Source : the age
Queensland’s public-spending watchdog has fast-tracked its probe of a bungled $188 million child safety IT system, as pressure mounts on the government over kids sleeping on department floors.
The Queensland Audit Office’s updated forward work plan, released this week, reveals a planned report into the rollout of the long-awaited Unify system is now expected to be tabled by September.
The report was initially not due until the 2027-28 financial year.
“We brought forward this audit to ensure timely assessment of the system implementation following its go-live in April 2025 and challenges identified in the December 2025 review,” the audit office’s 2026-29 work plan states.
The development comes as Child Safety Minister Amanda Camm faces pressure over details of children in state care sleeping on child safety service centre floors – which she is yet to respond to – amid scrutiny of her relationship with a colleague.
Camm commissioned the earlier Deloitte review in September after announcing there had been a “critical IT failure” in the rollout of a system meant to manage the records for some 16,000 kids in state care or known to the department.
At the time, Camm said she was concerned the “former Labor government’s bungled IT program” could result in the death of a child if frontline staff could not access timely and accurate information.
The 11-month Child Safety Inquiry, initially planned to run until November but cut short to May, said in its June report it did not investigate Unify “to any extent” but the state’s ability to protect children was “compromised” by a dysfunctional record system.
Details of the in-progress audit office probe note implementation of large-scale IT projects carry significant risks and “need to be carefully and planned managed to ensure they meet intended objectives and avoid these common pitfalls”.
Both the Child Safety and Youth Justice departments are being audited as part of the work, which will assess “whether responsible entities have effectively governed the design and implementation of the Unify system”.
“This will consider the governance and decision-making to support design and implementation, and whether governance, risk management, and remediation plans effectively respond to identified Unify system issues to minimise impacts to those in the child protection and youth justice systems.”
The Child Safety Department began work on an overhaul of its IT system in 2015 to give other agencies and service providers access to relevant information and to enable them to contribute to it.
This came after an earlier audit office report found issues with the patchwork processes put in place after the 2012 Carmody report that had not balanced access with data security.
In 2019, then-minister Di Farmer announced funding for the Unify overhaul – slated for completion by 2023 – after a follow-up audit found many of the problems persisted.
In a statement to this masthead, Camm welcomed the fast-tracking of the audit office work into the design and descoping of a system she said was “bungled” by the former Labor government and that created the “broken child safety system we inherited”.
Labor’s child safety spokesperson Corrine McMillan said the audit office should fast-track the review as a result of failures under Camm, which “potentially put the lives of thousands of children at risk”.
“The audit must be carried out as quickly as possible to ensure the system has been fixed and children are not still slipping through the cracks,” McMillan said.
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Matt Dennien is a reporter at Brisbane Times covering state politics, parliament and the public sector. He has previously worked for newspapers in Tasmania and Brisbane community radio station 4ZZZ. Contact him securely on Signal @mattdennien.15Connect via email.
