Watching the Cook government trying to contain the latest child-protection flashpoint stirred memories of a scandal in the mid-2000s, where a coroner’s report helped expose inaction.
An 11-month-old boy called Wade Scale drowned in a bathtub after swallowing sedatives left lying around by his drug-addled parents in their Shoalwater home.
Alastair Hope held an inquest and, through testimony and documents, he was able to highlight a litany of failings by the then-department for community development.
The result was a restructure of the department and more than $100 million of Labor government investment into making child protection its number one priority
“I want the protection of children to be the over-riding consideration in every single decision this department makes,” minister of the day, David Templeman, said.
In the Scale case, on which I reported extensively, it emerged that the grandmothers of the infant had been trying in vain to convince the department and government that the lives of baby Wade and his older sibling were in danger.
“I hope my fears for the two little ones are only that and it does not end in tragedy,” Margaret Jakins wrote in a letter to then-premier Geoff Gallop, a few months before Wade’s death.
In total, she had written more than 11 letters detailing her concerns about the children’s welfare, but no-one listened until it was too late.
When Mr Hope handed down his confronting inquest findings in 2006, which included images of other babies bashed by Wade’s father, everyone heard Mrs Jakins’ earlier screams for help.
The grandmother had tried to warn Mr Gallop, then-child protection minister Sheila McHale, Rockingham MP Mark McGowan and the department’s managers that the baby’s father was a serial child beater and hopeless addict.
Fast forward to the current case, where allegations have been raised that a grandmother was complaining to the Department of Communities before her three grandchildren were murdered by their mother in Port Hedland in 2022.
Unlike the Scale tragedy, there has been no inquest into the deaths of the Hawke children in Port Hedland, and the government has been under enormous pressure to force one.
Premier Roger Cook and Attorney-General Tony Buti had been arguing that the separation of executive powers prevented the government from overriding a 2025 decision of coroner Philip Urquhart not to hold an inquest into the Hawke case.
He concluded the fatal outcome was unpredictable and unpreventable.
“The request for an inquest is therefore refused,” Mr Urquhart told the Hawke children’s grandmother, Dorothy Papertalk.
Mr Cook and Dr Buti left the door open to directing an inquest if new evidence emerged, which it did when Western Australian ombudsman Bevan Warner released recommendations after reviewing the department’s management of the Hawke casefile before the murders.
“The Department of Communities takes steps to strengthen the effectiveness of current strategies for frontline child-protection service delivery when the number of child-safety practitioners in a district falls below critical staffing levels,” was one recommendation.
Regardless of how the government has handled this latest child protection crisis, the Wade Scale case 20 years prior should have been a watershed moment.
When a child dies amid concerns about their welfare – and whether the state had done enough to prevent such a tragedy – an investigation by the coroner’s office must be mandatory and not left to a coroner’s discretion.
Families have a right to know about the decisions made by the public service in the lead-up to the deaths of children.
In 2006, Mr Hope discovered parts of the department overseeing child protection were in crisis.
“This case highlighted worrying failures on the part of the department to respond to concerns raised by family members and to take appropriate action to provide protection for the deceased and his brother,” Mr Hope wrote in his findings.
The letters of Mrs Jakins were proof of that; a coroner’s inquest ensured they became public.
What the Hawke case has shown is that the system, notwithstanding the reasons, can still curtail full transparency around the circumstances leading up to the death of a child known to the state.
It’s in the government’s interests to end that anomaly and to avoid accusations of concealing shortcomings, or worse, in the sensitive realm of child protection.
