—Vincent Willow, B1Daily

Australia has spent decades insisting that the forced separation of Aboriginal children from their families belongs to a darker chapter of national history. But testimony delivered to a federal Senate inquiry this week raises an uncomfortable question: what happens when the machinery changes, the terminology becomes bureaucratic, but First Nations children continue disappearing into state care at extraordinary rates?

At the final hearings of the Senate inquiry into racism and hate directed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Naarm/Melbourne, Indigenous child-welfare advocates delivered a blistering assessment of Australia’s child protection system. They argued that racial bias is not merely an occasional failure by individual workers. It is embedded in decision-making structures that can treat Aboriginal families differently from other Australians at virtually every stage of intervention.

The numbers make those claims impossible to dismiss casually.

First Nations children represent roughly 7 percent of Australia’s child population, yet account for approximately 45 percent of children in out-of-home care and 60 percent of children in juvenile custody, according to evidence presented to the inquiry.

Those disparities do not prove that every individual removal is racist. Children sometimes genuinely must be removed from dangerous environments, regardless of ethnicity. Governments have a responsibility to intervene when children face serious abuse or neglect.

But when one small section of the population becomes almost half of the children removed from their homes, society has an obligation to ask what is happening before, during and after those decisions.

That is exactly what witnesses demanded.

“At Every Stage” Children Are Treated Differently

Catherine Liddle, chief executive of SNAICC, the national peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, was asked directly whether racism was contributing to the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in state care.

Her answer was unequivocal.

“Absolutely.”

Liddle told senators that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are treated differently throughout the child-protection decision-making process, arguing that Australia will not solve the problem without confronting systemic racism itself.

That distinction matters.

Individual racism is easy for institutions to condemn. A caseworker says something racist, an employee is disciplined, a government issues an apology and the institution moves forward.

Systemic racism is far more difficult to confront because it doesn’t require anyone involved to announce racist intentions.

It can emerge from rules, assumptions, risk-assessment systems, institutional cultures and discretionary decisions that repeatedly produce worse outcomes for one group.

A social worker may believe they are protecting a child.

A police officer may believe they are simply following procedure.

A department may insist it applies the same rules to everyone.

Yet if Aboriginal poverty, overcrowded housing, geographical isolation or difficulty accessing health services is repeatedly interpreted as parental neglect, supposedly neutral rules can generate profoundly unequal consequences.

That was one of the most disturbing arguments presented to senators.

When Poverty Gets Interpreted as Neglect

Liddle told the inquiry that conditions associated with poverty can be treated as evidence that Indigenous parents are unable to provide safe homes.

In remote communities, families may struggle to access doctors or specialists because services simply aren’t available nearby. Overcrowded housing can reflect a severe shortage of appropriate accommodation rather than parental indifference.

Yet according to testimony presented during the hearing, those circumstances may contribute to assessments that a child should be removed.

This exposes one of the central contradictions in child protection.

Imagine a family lives in an overcrowded home because affordable housing does not exist.

The government fails to provide sufficient housing.

The family’s overcrowding is then treated as evidence of an unsafe household.

The government subsequently removes the child because of conditions government policy helped create.

That is not simply child protection.

It risks becoming punishment for poverty.

Victorian Aboriginal Child and Community Agency chief executive Muriel Bamblett similarly told the inquiry that many child-protection notifications correspond closely with Australia’s most impoverished communities. She argued that governments have failed to adequately address the poverty underneath many interventions.

If governments genuinely want fewer children entering state care, the first intervention should frequently be assistance.

Housing.

Domestic-violence services.

Addiction treatment.

Mental-health support.

Parenting assistance.

Health care.

Income stability.

Pregnancy support.

Removing children should be the emergency exit, not the front door of social policy.

Family Violence Is Central to the Crisis

The testimony also complicates any simplistic narrative that child removal is merely a racial issue detached from genuine family problems.

Bamblett told senators that more than 70 percent of children coming into contact with child protection do so in circumstances involving family violence.

That is extraordinarily important.

No serious reform can protect First Nations families by pretending violence or neglect never occurs.

