Introduction by Croakey: A Queensland inquiry has been criticised over its finding that racism is not a factor contributing to the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in the State’s child protection system.
This finding was “a slap in the face to all our families” and “quite frankly inexplicable”, said SNAICC – National Voice for Our Children.
CEO Catherine Liddle said findings from the Child Safety Commission of Inquiry’s final report make it clear that children and families are not safe in the system as it stands, especially for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in residential and out-of-home care.
“Disappointingly, the report falls very short in its recommendations, many of which contradict the volume of expert and lived experience evidence presented to the inquiry,” she said in a recent statement.
First Nations children in Queensland are placed in out-of-home care at nearly 10 times the rate of non-Indigenous children.
The National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People Commissioner, Sue-Anne Hunter, also disputed some of the report’s key findings and recommendations.
“We do not accept the finding that racism plays no part in why our children are removed,” she said in a statement. “Under the National Closing the Gap Agreement, our governments have already accepted that this overrepresentation is driven by colonisation, trauma and systemic racism.
“For racism to be dismissed in this report shows exactly where the issues lie in Queensland.”
The Queensland Government are understood to be considering the report, and have not made clear their plans for the position of Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children, following the expiry of Commissioner Natalie Lewis’s tenure.
Many other concerns about the report, ‘From Pressure to Purpose: Reforming Child Protection in Queensland’, are also raised in the analysis below, by Debbie Kilroy OAM and Tabitha Lean, of Sisters Inside, which supports criminalised women and girls, and their children, both inside and outside prison.
These concerns are relevant for other jurisdictions, as governments across Australia continue to respond to complex social problems by expanding systems of surveillance, intervention and coercion, rather than addressing the conditions that place families under pressure, they write.
Debbie Kilroy and Tabitha Lean write:
The Queensland Child Safety Commission of Inquiry presents itself as a blueprint for transforming a failing “child protection system”.
It acknowledges that too many children experience instability, harm, and poor outcomes while subject to state intervention. It recognises that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children remain dramatically overrepresented in out-of-home care. It acknowledges that families are struggling with poverty, housing insecurity, violence, disability, and unmet support needs.
Yet, despite documenting these realities, the report ultimately proposes solutions that expand the power of the very systems responsible for producing many of these harms.
From the perspective of Sisters Inside, the report fails to grapple with a fundamental question: what if the problem is not that the family policing system is malfunctioning, but that it is operating largely as intended?
For decades, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, criminalised women, disabled parents, women experiencing domestic and family violence, and families living in poverty have consistently reported that family policing intervention functions less as support and more as surveillance, punishment, and family separation.
The report acknowledges many of these experiences but remains committed to preserving the core architecture of the system.
Concerning framing
One of the report’s central themes is that previous reforms have focused too heavily on systems and not enough on the “proximate causes” of harm, such as substance use, family violence, gambling, and mental health issues.
This framing is deeply concerning.
Substance use, violence, poor mental health, homelessness, and family instability do not emerge in a vacuum. They are often the consequences of colonisation, poverty, racism, housing insecurity, disability discrimination, family separation, and intergenerational trauma.
The report frequently treats these issues as characteristics of families, rather than examining why some families experience vastly greater levels of state intervention than others.
Absent from much of the report is any serious analysis of why Aboriginal children continue to be removed at staggering rates despite decades of inquiries, apologies, Closing the Gap commitments, and family policing reforms.
Similarly absent is a meaningful analysis of how criminalisation, imprisonment, poverty, and housing insecurity shape family contact with family policing.
The result is a framework that risks locating the problem within families rather than within the conditions produced by government policy itself.
Alarming recommendation
Perhaps the most alarming recommendation is the proposal to elevate adoption as a permanency option for all children, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
The report argues that adoption has become underutilised and that current policy settings prevent it from being adequately considered.
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, this recommendation cannot be separated from Australia’s history of child stealing.
The mass removal of Aboriginal children was repeatedly justified as being in children’s best interests. Generations of Aboriginal families were told that separation would provide stability, opportunity, and protection. We now understand those policies as part of the Stolen Generations.
The report acknowledges this history but appears to treat it primarily as historical context rather than an ongoing reality.
Today, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children remain dramatically mass represented in out-of-home care. Any recommendation that seeks to expand permanent legal severance of family relationships must be considered against that backdrop.
The report frames permanency as a solution to instability. It gives insufficient attention to the instability often created by the system itself through repeated removals, placement breakdowns, and failures to adequately resource families before intervention occurs.
Children need stability. But stability should not be confused with permanent separation.
Self-determination matters
The report repeatedly questions current approaches to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family policing, including aspects of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle and delegated authority arrangements.
