On a bad night in regional Queensland, a caseworker's last resort is a phone call to a motel. A child who has just been removed from a violent home, or whose foster placement has broken down that afternoon, is booked into a room for the night — sometimes for many nights running — with a rostered youth worker sitting in the corridor, because there is no registered foster carer, kinship carer or residential bed free anywhere in the region. Queensland's child safety department has confirmed to state parliament, year after year, that this happens: children already in the state's care sleeping in commercial accommodation, share houses or short-term rentals that have never been assessed, registered or inspected as fit for a child (approx.; Queensland Parliament, Estimates hearings, Child Safety portfolio, 2022–2025; Queensland Family and Child Commission, systemic reporting). It is not what anyone designed the system to do. It is what an overloaded system does when there is nowhere else left to put a child it has already promised to protect.
What the government did
Queensland's current child protection system was built on a reform program that is itself now finished. Following the 2013 Carmody Inquiry into the state's child protection system, commissioned by the former Newman LNP government, successive Palaszczuk and Miles Labor governments ran a ten-year reform Blueprint, "Supporting Families Changing Futures," aimed at investing earlier in struggling families, keeping more children safely at home, and shrinking the state's reliance on both residential care and unregulated placements. That Blueprint formally concluded around 2024, the same year the Crisafulli LNP government took office (approx.; Queensland Government, Supporting Families Changing Futures, Blueprint 2014–2024).
The Crisafulli government inherited a system still running well outside several of the Blueprint's own targets. It has kept the machinery of independent oversight in place — the Queensland Family and Child Commission, established under the same reform program, continues to audit outcomes and report to Parliament — and it has added its own commitments on top: additional frontline child safety officers, and a stated intention to cut the number of children held in unregulated or unapproved accommodation, carried into the government's first two budgets (approx.; Queensland Budget 2024–25 and 2025–26, Service Delivery Statements, child safety portfolio). It has also restructured the youth justice side of the system separately, under its "Making Queensland Safer" sentencing laws — a related but distinct reform covered elsewhere on this site, and one that matters here because a disproportionate share of children who move through youth detention have themselves passed through out-of-home care.
What has not changed, across the final years of the Labor government or the first year of the Crisafulli government, is the underlying arithmetic: more children entering care each year than the system has stable, safe places to put them, with the gap increasingly filled by the most expensive and least evidence-supported options available — residential care and, when even that is full, unregulated accommodation.
The strongest case
Demand has grown faster than any government could realistically build supply for it
The government's case does not rest on denial. The pressures pushing more children into care are largely outside any single government's control on a short timeframe: rising family and domestic violence notifications, methamphetamine and alcohol-related harm, and mental health system strain all feed the same intake pipeline, and the Queensland Family and Child Commission itself notes this is a national pattern, not a uniquely Queensland one — several other states report similar or worse over-representation figures. The pool of Queenslanders willing and able to become registered foster or kinship carers has shrunk against a rising number of children needing placement, a trend recorded state-wide and nationally, which the reform Blueprint was designed to reverse but did not. The Crisafulli government had been in office less than a full budget cycle at the time of this analysis, has continued or extended most of the specific measures aimed at reducing unregulated placements that the outgoing Labor government put in its own final budget, and can fairly say it did not create the decade-long growth trend it inherited. Its ministers have also been willing to concede, publicly and in Estimates, that placing children in motels is not acceptable — a level of candour about the system's failures that earlier governments were not always as quick to offer.
The evidence
By the state's own reporting, Queensland has (approx.) 10,700 children in out-of-home care at any given time — across kinship care, foster care, residential care and other arrangements — a number that has trended upward for most of the past decade even as the state's overall child population has grown more slowly (approx.; AIHW, Child Protection Australia 2023–24; Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services, Part F, 2025). Residential care — staffed group homes, typically used for children with the most complex needs or for whom no foster or kinship placement can be found — has grown as a share of that total even though it is both the costliest form of care the state funds and the one the Blueprint explicitly set out to shrink in favour of home-based care (approx.; Queensland Audit Office, child and family services reporting; Queensland Budget, Service Delivery Statements).