The question is whether Australia’s response actually makes children safer.

A mother experiencing domestic violence should not automatically be treated as though she is the perpetrator simply because she has been victimized.

Governments should be asking whether the violent partner can be removed, whether the mother can receive safe housing and whether community-based services can stabilize the family before authorities separate children from their parent.

Otherwise, a woman can effectively be punished twice.

First by an abusive partner.

Then by the state.

The child suffers a third punishment by losing their family.

Reports Before Aboriginal Babies Are Even Born

Perhaps some of the most troubling testimony concerned unborn children.

Bamblett told senators that Aboriginal women are disproportionately subjected to reports during pregnancy and that such notifications are more likely to proceed toward removal after birth. She questioned whether sufficient services exist to work with vulnerable expectant mothers before authorities reach that point.

Nerita Waight, chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and chair of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, described situations in which historical family-violence incidents were allegedly used in assessments years later, sometimes involving partners no longer present in the mother’s life.

ABC reported Waight telling the inquiry that Aboriginal mothers continue experiencing children being removed around the time of birth.

That is precisely where Australia’s history makes the modern debate impossible to separate entirely from the past.

The Shadow of the Stolen Generations

Between the nineteenth century and the late twentieth century, Australian governments and institutions forcibly removed enormous numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families under policies that became associated with the Stolen Generations.

Those policies were explicitly tied to assimilation.

Modern child-protection laws are not the same thing. Contemporary agencies operate under safeguarding laws and are legally supposed to intervene because children face danger, not because governments wish to erase Indigenous identity.

That distinction matters.

But history also gives Australia a special responsibility to examine modern removal rates with extraordinary scrutiny.

When Aboriginal children remain dramatically overrepresented in state care generations after openly assimilationist policies ended, governments cannot simply declare that history irrelevant.

Waight told senators Australia had failed to learn the lessons of the landmark Bringing Them Home report, which documented the consequences of forced removals.

The disturbing question is not whether today’s child-protection departments are literally recreating the old policies.

It is whether institutional assumptions inherited from that history continue shaping which families are viewed as dysfunctional, unsafe or incapable of caring for their children.

Removing a Child Is Supposed to Make Them Safer

There is another problem even harder to defend.

What happens after removal?

The assumption underlying state intervention is straightforward: if government removes a child from a dangerous household, government has an obligation to place that child somewhere safer.

Yet evidence presented to the inquiry raised doubts about whether that promise is always being fulfilled.

A recent Northern Territory Children’s Commissioner report found that harm notifications involved roughly one in four children in out-of-home care, according to testimony highlighted during the hearing. Senate inquiry chair Jana Stewart said most Australians would likely be horrified by such figures.

Liddle responded with a devastating observation: once government removes the child, government effectively becomes the parent.

That changes the moral equation.

A state cannot declare a biological household unsafe, assume custody and then expose the child to another environment where serious harm occurs.

Once government exercises its most extreme power over a family, government assumes an equally extreme responsibility for what follows.

Culture Isn’t an Optional Accessory

Child protection is also about more than food, shelter and physical safety.

First Nations advocates argue that children removed from Aboriginal families can lose language, kinship networks, cultural knowledge and community connections if authorities place them in culturally disconnected environments.

Liddle described one case involving a young child removed to Darwin who reportedly could not speak English and was placed with carers who could not speak the child’s language. She told the inquiry that the child cried persistently, resisted physical comfort and became increasingly unwell.

That story illustrates why the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle exists.

The principle seeks, where safe and possible, to prioritize placements that preserve Indigenous children’s connection to family, kin, community and culture.

Critics sometimes portray this as putting culture ahead of safety.

Indigenous advocates reject that framing.

Liddle told the inquiry that portraying culture and safety as opposing goals creates a false choice.

A child should obviously not remain in a dangerous home simply to preserve cultural continuity.

But neither should “safety” become an excuse to ignore whether equally safe relatives, kinship carers or Aboriginal community-controlled organizations could keep that child connected to their identity.

Safety and culture can coexist.

