Katherine, Aboriginal Entirestradia Lander children are overrepresented at all stages of the child protection system in all states and territories. To start, can you just lay out the scale of the problem.
Sorry for the pause, but it's just I need to take a breath before I say it, because the numbers are obscene.
Catherine Little is the CEO of SNAKE, the national body that represents Aboriginal and Entirestrata Lander children and their families. Every year, Catherine and her team document how First Nation's children are faring and how they're treated, and yet again the picture is devastating.
Aboriginal and Torres straight Islander children are nine point six times more likely to be an out of home care and on third party parental responsibility orders, which is a zero point five percent increase from twenty twenty two to twenty twenty three. Now that might not sound like a
big jump, but it is massive effectively. What it means is in just the last six months alone, an estimated two thousand Aboriginal and tourist Right Islander children have been put into out of home care two thousand in about six months.
Catherine's report shows that Aboriginal and tirest rate Islander children more likely to be reported to authorities, They're more likely to be taken away from their families, and they spend more time institutionalized. For every dollar the government spends on this, only sixteen cents goes to helping families. The rest is on taking children away.
Those child removals create an enormous amount of self harm. We know that they're less likely to be able to enter the workforce. We know they're more likely to have mental health issues, aboriginal torrestrate Islander children are more likely to be abused in out of home care settings and in residential care settings and any institutional setting in Australia. That is where the highest rate of assaults against our children happen. And it's not like it's something governments aren't aware of.
I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven AM today Snake CEO Catherine Little on the damage the child protection system is doing the First Nation's children. What needs to be done to break the cycle. It's Monday, December fifteenth. Catherine. Let's start at the beginning of the chain with notifications. Tell me how they work.
So notifications basically mean that someone's expressing in a concern about a child. Now, this is good and fair enough. So a notification, though, could be something like you're a school teacher and you've noticed that a child hasn't brought lunch to school. In the Northern territory where you see massive numbers of notifications, that is usually things like lice or scabies, and these are communicable health issues, they're not
actually child protection issues. These things it shows that there are fundamental failings in systems and the ability to get help to children. So when you look at the numbers and then you look at what happens as a response to those numbers, as opposed to getting immediate help to families instead, what we're doing is removing children for life, many cases for life.
In many cases, cash through women are being reported to authorities while they are still pregnant. When that happens, how does that change the outlook for the baby once it's born.
Oh, look, it's absolutely horrific. There is an example of a hospital that every single Aboriginal mother presenting had a notification to child Protection before that child was born. The highest number of removals are children between zero and two. Horrific times to be removing children, but also the most critical times to be able to jump in and support families.
When you look at say South Australia where the Aboriginal Children's Commissioner did massive review on what was happening to children there and she found homelessness was actually the biggest common denominator in those removals. So instead of notifications going to a housing accommodation option, it was a notification to child protection. What we know across the board, it doesn't matter if your Aboriginal law, any other socioeconomic group or
racial group. The biggest common denominator in child removals is access to early education and care. And those children haven't had access to those services, they haven't had access to the supports that come in early and say hey do you need a little bit of help? And that comes down to the way the child protection system is built, and that is it is built to remove children from families in crisis as opposed to supporting children and families to thrive.
And you mentioned the role of schools and teach but who is making these notifications. Which organizations are most responsible for throwing Aboriginal entire strata onto families into the child protection system.
It'll vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In Victoria it is schools. Often in other states and territories it might be police. And again that comes down to things like mandatory reporting, so you don't necessarily know where that notification is coming from. And look, we need this system. Children need to be protected.
No one is ever going to argue that there shouldn't be a need for mandatory reporting, or that there should be a need for something that is able to pick up where a child might be at true risk of
danger or true risk of neglect. But one of the common things that we're starting to hear, particularly for children who are coming out of the out of home care system, and they've reported it to commissioners right across the country, they say, you know this mandatory reporting that you're all talking about, when are you going to change that dialogue
to mandatory support? When will that become what you're actually investing in in that is, you've seen a family in need, how do you support them as opposed to report them.
Let's talk about police and their ability to properly assess what is happening within a First nation's family. We've seen on a number of occasions in Queensland and the Northern Territory in Wa and in Victoria allegations or evidence of racial profiling or systemic racism within the force. So what happens when that culture is tasked with making assessments about a family's capacity to care for their children.
It is genuinely not their remit. Being able to genuinely make those assessments takes an understanding of what the stresses of that family might be. It takes the ability to be able to understand that just because you're poor does not mean that your children are not loved. It takes the ability to understand that different people live differently. I mean, I don't know about you, but you know it took me ages to get my kids to stop sharing a bit because that's how they like to sleep, and in
Aboriginal families it's quite normal. If you're not familiar with those types of lifestyles and ways of understanding what families are and how they function, then it can look very very different. Now again, when we look at the child protection numbers. Vakka here in Victoria had done a lot of done a lot of testing of things, and they'd
heard that in the United States. Once they stopped identifying that a child was Aboriginal, the number of notifications and the number of substantiations and the number of child removals flatlined and became less than what was being experienced in the non Aboriginal communities in the US. So they did a little mini trial of that through Vakka and found exactly the same thing. The moment they deidentified children as being Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander, then the numbers balanced.