The gap between designed capacity and actual demand is most visible at its rawest edge. The department's own answers to parliamentary Estimates in recent years confirm that several hundred Queensland children in care are placed, for at least one night in a given year, in accommodation that has never been registered or approved as a care placement — commercial motels, short-term rentals or share houses, usually staffed by a roster of paid youth workers rather than a consistent carer (approx.; Queensland Parliament, Estimates hearings, Child Safety portfolio, 2022–2025). The Commission's own statutory reviews of deaths and serious harm involving children known to the child protection system have repeatedly flagged placement instability — children shuffled between multiple unregulated or short-term arrangements within a short period — as a recurring risk factor, not an isolated one (approx.; Queensland Family and Child Commission, annual reporting on deaths of children and young people).
A system leaning on residential and unregulated care
The direction of travel matters more than any single year's number. Queensland's reform Blueprint was built on evidence that home-based care — a foster or kinship carer embedded in a stable household — produces better outcomes for children on almost every measure the state tracks: school attendance, placement stability, and contact with the youth justice and adult criminal systems later in life. Residential care was meant to be the exception, reserved for children whose needs could not safely be met any other way. A decade into the Blueprint, it is instead absorbing a growing share of the total, at a cost the Queensland Audit Office and the state's own Budget papers put at several times — on the order of five to ten times, depending on a placement's complexity — the cost of a comparable home-based placement (approx.; Queensland Audit Office; Queensland Budget, Service Delivery Statements, child safety portfolio).
Unregulated placements sit even further outside the model the system was designed around. A motel room is not licensed, not routinely inspected, and not staffed by anyone required to hold the training or vetting an approved foster or residential carer must hold. The Queensland Family and Child Commission has said plainly, in its statutory reporting, that these placements should never be used for children and that their continued use is a sign the system is operating past its safe capacity, not a sustainable placement type in its own right (approx.; Queensland Family and Child Commission, annual and systemic reporting, 2022–2025). Successive Child Safety Ministers, Labor and LNP, have acknowledged the practice publicly rather than defended it — a form of honesty the system deserves some credit for, even as the practice itself continues.
Behind both trends sits a workforce problem the department's own data confirms: caseworker vacancy and turnover running above the department's internal benchmarks in some regions, and average caseloads that leave less time for the family-support work the Blueprint was meant to prioritise before a child ever needs removal at all (approx.; Queensland Audit Office; Queensland Parliament, Estimates hearings, Child Safety portfolio).
A motel room is not a placement type. It is the system telling itself, one night at a time, that it has run out of room.
The children carrying the widest gap
Queensland's out-of-home care population is not a cross-section of the state's children. First Nations children make up roughly 9 per cent of Queensland's child population but around 40 per cent of the children in its out-of-home care system (approx.; Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services, Part F; Queensland Family and Child Commission reporting) — more than four times their share of the general child population. This is not a new problem, nor a Queensland-only one; it is the reason the National Agreement on Closing the Gap includes a specific national target, Target 12, to cut Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children's over-representation in out-of-home care by 45 per cent by 2031. On the most recent published tracking against that target, Queensland is not on trend to meet it, a status it shares with most other states and territories (approx.; Productivity Commission, Closing the Gap Information Repository, 2025; SNAICC, Family Matters Report — an independent Aboriginal-led secondary source, cited here for context).
Every government since the Carmody Inquiry has said the right things about this gap. The reform Blueprint included specific commitments to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family-led decision-making models and to growing the pool of accredited Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander foster and kinship carers. A decade on, the gap the Blueprint was meant to close has not closed by anything like the rate promised, and the Crisafulli government has not yet published a replacement plan with its own numeric target and timeline to succeed where the previous one fell short (approx.; based on the most recent public reporting available to this analysis). Crediting a government for continuing a program is not the same as crediting it for progress against the number that program exists to move.
The risk to the future
A system that grows the expensive, worst-evidenced options faster than the ones that work
If the current trajectory holds, Queensland spends a progressively larger share of its child safety budget on the two placement types the reform Blueprint set out to shrink — residential care and unregulated accommodation — while the home-based foster and kinship care system the evidence favours keeps losing carers faster than it recruits them. That is a compounding cost problem as much as a safety one: every year residential and unregulated placements grow as a share of the total is a year with less budget headroom for the family-support and kinship-carer recruitment work that would, over time, shrink the number of children needing an out-of-home placement in the first place. It also keeps feeding a pipeline this site documents separately — children who cycle out of unstable care placements and into contact with the youth justice system, where Queensland's newly toughened sentencing laws now apply. First Nations children, already carrying the largest share of the over-representation gap, stand to carry the largest share of that growth too, unless a government is willing to publish a specific, numeric, dated plan to reverse it — and be judged against it.