The number of local children trapped in the failing and expensive residential care system has risen to 444, with one child costing taxpayers almost $2million in one year.

Figures tabled in Queensland Parliament last month revealed there were 444 children in residential care in the South West region as at September 30, 2023 – up from 136 children in 2016.

Residential care facilities were originally established as a last resort for teenagers whose foster care placements had failed, often due to violent and extreme trauma-related behaviour.

However, in recent years an increasing number of younger children aged under 12 have been placed in resi-care facilities.

The group home facilities are staffed by paid shift youth workers and are a stark difference to the environment of living in a nurturing home with a foster family.

Member for Toowoomba South David Janetzki MP said the government’s overreliance on residential care in recent years has had devastating consequences.

The cost of resi-care in the South West region in 2023 has not yet been revealed, but it reached more than $176million in 2022 – an average cost of $443,125 per child, per year.

In comparison, $30,660 is the average cost per child, per year in family-based care such as foster care or kinship care.

“I have spoken with a former resi-care worker who said children were referred to as “contracts” for cash which is just appalling,” Mr Janetzki said.

“These children have suffered unimaginable horrors which are rarely publicised – but it is happening every day in our region,” he said.

“So many tears have been shed in my office through stories of our local children being raped, beaten, tortured, tossed against walls like ragdolls, neglected, fed out of dog bowls, tasered with cattle prods – it is truly heartbreaking.”

Mr Janetzki said the government’s Residential Care Roadmap released in February was “too little, too late.”

“There is a generation of young people who have been failed by a broken resi-care system,” Mr Janetzki said.

“Too many young Queenslanders are living in unsafe situations, leaving them vulnerable to a life of crime and ending up in the youth justice system,” he said.