The system should be designed to achieve both.

Online Racism Is Entering the Schoolyard

The Senate inquiry was not limited to child protection.

Witnesses described a broader racial environment increasingly shaped by social media, political rhetoric and online abuse.

Bamblett told senators that Aboriginal children experience bullying linked to their culture and that racist narratives appearing on television and social media can spill directly into schools the following day.

ABC reported that some Indigenous children have become reluctant to publicly identify as Aboriginal because of racism they encounter.

That should trouble Australians far beyond the Indigenous community.

A society has reached an ugly place when children conclude that concealing their ancestry is safer than expressing it.

Online racism is frequently dismissed as pixels on a screen, unpleasant but ultimately separate from physical life.

The testimony before Parliament demolishes that comforting distinction.

Children read it.

Classmates repeat it.

Adults internalize it.

Threats move from online spaces into workplaces, schools, sporting grounds and public events.

Digital hatred does not remain digital.

It leaks.

A Woman’s Death Was Kept Quiet Because of Racist Trolls

One episode described during the inquiry captured the atmosphere with particular brutality.

Bamblett said VACCA decided against publicly sharing the story of an Aboriginal woman who died following family violence because the organization feared online commenters would vilify her or argue that she somehow deserved what happened.

The woman’s life and cultural identity were therefore not publicly memorialized in the manner the organization otherwise might have chosen.

Think about what that means.

Racism did not merely attack someone while she was alive.

The expectation of racist abuse followed her into death.

An organization tasked with supporting Aboriginal families had to calculate whether honoring a deceased woman might expose her children and loved ones to another wave of degradation.

That is not ordinary social-media ugliness.

It is social intimidation.

First Nations Children Are Being Used as Political Ammunition

Liddle also accused politicians and media figures of “weaponising” First Nations children by promoting narratives that frame Aboriginal communities principally as social problems, offenders or failures requiring intervention.

This is one of the most politically explosive aspects of the debate.

Concerns about child abuse, youth offending and public safety are legitimate. Governments have a responsibility to protect victims and communities.

But there is a profound difference between reporting individual crime and constructing an entire Indigenous population as inherently dysfunctional.

When political discourse repeatedly associates Aboriginal identity with crime, welfare dependency, violence and social disorder, that narrative does not remain confined to television studios.

It can influence how teachers see students.

How police approach teenagers.

How neighbors interpret families.

And, critically, how child-protection workers assess risk.

That does not mean every adverse decision is consciously racist.

It means stereotypes can become background assumptions inside institutions whose employees possess enormous discretionary power.

Child Protection and Youth Justice Form a Dangerous Pipeline

The figures on juvenile detention reveal another frightening pattern.

First Nations children account for around 60 percent of children in juvenile custody despite being only around 7 percent of Australia’s child population.

The relationship between child protection and youth justice has been documented repeatedly. Australian parliamentary material notes that young people who interact with child-protection systems are disproportionately represented among those later entering youth justice, even though most children in care do not offend.

That creates what advocates sometimes call a crossover population.

Children experience abuse or instability.

They enter child protection.

Some move repeatedly between placements.

Education becomes disrupted.

Relationships fracture.

Behavior deteriorates.

Police contact increases.

Eventually the institution originally created to protect them feeds into another institution designed to punish them.

That pipeline should terrify policymakers.

Because government can end up spending enormous amounts of money at every stage while producing worse outcomes than earlier family intervention might have achieved.

Australia Has No Shortage of Inquiries

Perhaps the most damning testimony was not about a particular policy.

It was about fatigue.

Witnesses told the inquiry that First Nations Australians are tired of repeatedly participating in investigations, hearings, reports and consultations that produce recommendations without producing transformation.

Australia has investigated Indigenous disadvantage extensively.

Royal commissions.

Parliamentary inquiries.

State reviews.

Closing the Gap reports.

Child-protection reviews.

Deaths-in-custody investigations.

The archive grows.

So do some of the disparities.

The 2026 Closing the Gap assessment found that only three of 15 assessed targets were on track, while outcomes involving children in out-of-home care, adult imprisonment, suicide and early childhood development were worsening.

