Relatives of a dead 15-year-old Indigenous teenager with a significant cognitive impairment say they were not alerted to the fact he had left his residential care facility days before a shocking fatal car crash outside federal Parliament House.
The case has prompted a public intervention by the ACT’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People Commissioner, Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts, who has called for a major overhaul of the out-of-home care system, saying it is failing Indigenous Australians.
The teenager, who cannot be identified, was found with critical injuries some distance from an overturned Toyota on Adelaide Avenue – near State Circle, the road that encircles federal parliament – in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
He died from his injuries on the weekend. The car was stolen but police still are yet to determine who was driving.
The boy had been in a residential care facility run by MacKillop Family Services at the time.
The young Torres Strait Islander had been in some form of care – either foster or residential – since he was about three years old.
He left the MacKillop care facility on Monday last week and did not return.
Close relatives say they were not alerted when he left the care facility.
His mother says she received no such notification. She wants him remembered as a beautiful, happy boy, who loved his friends and playing football.
“I want change,” she said. “How many others have to put their daughter in the ground or son in the ground? Because I wouldn’t wish this pain on my worst nightmare.”
“Enough is enough. Too many kids are getting their lives taken at such a young age. You’re meant to still be here at 15, you’re meant to be at school playing with kids … the other day I put my son to sleep for the last time ever. I’ll never hold my son again.”
Another relative echoed calls for change.
“He was supposed to be at MacKillop house. For the last three days of his life he was not there. We should have had a missing persons report because he was out of the building,” she said.
“Being honest with you, I have found right through this [out-of-home care] process, from when he was three-and-a-half to now, no one really cared … he was too hard.”
Turnbull-Roberts, a Bundjalung Widubul-Wiabul woman with lived experience of the effect of the child protection system on First Nations people, said she was deeply concerned by the case and more broadly at failures with out-of-home care in caring for Indigenous children.
“There is this narrative that it is in the best interests sometimes of children to fall under the responsibility of child protection services, and I think what we’re seeing time and time again, history has told us, is that they’re not best suited to parent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people,” she said.
“We have a young person that fell under the protection of care and protection in the ACT and we failed to see him be protected at all costs and all means.”
MacKillop said it could not comment due to legal restrictions.
Turnbull-Roberts says the case for significant reform is urgent and clear.
“What we’re seeing throughout the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children through the system, we’re seeing the way child removal is an undergraduate degree for a postgraduate degree in the criminal justice system or a doctorate in the adult prison system,” she said.
“This pipeline is horrific and we need to start taking serious responsibility and taking power away from statutory services that are failing our Indigenous people and see it handed back to community-controlled organisations.”
The ACT minister for children, Rachel Stephen-Smith, described the death as “tragic” and said the government would cooperate with the coronial process.
Stephen-Smith acknowledged that the over representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care was “unacceptably high” and said the government was committed to reforms, through its Our Booris, Our Way review.
“The child protection system is complex and there is no doubt change is taking longer than any of us would have hoped,” she said.
She said there had been a reduction in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in care since 2017-18.
Through the cracks
Last week, police said the stolen car had been involved in a number of interactions with police and had failed to stop.
Police said, at one point, it had sped away in a suburban area and could not be pursued.
Police also said the teenager had been breaching bail conditions and was unlicensed, though said it was still unclear whether he was driving.
The death comes as governments in states and territories grapple with how to balance community concerns about youth crime with a need to ensure the welfare of children and teenagers in the criminal justice system.
That balance has become even more fraught as these governments also consider impending changes to the age of criminal responsibility.
A 2021 report completed for the Australian Federal Police National Missing Persons Coordination Centre found there had been little research completed on youth missing from out-of-home care and no nationally agreed response on how authorities should respond when it happens.
It found that “juvenile institutional absconders constituted an enormous operational and administrative load for police”, with three-quarters of all missing youth in the ACT in 2008 involving children in this cohort.
“Despite the fact that it exists to provide vulnerable children with a safe, nurturing and healthy environment in which to grow into adulthood, the OOHC system does not always guarantee that children in its care will have their needs met, or be safe and happy,” the report found.
“In Australia, little is known about the reasons young people from care go missing, or their experiences while missing.
“There is a pronounced lack of academic literature and practical resources targeted towards the experiences and issues affecting young people who go missing from care. There is no national picture about their specific circumstances and no nationally agreed agency response to be applied when they go missing.”