Coming up. Now, changing the child protection system is the real test for Treaty Catherine. Before we deal further into what happens after a child is removed, I want to know how the process should look. So say a teacher or a healthcare worker notices that a family member may be having trouble and a child may be in danger, what should happen?
There should be a process within the school that has a relationship with the Aboriginal community controlled services that sit around those families. We know that where schools have fantastic relationships with those services, where you've got the Aboriginal workers in the school and you've got a really trusting environment, you don't even need to make a notification because it's already been picked up, and they've already identified ways to get children to say, jeez up, babies had a cold
for a long time, maybe they need an antibiotic. In the early childhood space we get a much better, better result, and that's because we have more Aboriginal community controlled earlier services.
We know that what should happen is largely not what is happening. So tell me about the reality. What happens once a child is removed, Where do they go?
Look? It really depends on where they are and what is available. So usually it goes into a short term placement while it's worked out what will happen to a child. So one of the things that we experienced as a family, one of our family members was removed and no one knew where that child was, and trying to find that child world was incredibly difficult. You finally find out that there have been no foster care as available in Alice Springs, so baby has been sent to Darwin to stay with
a family in Darwin. This is a child from a first language family, so there is no one in the home that they have been sent to that can speak the language of what is a very very distressed child. We tried really really hard to find this little one. It took about three months to find where he was. And when we were trying to get him back, what we were saying was, well, why did you not reach out to family members? We are a really highly functioning family.
There is no way you couldn't have found someone. And in the end it took us two years, two years to be able to get that child back. And across the child protection system, that's pretty much the norm you've.
Done and report the shows where First Nations kids end up when they exit the system, when they leave out of home care, where do they invariably end up.
So the numbers in this report are showing a really big acceleration in the number of children who, once they leave care, enter the juvenile justice system. The earlier they hit those juvenile justice systems, the less likely they are to come out of them. We're also seeing a number of children choose homelessness as soon as they can, so as soon as you're able to place yourself independently, we're seeing children would rather be homeless than stay within the
child protection system. This tells you something really horrific. And we're also seeing a lot of children choosing just to go CouchSurfing because again, that is safer for us, and we feel more secure in CouchSurfing than we would in a placement where we don't know what's going to happen to us, we don't know how long we're there for. We're unstable, we're unclear about what's happening. And again it shows a fundamental failing in not investing in families first
and keeping childrens first. It is the biggest misnomer ever the child protection system.
And finally, Catherine, last week, the Premier apologized to First Nations people in Victoria.
If this apology is to carry more than words and the intention of members today, then we must certify through what we do next. The treaty is not merely a gesture. It is a pathway to healing and change.
So what would that actually look like in the child protection system?
Look, this year's report, our tenth year of the Family Matters Report, is a really clear roadmap. And while we've been talking about some really heavy stuff, it actually is
a story of hope. It says, look, we can't shy away from the things that have happened to harm us and the things that continue to harm us, which is essentially why we have things like a treaty in apology, but it also says with self determination, the ability to make decisions about yourself, we get a very very different outcome when Aboriginal families are involved in the decisions about
the things that affect them. When we're able to invest in families not crisis, we get a fundamentally different result. And Family Matters has some incredible stories about how Aboriginal community controlled organizations have said we're not going to play in this narrative around a broken system, We're going to build our own. They get significantly different results, and hopefully
that is what we'll see through treaty. The ability to have some say in the decisions that affect us, the ability to invest more in the solutions that work, and that's good for everyone.
Catherine Little, thank you so much for your time, pleasure.
Thank you.
For the most part of this year, I've been working in the world of truth and treaty, working alongside the First People's Assembly of Victoria, the Yurok Justice Commission, and the government itself. With the numbers across the range of indicators showing that First Peoples continue to go backwards when it comes to being able to live happy and fulfilling lives. How we treat and care for our children will be the first and perhaps the major test as to whether
the treaty would have made a difference at all. Also in the news, Michelle Rowland has been told to pay back expenses she claimed after she built taxpayers more than twenty one thousand dollars for a family trip to Perth in twenty twenty three. Last week, the Australian Financial Review reporter on the trip, which included a claim for more
than sixteen thousand dollars in flights for her family. Roland then referred the expenses to the Independent Parliamentary Authority, which found that some of the spending was outside the guidelines. And Two members of the US military and an American civilian have been killed by a member of Islamic State in Syria. The government also wounded three other people before being killed himself following the attack. It's the first iLINK attack on US troops since the fall of President Michelle
Alasad a year ago. A spokesperson for the Pentagon It's at the attack targeted soldiers working on canter terrorism operations. US President Donald Trump has promised to retaliate I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. We'll be back tomorrow