Then-Treasurer Kevin Foley has confirmed one of his departmental bureaucrats was sent inside the Department of Families and Communities – the child protection agency then overseen by Jay Weatherill – with a view to finding budget savings.

But it’s understood the official, David Imber, instead returned with a bleak assessment of the state’s child protection regime, recommending major changes, including one that has since been echoed amid a succession of public inquiries.

InDaily has sought a copy of Imber’s report but it has not been released on the grounds of cabinet confidentiality, which has a statute of limitations of 10 years.

Foley pointed out that many of the recommendations of various inquiries contradicted those before them, and poured cold water on yesterday’s damning Royal Commission findings, noting it was merely the view of one judge.

“It’s Margaret Nyland’s report,” Foley told InDaily.

“It will add some useful commentary and suggestions to the problem, but she’s not the font of all knowledge.”

He said Nyland’s push for increased funding was what “tends to happen with Royal Commissions”, but warns child protection is “a policy issue that goes way beyond resources”.

“I’m not convinced chucking money at this issue is really the answer, but I’m not in that position anymore,” he said.

However, the Imber Report did provoke a substantial new investment in Weatherill’s department, with Foley’s 2008-09 budget speech detailing “$190.6 million to meet the needs of children in care and to provide additional support to carers and families”.

This included new money for early intervention case management and home visiting services, increased capacity for specialised placement support and “intensive family preservation and reunification services”.

In the preface to her 2008 annual report, outgoing Families and Communities chief executive Sue Vardon wrote that she “appreciated the assistance from David Imber, of the Department of Treasury and Finance, who helped us address the financial pressures facing the department”.

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was the continuing growing demands of children in care and increasing needs of vulnerable families and the resulting pressure that this placed on our finances,” she noted.

Foley said his bureaucrat – who is no longer with the Government – found “operational savings”, noting “Treasury rarely comes back with the option of spending more” – but also urged urgent new investment in Government housing.

It’s understood this included large-scale residential accommodation units, of the type yesterday discredited in Nyland’s findings, on the grounds that they “do not provide the homely environment that children need, and the warehousing of a large number of children with complex behaviours under one roof inevitably leads to residents learning new behaviours from each other”.

But Foley says one of the “critical findings” of the Treasury report was that “there was real opportunity to both save money and deliver better outcomes – if the Government could bite the difficult political bullet of adoptions”.

“That’s a personal philosophical view, but I strongly felt we should be doing all we can to get kids out of [state] care,” he said.

The prospect of strengthening adoption provisions was a key recommendation of last year’s coronial report into the death of Chloe Valentine, but Nyland’s findings did not echo the coroner’s enthusiasm, arguing that “an increased emphasis on making children in care available for adoption” is not “necessarily appropriate”.

“No government’s grabbed that issue and run with it, so that doesn’t surprise me,” Foley reflected.

“What does surprise and concern me is this constant view that governments are to blame for the ills of society [when] the fundamental issue is sick and unstable people incapable of raising children.

“What happens in SA is we always blame the Government and expect the Government in this state to pick up where we as citizens fall down badly.”

He said child protection had become “such a top-order issue because both Jay Weatherill and politics in general have shone a light on it in the past decade”.

“We’re now getting to understand the underbelly of a pretty disturbing society,” he said.

“The bureaucracy and body politic get unfairly blamed for what’s a social ill that nobody seems to be particularly prepared to own up to and deal with… being good and responsible parents is what we were put on this earth to do.

“To think the bureaucracy or Government or even an NGO can identify every vulnerable child and get them into a stable life is naïve in the extreme.”

Foley’s response echoed that of the Centre for Independent Studies’ senior research fellow Dr Jeremy Sammut, who told ABC891 this morning that the Nyland Report “has done what always happens with these inquiries, which is that they recommend reinventing the existing flawed system that has failed children”.

“What happens is that the usual suspects in the sector, the academics and a lot of the charities get a hold of the Royal Commissioner and tell them that the problem is that we don’t do enough to keep children safe with their families, that we don’t do enough early intervention and prevention, but all the evidence… shows that the real problem is that we leave children with really dysfunctional families,” he said.

“We do too much family preservation at almost all costs… I find it simply defies belief that the major recommendation of the Nyland Royal Commission is that we need a new department which is dedicated to doing even more family preservation.”

Weatherill today defended the fact that a raft of recommendations from subsequent inquiries – both public and confidential – had never been implemented, arguing “not all these inquiries necessarily came up with ideas that we can or should act upon”.

He said there was “no lack of resources” in child protection but conceded “we’re spending money in the wrong places”.

Opposition Leader Steven Marshall has demanded Weatherill’s resignation, saying he has “failed to implement numerous recommendations from independent investigations into the failed child protection system in this state”.