February 2026

Policies alone do not create safety; capability and accountability do. Tasmania is undertaking a significant reform effort to better protect children from harm. The Commission of Inquiry (COI) into the Tasmanian Government’s Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2023) exposed systemic failures exacerbated by gaps not only in policy and process, but in organisational culture – including silence, unequal power dynamics, defensiveness and misplaced loyalty to systems over children’s safety. The COI was shaped by the testimony, advocacy and voices of victim-survivors, families and supporters who described experiences where they were unsafe, unheard, and dismissed. Listening carefully to those experiences remains central to building safer systems. 

Safe culture, not just compliance, must therefore underpin Tasmania’s next steps. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2017) defined a child-safe institution as one that systematically reduces the likelihood of harm, increases the likelihood of identifying harm, and responds appropriately to concerns and disclosures. Research confirms that organisational culture is a decisive determinant of whether safeguarding measures succeed (Moore, McArthur, &Noble-Carr, 2020, Child Abuse & Neglect). The Australian Child Maltreatment Study (Mathews et al., 2023, Medical Journal of Australia) found that 62% of Australians experience child maltreatment. These findings underscore that child safeguarding requires a public health and systemic approach. 

Creating safety means cultivating environments where children’s rights, wellbeing and experiences are foundational to decision-making; leaders model curiosity, transparency, and accountability; staff feel psychologically safe to respond to and report concerns; and continuous learning is expected and supported. Child-safe culture is not an “add-on” to existing practice. It is the operating system.

Leadership and psychological safety are therefore critical safeguarding levers. Effective leaders model humility, invite scrutiny, and make child safety an explicit organisational priority. Research by Amy Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) demonstrates that psychologically safe teams are more likely to raise concerns and learn from mistakes. In child-safe contexts, this means encouraging staff to voice discomfort or uncertainty, responding to concerns with curiosity rather than blame, and treating transparency as professionalism rather than disloyalty. Training and leadership frameworks should therefore focus on creating psychologically safe environments as a precondition for safeguarding (Newman etal., 2017, Journal of Organizational Behaviour). This aligns strongly with survivor testimony and with broader public-sector expectations around integrity and accountability.

Just as importantly, child-centred practice requires leaders to hold a steady line: systems must centre children’s lived experience and safety even when doing so is complex, politically difficult, or emotionally confronting. 

Reporting environments that reduce harm and fear are equally essential. Evidence shows that organisational culture and perceived support strongly influence whether professionals act on child protection concerns (Mathews, Walsh, & Fraser,2020, Child Abuse & Neglect).Best-practice reporting environments account for and are responsive to institutional and structural harms, normalise consultation and open communication, protect whistleblowers, provide transparent feedback loops, and integrate overlapping schemes to minimise confusion. Building such cultures requires sustained attention to staff capability, supervision, and wellbeing (Bromfield & Arney, 2021, Australian Social Work). It also requires clear accountability: systems must provide credible oversight and proportionate consequences when institutions repeatedly fail to act, while still supporting learning and improvement.

This is the point at which “children’s rights” becomes more than a statement of values. Australia has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but the translation of those rights into domestic law and enforceable duties remains partial and uneven. Some rights are reflected in legislation and policy settings, but often in fragmented ways - and too often without clear expectations about how decision-makers must demonstrate that children’s rights and best interests have been actively considered.

This gap matters because rights that are not operationalised can become rhetorical - invoked after failures rather than embedded to prevent them. In safeguarding contexts, rights need to function as practical decision standards: guiding choices about risk, service design, information sharing, participation, funding priorities, and responses to harm.

International evidence suggests that when children’s rights are given clearer statutory force,  particularly through duties on public authorities and routine rights-based decision tools, there can be shifts not only in legal accountability but also in organisational culture, including leadership practice and transparency (Lundy et al., 2019, The International Journal of Children’s Rights; Hanson & Lundy, 2021, Social Policy Review). The key lesson is not that a single instrument “solves” culture, but that culture change is more likely to endure when systems are designed to require and reinforce it.

Importantly, this kind of rights architecture complements existing rights-based work already underway in Tasmania, including approaches that seek to translate rights into monitoring and evaluation practice across government. It provides the “backbone” that makes rights-based practice consistent and durable across portfolios, rather than dependent on individual champions or local culture.

Tasmania stands at a critical juncture. While child sexual abuse has been a powerful catalyst for reform, child-safe cultures must also address broader harms - including neglect, family violence, digital harms, emotional abuse, discrimination and environments that silence children. Embedding children’s rights into leadership, governance, and daily practice through a legislated Charter, supported by evidence-based leadership and continuous improvement, can make the system child-safe. In doing so, Tasmania could become a national exemplar of how culture, capability, and accountability create lasting safety for children. Culture determines whether reform endures.

The next phase of reform should therefore focus as much on culture, capability, and accountability as on policy. Government, community services, institutions, and the broader community all have a role to play in ensuring that children’s rights are not only articulated but actively lived in everyday practice across Tasmania.