At some point, commissioning another report becomes less impressive than implementing the last one.

Community-Controlled Organizations Offer Another Model

One recurring demand from First Nations advocates is greater authority and funding for Aboriginal community-controlled organizations.

The logic is straightforward.

Organizations embedded within communities possess cultural knowledge, family relationships and local trust that centralized government bureaucracies may lack.

Previous evidence from SNAICC has argued that Indigenous children receiving out-of-home-care services through Aboriginal community-controlled organizations are more likely to maintain kin and family connections.

Donnella Mills, lead convenor of the Coalition of Peaks, told the current inquiry that structural reform should include shared decision-making, stronger community-controlled services, transformed government institutions and better data accountability through the Closing the Gap framework.

That is a fundamentally different philosophy from government agencies parachuting into Aboriginal communities only when something has already gone disastrously wrong.

Instead of intervention after collapse, community control emphasizes prevention before collapse.

Cultural Competency Cannot Be a Weekend Seminar

Liddle called for cultural competence to become mandatory throughout services affecting Aboriginal children.

That proposal should mean considerably more than forcing government employees through an annual online training module.

Real cultural competence would require workers to understand Indigenous kinship structures, community relationships, historical trauma, rural disadvantage and the differences between poverty and neglect.

It would also require accountability.

Training without consequences becomes theater.

Departments should track disparities at each decision point.

Which families are reported?

Which reports are substantiated?

Who receives family-preservation assistance?

Whose children are removed?

Who receives kinship placements?

How quickly are children reunified?

How frequently do children experience multiple placements?

How often are Indigenous children harmed while in government care?

The numbers should be publicly available.

If governments insist decisions are race-neutral, transparency gives them an opportunity to prove it.

If the disparities persist, transparency exposes where reform is required.

Australia Must Decide What Child Protection Is For

The purpose of child protection should not be difficult to articulate.

Keep children safe.

Strengthen families whenever possible.

Remove children when absolutely necessary.

Return them when safely possible.

Provide stable, loving care when reunification cannot occur.

Preserve identity and family connections.

Everything else should serve those goals.

But systems can gradually begin protecting themselves instead.

Departments become focused on liability.

Workers become overwhelmed by caseloads.

Governments respond to headlines.

Politicians promise crackdowns.

Risk avoidance overtakes family preservation.

And because removing a child can be defended as “doing something,” institutions may perceive separation as safer bureaucratically than accepting the risk involved in supporting a struggling family.

For Aboriginal Australia, that institutional instinct carries historical weight unlike almost anywhere else in the country.

The State Cannot Keep Breaking Families and Calling Every Outcome Protection

There will always be circumstances in which removal is necessary.

Children experiencing severe abuse cannot be left in danger because authorities fear accusations of racism.

That is not what these advocates are demanding.

They are asking a harder question.

Why are First Nations children entering the system at such extraordinary rates in the first place?

If poverty is involved, fight poverty.

If housing is involved, build housing.

If domestic violence is involved, protect victims and remove perpetrators.

If addiction is involved, expand treatment.

If medical access is involved, provide medical services.

If relatives can safely care for the child, support kinship care.

And if racial bias is influencing decisions, expose it and eliminate it.

Taking children after everything else has failed should be evidence of an emergency.

It should never become a substitute for everything governments failed to provide beforehand.

Australia has already lived through an era in which authorities convinced themselves they knew what was best for Aboriginal children while removing those children from their families and cultures.

Modern child protection is governed by different laws, purposes and safeguards.

But history places a special burden on the country not merely to insist the contemporary system is different, but to demonstrate it through outcomes.

When First Nations children are 7 percent of the child population but roughly 45 percent of children in out-of-home care, that burden has not been met.

And when those children can enter state care only to encounter instability or further harm, the word protection itself begins demanding an explanation.

Australia does not need another generation looking backward and asking why everyone could see the numbers but nobody fundamentally changed the system.

The Senate has now heard the warning.

What matters is whether government finally acts on it.

—Vincent Willow, B1Daily