While presented as a call for evidence-based practice, these sections raise significant concerns.
The report appears to frame Aboriginal self-determination as something requiring continual justification, while state intervention remains largely unquestioned despite overwhelming evidence of ongoing failure.
Aboriginal community-controlled organisations have long argued that children are safest when families, communities, culture, and Country are strengthened. The report instead places considerable emphasis on assessing whether existing Indigenous-led approaches have demonstrated sufficient success.
This creates an unequal burden.
Government systems that have removed generations of Aboriginal children are not subjected to the same level of scrutiny regarding their fundamental legitimacy. Aboriginal-led alternatives, however, are repeatedly asked to prove themselves.
Incomplete analysis
The report is correct to identify serious failures within residential care.
For years, Sisters Inside has worked alongside girls who have been placed in residential care homes only to become criminalised for behaviours directly related to trauma, neglect, institutionalisation, and survival.
The report acknowledges many of these violences and harm.
However, it largely treats residential care as a failed service model, rather than examining its role as a pathway into criminalisation.
Girls are frequently charged for behaviour that would never attract police attention in a family home. Property damage, emotional distress, conflict, absconding, and survival behaviours become criminal matters once they occur within institutional settings.
The result is a pipeline from care into children’s prison detention and, ultimately, adult prisons.
Any analysis of residential care that does not fully confront this reality remains incomplete.
Step up supports
Perhaps the most striking omission from the report is the lack of attention given to what families consistently identify as their most urgent needs.
Women working with Sisters Inside rarely tell us they need more assessments, more investigations, more monitoring, or more intervention.
They tell us they need housing.
They need income.
They need disability supports.
They need culturally safe healthcare.
They need freedom from violence.
They need practical assistance to care for their children.
The report acknowledges these issues but does not place them at the centre of its recommendations.
Instead, the dominant focus remains on improving decision-making within the family policing system itself.
This reflects a broader policy failure. The state continues to invest enormous resources in investigating, monitoring, and removing families – while underinvesting in the conditions that allow families to thrive.
Wider concerns
These debates are not occurring in isolation. Across Australia, governments continue to respond to complex social problems by expanding systems of surveillance, intervention and coercion rather than addressing the conditions that place families under pressure.
In the Northern Territory, recent government responses to concerns about child protection and child wellbeing have similarly prioritised punitive approaches, while dismissing or minimising concerns raised by communities, advocates and service providers.
At the same time, Aboriginal families continue to face the compounded impacts of poverty, housing shortages, over-policing, child removal and inadequate access to support services.
The language may differ across jurisdictions, but the underlying logic remains remarkably consistent: governments continue to invest in managing the consequences of inequality while failing to address its causes.
Queensland’s proposed expansion of adoption and permanency measures must be understood within this broader national context. From Queensland to the Northern Territory, we are witnessing renewed confidence in state intervention alongside continued underinvestment in housing, healthcare, disability supports, income security, violence prevention and community-controlled services that families consistently identify as their most urgent needs.
The question is not whether governments can become more effective at removing children.
The question is whether governments are willing to invest in the conditions that allow children to remain safely connected to their families, communities, cultures and Country in the first place.
Securing children’s wellbeing
The Commission correctly identifies that Queensland’s family policing system is in crisis. Where Sisters Inside differs from the Commission is in our understanding of why.
The report largely views the crisis as a failure of implementation. We see it as a violence of design.
The report seeks to improve the operation of a system built on surveillance, intervention and removal. Sisters Inside believes genuine transformation requires shifting power, resources and decision-making authority back to families and communities themselves.
Children are safest when families have housing, income, healthcare, cultural connection, disability support and freedom from violence.
No amount of procedural reform can substitute for those foundations.
The future of child wellbeing in Queensland will not be secured through expanded adoption, increased surveillance, or more efficient family separation. Nor will it be secured through the increasingly punitive approaches emerging in jurisdictions across Australia.
It will be secured when governments invest in keeping families together rather than building more effective ways to break them apart.
• You can access Sisters Inside’s report: https://sistersinside.com.au/state-controlled-childhood-the-business-of-family-policing-in-queensland/
Author details
Debbie Kilroy OAM was first criminalised at the age of 13 and spent more than two decades in and out of women’s and children’s prisons. Driven to end the criminalisation and imprisonment of girls and women, Debbie established Sisters Inside, as well as her law firm, Kilroy & Callaghan Lawyers.
Tabitha Lean is an abolition activist, writer and storyteller who organises to disrupt and dismantle the colonial project, abolish the prison industrial complex, and annihilate racial capitalism.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on the social determinants of health
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