vetting and it's counseling work, which is now open arms.

And so I made this decision, which is probably one of the best decisions I ever made. And that was no matter whatever was offered me, I would do it, even if I wondered whether I could. So I started doing some Employers Assistance Program work as well. So I had a bundle of that. So I had a lot of things happening. And then at one point, a guy I was working with got a job working for Ergon Energy. They were moving to a centralised system in terms of managing their flow of electricity. And I was asked if I'd like to come up there and work with him up at Rockhampton as an

organisational change manager. See, this is one of those positions whereby I thought, I know nothing about organisation will change, but that doesn't mean I can't learn. But it also means uprooting your young family. No, no. I went up. It was a three and a half month contract. Okay.

So it was short term. But the money was amazing. I've never earned so much money in my life. In fact, we earned so much money I was able to pay off a house. Wow. Basically and get rid of all our debts. But it was the worst job I've ever had. The guy I was supposed to be working with didn't want to work with me.

I don't know if you know Rockhampton at all. It's a nice place, but I don't think I'd want to live there permanently. No. I like Yipoon and used to spend a lot of time down at Yipoon playing golf. Yeah. But, yeah, I was very lonely, very isolated. The family came up once, I think, during that period. But I hated the job, did nothing, gathered the money together,

and I felt devalued as a social worker because I wasn't doing social work. I was doing something else. So the important lesson for me around that was it doesn't matter how much money you earn, Yesman. If you're not doing the job you're trained to do, it's not worth it. Yeah. Basically. And so I left there feeling pretty crappy, came back, didn't work for about five, six months, picked up my private practice.

I think sometime after that, perhaps Medicare came in. I can't remember. Yeah, and kicked off, told me six months to reinvigorate myself, I guess. kicked off my private practice and didn't look back. And did you have a mentor or anyone to support you who could kind of guide you through the process of setting up a practice? No. There was a couple of people around that kind of were dabbling in private practice.

But at that time, there weren't all that many of us in South Australia who were actually running a full-time private practice. So there were lots of practitioners who were working part-time. at it. I guess they had other jobs, and they were doing it on weekends and stuff like that, or they had partners who had full-time jobs who were able to support them. 85% of our profession are women. So I guess a lot of those were women too. Yes. No, I just weaned my way through it. And then I had a number of people from the Anglicare days who sought me out, and there were even some people, I guess, from Lifeline who wanted

to know who I was. I did some face-to-face stuff at Lifeline at that time. It wasn't all telephone. And so that just builds. You know, I had a phone call today from a client that I saw 20 years ago. And I work with them every year for a checkup. I go into a doctor. And I've watched their son grow up. I'll get lots of referrals because people kind of know who I'm. I've never ever had to advertise. This just kind of happens. And did you need to obtain your accredited mental health social work status early on in that process or did that come later? As soon as it became available, I applied. So what was that, seven or eight years ago now? Yeah, as soon as it became available, I applied, thought that it would be the Holy Grail,

but it wasn't because, see, my private practice consisted of all the work that I'd mentioned. So I saw my private practice as being Vietnam vets counseling service, Relationships Australia, Ergon Energy, any of the other stuff that I picked up along the way. I had a contract for Housing SA. That came about because there was a woman I was, who was a socialist student, that I was supervising at Relationships Australia. So I also did this work with Flinders University, where I was a supervisor for social education students.

And she went up getting a job with Housing SA. They were developing and running a new program called H2H, Homelessness to Home. And it was a new, innovative computer program that they wanted. wanted to implement and they wanted someone to train a group of people to be able to deliver this program. So this is another thing where I earned more money than I thought I deserved. And it was a nightmare because they were writing the program and they expected us to deliver it. I got a whole group of people together. We as a group voted who should get these jobs. So it was kind of like

