Secure Care in Australia—An Overview of Secure Care in Australian States and Territories and Commentary on the Legal Safety of Children Admitted to Secure Care in Australia

There is very limited information available on secure care in Australia. There is no national oversight, standards, or data collection mechanisms. This article aims to outline which Australian states and territories deliver secure care, provide an overview of these interventions, identify trends and outlying practice, and highlight the human rights implications. A comparative systemic methodology was utilised, gathering qualitative data on secure care across Australian states and territories to compare and analyse. The findings are presented descriptively, and a qualitative content analysis was completed. This article identifies that there is secure care in all states and territories in Australia except Tasmania, South Australia, and Queensland. The content analysis identified that the Northern Territory and New South Wales do not have secure care legislation, and that the Australia Capital Territory and New South Wales are the only jurisdictions that require a specific secure care judicial order to authorise admissions. Victoria, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia utilise ‘administrative detention’ to authorise a secure care admission—this is when the admission to secure care of children with the involvement of child protection is authorised by the government, not through a court order via the judicial system. A consequence of the use of administrative detention is that children ‘in care’ in Australia are being deprived of their liberty without legal representation or access to the right to appeal in a court of law. There is minimal publicly available admission data on secure care in Australia. This article argues that secure care’s welfare-based position, conceptualisation, and discourse simultaneously obscures visibility, legitimises depriving children of their liberty and the use of restrictive measures, and undermines a rights-based approach to children experiencing extreme vulnerability. The use of administrative detention undermines system accountability, and the legal safety of children admitted to secure care in Australia. This is placing the rights of children in secure care in Australia as secondary to the management of organisational risk.