In Melissa’s* five-bedroom home, with a large backyard granny flat, space is at a premium. It has to be. Over the years she has made room for her brother’s children and teenage foster kids and their partners, as well as her two children.
Her extended family has been entangled with the child protection system for years. Melissa was just 15 when her brother’s four children were removed from his care as he struggled with substance abuse and incarceration, and watched as her mother fought to keep the family together. After several months, her mother was able to bring the children home.
“My mother was so strong in that these are our babies, and you will be with us. We are family. You are never to ever say that you are anything different,” she tells Guardian Australia.
Now in her 30s, the Brisbane-based Aboriginal and South Sea Islander woman’s home has become a haven for children – a place where, despite the system, family tries to hold on to family.
“Blackfellas step up for each other, or they should, and often sometimes we get lost … or we get sucked up by a system that says that we’re not good enough or that we’re not worthy to be treated with respect, because all of our lives as children you’ve told us that our rights to family does not exist,” she says.
The battle between First Nations people and the state for control of their children is as old as the First Fleet. In recent months, it’s flared again. Queensland and the Northern Territory are considering changes to their child protection systems that erode protections put in place in the 1990s to keep Aboriginal families together. And advocates working with Aboriginal children and families say children are being caught in the middle.
The debate has narrowed to a false binary between safety and culture.
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Advocates say the most concerning changes being put forward by state and territory governments involve the erosion of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle (ATSICPP), a framework designed to ensure that connection to family, culture, community and country is maintained, and that removal from Indigenous families is a last resort.
It is a principle born out of trauma and decades-long advocacy, in response to the Stolen Generations, a statewide genocidal policy that saw between one in 10 and one in three Indigenous children removed from their families between 1910 and 1970 in the name of assimilation.
“We don’t have to go very far back in the history books to see that that method not only didn’t work but led to a future of litigation, a future of confusion, a future of displacement,” Melissa says.
The NT is proposing replacing the ATSICPP with a “universal principle”, with draft laws, circulating for public comment, saying that a child “must be removed … if there is a significant and likely risk of harm to the child” and that as far as practicable they should be placed in “close proximity” to their family.
In Queensland, the child safety commission of inquiry made 52 recommendations ranging from removing all children under five from residential care – a widely supported move – to considering adoption as a “genuine permanency option” for children who cannot return to their families, including Indigenous children. In its final report released last month, the commission said it “acknowledges significant concerns” held by the Indigenous community about adoption, but says reform is needed.
Kay Smith was born in New Zealand but has lived in Alice Springs for more than 40 years. The former foster carer worked in aged care services in Yuendumu and other remote central Australian communities and formed strong ties with local elders and families, connections she nurtured when raising three Aboriginal siblings, making sure they not only had each other but were allowed to grow up strong in culture, language and ceremony. It was a placement made at the request of the siblings’ family. “I’ve been involved with them for 30 years,” she says.
One of the siblings had been placed with a non-Indigenous family and had no contact with her family until she was nine years old. It was only after she came to live with Smith and her brothers that she was able to reconnect.
“She didn’t speak her language, she wasn’t involved in ceremony until her grandfather made sure she was involved in the brothers’ initiation, and it’s utterly crucial,” Smith says. She remained connected to Smith until she passed away two years ago due to poor health, at just 32.
Smith opposes the changes proposed by the NT government and says Indigenous children are best being cared for in community. She says the focus should instead be on addressing structural inequalities – such as poor housing, healthcare and food security – which disproportionately affect Aboriginal communities.
‘Culture is safety’
Child safety is always paramount when making decisions around custody and care, says Arrente woman Catherine Liddle, the chief executive of SNAICC – National Voice for Our Children, but it’s being waylaid by “debate and politicking”.
“If we were genuinely serious about children, what we’d be doing is having really hard conversations about how the systems have failed, our communities have failed our families, and most importantly, harmed our children,” Liddle says.
“There should not be a debate between culture and safety. Culture is safety. In legislation, where we do have the child placement principle embedded, it says ‘best interests of the child’. Now that means whole child – who you are, who you are right now, where you’re going, and who you’re going to become.”
The NT children’s minister, Robyn Cahill, defended the changes in a statement to Guardian Australia, saying the ATSICPP continues to guide decision-making, with connections to family, culture and community “a priority wherever it is safe to do so”.
Cahill says concerns raised by SNAICC and others arose from a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the bill’s intended outcomes. “The intent of this legislation is fewer children in out-of-home care, not more, by getting help to families sooner so children can stay safely at home,” she said.
Barrister and former Queensland treaty commissioner Joshua Creamer says proposals in his state that could see Indigenous children permanently removed from their families were deeply distressing.
The Waanyi and Kalkadoon man spent seven months giving evidence to and observing the Queensland commission of inquiry, and says the recommendation to consider adoption as a genuine option was inconsistent with the evidence before the inquiry.
“The evidence… was that adoption for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children is just not an appropriate mechanism, because it cuts all ties with the family, the biological family or Indigenous family,” he says.
Adoption of an Aboriginal child is a highly charged proposition. In 1997, the landmark Bringing them Home report found an estimated 17% of children removed during the Stolen Generations era were adopted – mostly by non-Indigenous families. Those removals had deep ramifications: abuse, intergenerational trauma, substance issues and disconnection from community and family.
A spokesperson for the Queensland department of child safety told Guardian Australia the Crisafulli government has accepted most of the report’s recommendations and was committed to improving outcomes for First Nations children, including the over-representation of children in out-of-home care.
Melissa says her family connections and culture remain her guiding force as she watches those who have grown up in her home take their place in the world.
“This is actually the systems that we’ve had for 65,000 years, that have worked and done beautifully,” she says.
*Names have been changed.