a bipartisan event. Yeah. So we went up with these six people or so. So they gave me the completed project on a Friday and it was complicated. You think about it. People coming in talking about what their housing situations are like. It was just the most complicated program. It'd be like asking you to learn a complicated computer program on a weekend and delivering it on the Monday because that's what they asked me to do. Yeah. I've never been as stressed as I was on that final weekend trying to get this done. Sleepless nights. I don't think I slept for the weekend and then I had to deliver the program on the Monday. And also it teaches all these other people. So you were teaching, it's like a training the trainer program then? Yes. It was training housing SA staff,

how to use this program, basically. And so we had all their managers and everything. And it ran for weeks, months in fact. And then I had all these people. So I'd deliver three programs a week and another person would deliver another three. We had hundreds of people we had to deliver this program too. And I had to develop a way of presenting the program. So I had this creative thing that we drew up on this wall and we had these lines and people would write their comments on sticky papers and all this sort of stuff you're doing group work. So I was employed to do it because I was very good at group work. And so I developed this presentation. They all liked it. But the actual presenting of the material was lacking simply because we didn't have enough to.

trying to prepare. Anyway, so that was another stressful thing. So did all of that, and that all incorporated my private practice. Yeah. That's what it was. And then Medicare came along and I've made more money, I think, as a practitioner from all these other things I've done than I'll ever make from Medicare. And while you're working as a private practitioner, at what point did you get to the

stage where you're thinking, I have this idea, I want to found the child protection party. How did that all come about? So I had an office in the city, which I was sharing as part of my EAP arrangement with an organisation. So I was paying for this office as well. And I had a young woman come to me who was referred also by someone else that I knew who was doing some advocacy work. And she said, I've got this person. I'm really having difficulty working with her because the problems who's got are extreme. Could you see it?

So I said, sure. So I also have this philosophy that I don't ever. ask for money. If someone's got a problem, you know, and you've got the time, then you should spend with them. Eventually, I think the money kind of sorts itself out. We should never make it the priority. And I think that's always worked for me because eventually something happens and the money arrives through another, whether it be housing estate or whatever, the money turns up. She had a young child taken away from her. And she sat in front of me, she looked at the ground, and she would never look me in the eye. And I said,

her, her name was Kim, she doesn't mind me mentioning her name, I still speak to her today. So she said to me, Kim, I'm going to, I've got a challenge. I reckon by the time we finish, I reckon you're going to look in my eyes and you're going to smile, you know, and she's looking down to that's never going to happen, you know. I think what we might do too is we'll try and get you to talk about your feelings, if that's okay. I've never talked about my feelings, never going to talk about my feelings. She was lovely, eventually, and she was cutting herself.

and she was doing some other terrible things and she was with a terrible partner. But she was one of the most beautiful women I've ever met, really young, 20, 21 I guess at the time, 20. And I could see so much potential in her. Yet the battle I was having with the department also because I started having meetings with the department about her. I came to start to realise for the first time,

not that I haven't been all that aware of it before, but social workers didn't see what I was seen for some of it. reason. And I could see that she was a good mum. She really loved this kid. There were no real issues. The homelessness was the issue, but, you know, after a period of time, she had her own home. She was thinking of dispensing with the child's father, which she eventually did. She was fantastic, but the department wouldn't give this child back. In fact, one day, I'm at her place with the department's social worker. And so this was about June, and he was saying, we'll work to have this child returned back to the mum.

We'll work on that. And by January we'll make sure that that happens. And I walked past him and I said, if you don't have this child returned, I'm coming after you. It's the first of the only time I've ever harassed another social worker because I knew that this guy wasn't going to do one thing that he said. And yet he'd promised me. And her.

To make it all worse, this child was placed with a grandparent with whom the mother had very little contact, primarily because he was violent to the family, and there was an AVO out on him. And this kid, who was a baby, was placed in his care. This guy was also known in the community in which he lived at the time. He was known as the local flasher. So he had a few things that kind of didn't sit all that well with me in terms of caring for this, child. And I couldn't understand why the department couldn't see any of this compared to the mum, who was a good mum. And I now know this child is 14. Lovely kid has since left that home,

