Protecting vulnerable children: A national challenge

At regular intervals over many years, reports on problems and shortcomings of the care and protection of children in out-of-home care have been produced. Unfortunately, it seems that these reports had minimal impact in achieving a system that was responsive, accountable and achieved outcomes in the best interest of children. A spate of more recent reports for a number of States and Territories reveal crisis-ridden child protection systems that are under-resourced, under-funded and understaffed, resulting in a high turnover of over-worked and inexperienced workers. They have also found that the crisis-ridden systems have resulted in children at risk not being adequately protected. The Committee considers that the improvement of the child protection system is of fundamental importance for the development of our nation. The social and economic cost of not fully addressing these issues will only escalate in the future. The protection of children needs to be at the forefront of government policy agendas within all jurisdictions

Weapons of affect:the imperative for transdisciplinary information systems design

Much has been written about ethical and human-centred Information Systems (IS) design, most recently regarding the deleterious outcomes and negative affect of some machine learning applications that embed and perpetuate unethical or even inhumane automation. Terms such as ‘harm’, ‘damage’, and surprisingly, ‘weapon’ have entered the language of this discourse. However, these characteristics are not unique to applications of data science but have long manifested in IS that can also can exhibit opacity and establish tight vicious cycles. These, when coupled with a lack of governance feedback, can perpetuate injustice that has community or sector-wide reach. In this paper, we explore how IS design that sets out with the best of intentions or at least, conceived as a ‘neutral’ system for managing transactional information, can emerge as ‘tools that punish’. We argue that there are crucial principles to be taken from Recordkeeping Informatics, concerned as it is with the entanglement of information and people across space and through time on multi-generational timescales. In particular we discuss how transdisciplinary and critical approaches are necessary to cover more of the design space and surface issues, rights, stakeholders, and, most importantly, values that may be otherwise hidden from a here-and-now, transactional viewpoint