is now living with the mother because she no longer wanted to live in that household. Heaven only knows whatever happened there. And the kid has high anxiety. Yeah. And it's sad to see what's happened to her. And so from that moment on, I thought, well, Maybe this is an area we can start to dabble him. But as it always happens for me, people started to find me out. So they heard about this person, they heard about others, and it just spiraled. Until one day I had all these people I was working with from the department, meetings with the department, confirming all this stuff I thought I'd recognized

in the first instance with Kim. And then in December 2014, I had a meeting with the chief executive of the Department of Child Protection. family's essay it was back then. And in that room that I had, there were a few of us, and there was a few advocates. So there's this group of people that were care leavers, the people that had issues with the department. I was involved with a lot of them because my wife is a care lever. So they organised this meeting. I turned up, and this guy, as a chief executive, went around the room and I was the last person, you know, why you hear what you're to get from this meeting sort of stuff, came to me. He knew how I was, and the work I'd been doing,

advocating for families and I had uttered literally no more than 10 words than he had a guy at me. He attacked me verbally, something terrible. And to the point whereby I broke down in tears and I left the room. And one of a mates from inside came out and said, look, Tony, you need, look, come back in, whatever. I came back in. He didn't apologise, nothing. I just sat there quietly, tears streaming down my face. I left, sat outside in a coffee shop with a group of these people and thought,

I got to do something about this, like this is the final straw. So I went through a period where the department wouldn't let me come and sit in with clients, wouldn't let me advocate for clients, whatever. And then I had this berated experience. I thought, well, okay, so what can I do? And I decided that the only thing I could do at that particular point was to perhaps start a political party. Because if we're going to implement any change for kids, it needs to be.

at a political level whereby we can, you know, we may not be able to implement policies or legislation specifically, but at least we can start to talk to the people that make the legislation. Right. That is other political parties, start to influence them, start to talk to them about what's happening within the Department of Child Protection. So in January 2015, I've got a group of people together and we established the Child Protection Party. And here we are today.

None of those people that were here at that meeting are members of the Child Protection Party to this day. Okay. But it's a national party now, right? It's a nationalised approach to child protection and related inquiries. Well, it has been. So we got state registration and then we got federal registration on the back of that. It's obviously two separate things. We failed our last audit by the Australian intellectual commission because we didn't have enough

members who could validate. It's a complicated process. Won't go into it now. But we got our first lot okay. And then they do it every three years and we failed our last one. So we don't have national registration right at this moment. But that doesn't matter to us because it's the states who run the child protection system, not federal government. And our focus was always on the state. I still as a candidate two and a half years ago. We had 16,000 votes. which was probably 16,000 more than what we expected, and we'd only registered two or three months prior to the election. So the response we got was pretty resounding.

And, you know, at the moment, as a political party, we've got a fabulous executive, the best we've ever had. It's a national executive, so there are people from all over Australia who meet with us once a week, and pretty powerful. And so a lot's changed in that time, though, Yasmin. we don't have any money. We use Facebook and YouTube as our form of promoting ourselves. I churn out stacks of videos on a whole host of issues,

hoping that people will be interested enough. We've brought in our perspective around what CPP means. We've had conversation about changing the name because everybody thinks it's got something to do with the Department of Child Protection. We're really now a party that focuses on improving outcomes for kids, generally. That includes education, disabilities, you know, our concerns about youth suicide, our concerns about youth mental well-being, all those things now come under the purveyor of the Child Protection Party. And what would a typical day look like for you within that role?

Lots of phone calls. So today, for example, hasn't been all that exciting because I've also started up this production company. So I've spent lots of money. buying whip-bang cameras and what we're sitting in there is actually my studio green screen behind me as you can see yeah so I try and produce videos so we produce two videos at the moment today I had I'm supposed to have a meeting with Google to talk about them helping political mind of parties conversations with our secretary I've had three conversations from clients and today's my day off incident And then I've looked at the production stuff really has been about,

so I'm learning a new piece of software called Da Vinci Resolve. Do you know of Da Vinci Resolve? I do, yeah. Yep, which is fabulous, I think. So I'm learning about stuff I know nothing about. And I've got a very expensive camera, which is not the one we're looking at now. It's another one. And I want to do a video, I want to do a documentary on parents' responses to children being removed,

is what I want my video to be on. And so I've been collecting stories from people. So some of those stories are up on our Facebook page. But eventually all of that stuff will be, and on YouTube, and all that stuff will be formulated into a documentary, which will be focusing on kids. My wife and I started this project off by doing a video on Caroline Clark Memorial.

I think it's on our Child Protection Party YouTube page. So that was where Dee did all the writing. and the stuff where I just did the photograph and the editing. But that was about a memorial for kids who have died in care. And it's a disgusting memorial placed in Adelaide Centennial Park. And when we saw it, it was a disgrace because it just hasn't been cared for and so on. We're working to have that improved for some volunteers perhaps coming in, tidying that up. And the ASW, in fact, here in South Australia got on board in relation to that.

So we did a small documentary, 20 minutes on that. And then I've got all these other projects that I want to do. We've got two podcasts. I've got a podcast called Kids Matter. Don't do all that much on that. I should do more. So that's about taking some of the stuff that we do as videos. I take off, strip off the audio, pop it on to the podcast.

Or if I've got something that needs to be said or an interview, they might seem to this one, I'll pop that on Kids Matter. And then my wife and I've got one called Conversations Over Coffee. So that's where we just sit down and we have this bizarre conversation about politics generally. That sounds great. So I guess I'm 70. So the thought of retirement is, I hate the R word because retirement to me equals death. So I try to avoid that conversation and I try and fill my life up with other stuff.

And that includes when I can see my grandchildren in New Zealand and on the Gold Coast. And I've got a son who's in Ireland and another son who's in Sydney and a daughter who's here who's incidentally also a social worker. Right. Yeah, so life's full. What can I say? It must be hard also when half of your life has been working as a social worker. You know, it's what you are.

It's so much part of your identity. It would be really hard to let that go. But it's also really wonderful having that rich experience and longevity within the field. I'm curious as to what changes you've seen during that time that you've been working in terms of child protection and where you see social work continuing to make an impact in an ideal world. Maybe that's an ideal outcome to do with justice or greater representation. It's interesting. I see very little change. So I've been working in the area of child protection, I guess, for about 12 to 15 years. So I guess I don't see any change. And that for me is extremely distressing.

The behaviours that I was seeing way back then, I still see today. I've had conversations with the minister here about the things that need to be changed. And it's funny because at one point she actually offered me a job. She said, look, Tony, perhaps she'd like to come and work with the department. And I said, no, because they would never listen to me. because the things that we're asking them to change are things which they are so resistant about. And one of those things I think is, I did a video last Sunday, I think it was, on victim blaming. And that came from some research that had been done in Sydney University.

And that is a core issue. So social workers, well, my view is, not all social workers, Yasmin, are bad social workers. They're not. I get lots of support from the ASW because a lot of the people that I see there are people who understand the issues but are never in a position to make the changes required. So they don't disagree with the things that I say, they're just not in a position to make those changes. And I don't know who is because, well, the issue around victim blaming, for example,

we need to think about the sort of stuff I was saying earlier. I've known this stuff from very beginning is that it's a type of language we use, it's the position we hold, it's the power and authority we express that determine how that is perceived by others. So if we have a view of a person, so they come from a low socio-economic background,

or they're indigenous, or they're disabled, and our view of those people is so limiting, then we're never going to be able to see an outcome for them, which is going to be better for them and their children. We won't. So the department has always worked and operated from risk aversion. So everything they do is about, I don't want to do it. This child is safer with us than us working with the parent.

And we know from Corey Valentine case here in South Australia where a kid died because the department didn't take enough notice of what was happening. for her and some other cases. There's a case in Sydney earlier this year where a child died that was known to the department. They chose not to respond. And we have this strange dichotomy, whereas the department thinks if they do nothing, they're in trouble. If they do something, they're also in trouble. And they're not wrong. I get that. But there's a middle ground. Some families need to have kids removed. We know that. At the other end of the spectrum, there are families who could have their children remain with them,

but the social worker's view of this family is so distorted and lacks so much positivity about them that they're never going to allow that to happen. Right. And it's that part of social work that needs to change. And do you think that comes down to training as well as the systems that they're working within? I think, yeah, I've had an issue with universities

and I speak to someone from university, I know it's not a problem. But there is something about students feeling when they leave university not being confident enough to challenge the systems that sit around them that they know are wrong. The other issue too is I don't know whether the, you know, and I've got a daughter who's just finished social work a year or so ago. So I kind of got firsthand information about that. But there's something about the lack of teaching social work based on our Code of Ethics.

because the Code of Ethics to me is the Bible. If I've got an issue that I need to check out and find out where I stand, the Code of Ethics does tell us where it is that we should stand ethically as a social worker. But I don't think that those beliefs that sit within our Code of Ethics are ingrained enough. The principles, you know, I want to ask people, you know, what are the core three principles of social work? and 99% of them can't tell me. I usually use it as an exercise to find out how much you know about social work or if you're a student.

First question I'd always ask. You tell me what the three principles are of social work. And they just can't tell you because they're not ingrained in them enough and to understand what social justice means and professional integrity means and respective persons. You know, what do they really mean? not just say them, but look at the writing that sits underneath each of those principles and tell me what that means.

Yeah, and that's the core of who we are. We are the only professional organisation that has based our code of ethics on social justice. We're the only ones that recognise and mention social justice as a core principle. Right. So why don't we act as if we are? Well, or even reflect on what that means not just as a professional, but as a person and what that means within a specific field of social work, because it's going to change so much. It's a dynamic thing.

It's not as though your values will never change. And the other part to that question that you asked, I think, is to what extent do we integrate social work into us? I think I was fortunate because I had to do a lot of changing when I was going through university from one set of views that were my parents' views to a view that I had to adopt that were my own. And it was social work that helped me to do that. So none of that stuff was innate. It had to be reasoned and understood and evaluated. And eventually I came out the other end believing this is who I was. It's the invention of who we are professionally

that makes us the best possible social worker. So I'm not a social worker nine to five. You know, my principles and values and everything hold out throughout my life. It doesn't mean I stuff up every now and again and I forget about that stuff, but there's always stuff I come back to that tells me who I am. And given that you came to social work later in life, this is a big hypothetical, but if you had found social work earlier in life, do you think that your trajectory would have been any different?

What impact has your previous life experiences up until that point had any effect on the area that you went into or the way that you saw things. There have been some specific influences. I've often asked that question myself. Like if I was 21, well, firstly, there's a whole stack of beliefs that I had when I was young that I have discarded, and that's around views of other people. There are some core principles that I grew up with. I came from a very Christian background where there was a sense of equity and fairness

amongst everybody. So that principle I've still adopted to this day, looking to the better part of people rather than the negative was something I grew up with. So those things I've retained. It's the other stuff, the negative stuff about people in general, in some sense in terms of categorising, identifying them, being judgmental, being racial, for that matter, has been dispensed with. But the good stuff I've been able to keep. I don't know if I had the maturity at the age of 21, to 30 to do that. I don't think I did. I think social work came into my life at a point when I needed it the most.

Right. And the great thing about social work is, as I said earlier, is that I learn more from my clients than they will ever learn from me. And I cherish that. I don't tell them that. But it's true. Yeah. That's wonderful.

I feel like what you were saying before about feeling confident to provide that advocacy and give people that sense of respect and speaking out against injustices and how that affects the systemic limitations. I think that comes into so much of your values and trying to understand and research issues to view a person's situation with a wider lens. Whereas I feel like some of the systemic issues might be because that lens has been reduced so much. They're just dealing with one small thing and not seeing that wider picture. But yeah, it's a really tough one, especially if you feel like you're doing so much and it's not having a huge effect. That's got to be tough. Are there any specific campaigns or research that you're

doing to try to impact on that other than the documentary, which sounds wonderful? There's a few policy things that we're doing that are interesting. In fact, the department recently adopted one of them. not that they'd say that it was ours but so one of the things i'd been pushing for for it was for therapeutic foster care for years and to me that was someone who has social work training but is a therapist working with kids that have got significant issues to be overcome and that they'd be in a placement where they're cared for and respected and honored now i don't know whether that's going to happen but the department did announce a couple of weeks ago that they We're implementing a program which, again, they're borrowed from overseas because for some reason Australians can't think of this stuff for themselves.

Yes, so they're implementing the Oregon program, which does kind of what I've suggested for years. And they're paying specific workers some $60,000 a year to do that, which I think's not enough, frankly. So I think someone's doing that whether we should be paid between $80,000 and $90,000 a year. And they probably would have to have a couple of kids in the home in order to do that. But that's one thing that I think is important. The other thing that I think is important, which is a video I've just completed, which is on registration, social work registration, which I'm passionate about. I remember I took it to the chief executive at Families, they say it was back then,

a lovely bloke by the name of David Waterford. So David, I said to him once, I said, one of the ways by which you could solve part of the problem in relation to how social workers work in the department is to force them to become members of the ASW. So the condition of employment would be that you were a member of the ASW. He laughed at me because he knew that he could never make that happen and that it'd lose so many staff. Because in South Australia, see, the interesting thing is,

I don't know how it sits around the rest of Australia, but there's only a handful of social workers within the Department of Child Protection who are actually members of the ASW. I think it's sitting at about, is it 25% nationwide? Oh, I saw the figures the other day. I quoted them in a thing I was doing. It's something like 30,000 social workers Australia-wide, 10,000 of them are registered.

Okay. The question is how many work for the Department of Child Protection or Child Safety or whatever amongst that 10,000? Yeah. I mean, I did hear a figure here in Child Australia at one point, there's a few years ago. It was six over, you know, one or two thousand people that worked for the department for the social workers. Yeah.

So I don't know what the specific figure is. The point is, though, that social workers are not committed to registration within department because they would then have to be accountable to a registration board. And I've often thought, you know, if you're fearful of being registered, are you afraid that you may be doing something that perhaps the registration board might disagree with? and if you are, why don't you correct it? And if you're aware of it in the first place, why are you doing it?

So, yeah, I don't get it. But registration certainly is one of those things. And Karen Franks, who's the member of the Legislative Council here in South Australia, and a Green, has putting forward a proposal around that, which has taken far too long to go through the Lapa House. Yeah. We're always hopeful. Of course. the only way you can work in this field.

Yep. If people are interested in knowing more about the work that you're doing or even just social work in child protection, where would you send them? I'm sure there's a lot of good stuff around group work and trauma and mediations and processes of engagement and you're probably using quite a lot of theoretical approaches in the work that you're doing. The Australian Institute of Family Studies for me is the best place to go. There's also the Institute of Child Protection at the University of South of

Australia. Fiona Arnie's not too bad around some of the stuff that they talk about. I tend to think that if people in the latter days, Google's a wonderful thing. Because if you've got an issue for me, if you've got an issue, what keeps me informed most are Google alerts. So I do heaps of Google alerts around child protection, foster care, kinship care, any of those things. And then just read as many articles as I can on that stuff.

and read the ASW Journal, which often has information around mental health and well-being of young people and a lot of other subjects that we should be thinking about. And it sounds as though Dee's book on her experience would be incredibly helpful for people to read as well if they wanted a bit more insight. Yes, if they wanted to read the evolution of foster care in Australia and the final conclusion, interestingly enough. So she did it with another academic, a historian in Melbourne. and the final conclusion though, Yasmin, is nothing has changed.

It's a great book. But we started a publishing company a few years back, which no longer operates, called People's Voice Publishing. The idea was to be able to provide people with the opportunity to be able to write their stories. And we published a number of books. Recipes for Survival is one, which we still got a thousand or so in by garage. Yeah.

So contact me to... If they want a copy of that, D-wrote another book, The Wicked Witch, and there's a couple of other books too. So one of the things, in conclusion, is that we want people to tell their stories, you know, that there is something therapeutic about me today to do this. I see it as a therapeutic exercise because I actually, frankly, don't help and have an opportunity to talk like this. So I appreciate that.

But, you know, for people to tell their story, to have someone that's prepared to listen, someone that empathises and understands is critical. Yeah. And I think also if people can check out your broadcasts on social media, so you've got the videos and the case studies and the podcasts, I think that I give people a bit of insight into what you're working on, but also what the field is like and what challenges you've come up against. And just to call me and have a chat, is always okay too. I do have another YouTube channel which doesn't get many views.

called wise, witty and weird, where I talk about things political. So, yeah, and I think the struggle for me has always been, not never been heard. People hear me, but what they don't do is take me seriously. If I look at my whole discussion today, the theme is, I'm yelling from the top of the mountain, but very few people hear what I have to say. Right. So it's that difference between being listened to and heard, I guess. Yeah.

Is there anything else before we wrap up that you wanted to mention whether it's about social work in general or just your experience going through this process? Well, regardless of all the crappy social workers that I've met over the years, I've met some great ones. I really have. I get supervised once a month by a wonderful woman by the name of Mary Hood, who was the president here in South Wales. She's fabulous.

And there's a whole host of people that I meet who are good social workers. There are some people, there's a woman who works for the Department of Human Services who manages a lot of this stuff who gave a speech at a conference that we ran for the Child Protection Practice Group for the ISW. And she said it all. She understood what it was about. Now she's head of the department. And she has trouble implementing it all, I think.

But I think she had it together. And I think she was genuine. I think there are lots of us out there who are. genuine, other people, similar to myself, I guess. I don't think I'm the only one. I think I'm probably one of the loudest voices, but I'm not the only one. And I think we need to get together and provide a voice for everybody. And I think, you know, social workers who work in their little corner of the world, yes, but those that work for the department and, you know, have their 30 or 40 clients, whatever it might be, if every one of them chose to work a little bit more

effectively, and if they chose to develop the skills that are required to do their job more appropriately, and that is things like mediation, things like counselling skills, like conflict resolution, if they realised where the flaws were in their practice and then went out and changed that, they'd make so much difference. I see so many young social workers who are skillless because frankly, at university, you learn very little skills. You learn a lot of academic stuff, but you don't necessarily learn the skills. I had to go and learn the skills by going to Lifeline. So did my daughter, because that's why I suggested she goes.

And then you go out there and you practice it, and you practice it because you never get it right. Yeah. Just trying to improve upon it. So I think I'd like to see more young social workers also taking their profession seriously, really seriously. We change people's lives. The decisions that the department makes

around child protection in particular will impact these kids for the rest of their lives, not just until they're 18. How we treat them while in care, you know? Parents who've got kids in care who are smoking pot, taking cocaine,

getting drunk on Saturday nights and not returning to 4 o'clock in the morning, and they're in residential care. Their parent is the government. I guess what I'm taking away is that social work at university prepares us to be a social worker in a very general sense, but it's not until you get out into a field and you practice. And it also suggests that there's a lack of support from higher ups from either team leaders or managers who aren't providing people with the opportunity to learn or aren't encouraging it. There's such a focus on the clinical or the client

at work that they're neglecting the professional development. So if these people had an opportunity to develop professionally, then hopefully some of that work will actually be useful and will make a change in those children's lives. And one of the biggest failings is supervision. Amazing work that you're doing. I love your approach to creating a more equitable, fairer and transparent child protection system and your work in developing really creative solutions using, as you said,

the media and your position of influence to be the best voice that you can be, which for the time being is, you know, what more can you ask? I think it's incredibly valuable work, and I hope to see what comes out of it, and hopefully it develops further. We will see, and I really appreciate the time. Thank you. Thanks so much for your time and for your pearls of wisdom and for your openness and honesty, and it's been lovely chatting.

Thanks again, Tony. Take care. yourself and you know you're doing great work too yesman this is fabulous stuff you're doing as well this sort of podcast is sensational thank you thanks for joining me this week if you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or tony please visit my anchor page at anchor F.m. slash social work spotlight. You can find me on Facebook,

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