But they should take the children away…

Despite the worsening crisis in Indigenous child welfare, the Aboriginal industry is continuing to make the same misleading claims about the causes and nature of the crisis.

As reported by The Australian, the number of Indigenous children removed into ‘out of home care’ has doubled over the last decade from 3.2% to 6.5% of all Indigenous children.

The fact that so many Indigenous families are evidently incapable of properly caring for the more 15,000 Indigenous children that currently live in care reflects a deepening national tragedy. The reality that so many Indigenous children need to be rescued shows that many Indigenous communities are continuing the downwards spiral into social chaos and dysfunction — despite the tens-of-billions of dollars spent annually on Indigenous services.

But the explanation for the skyrocketing proportion of removed Indigenous kids offered by the peak lobby group, the Secretariat for National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, is very misleading.

Under the banner of the new ‘Family Matters: kids safe in culture, not in care’ campaign, the Secretariat maintains that the reason Indigenous children are removed at 10 times the rate of non-Indigenous children is that Australian child protection services are not ‘culturally appropriate’.

The claim is that Indigenous children are unnecessarily removed because social workers do not understand how ‘unique’ Aboriginal parenting styles are compared to non-Aboriginal parenting-styles.

We have heard the same rhetoric about ‘culture’ before.

The 1996 Bringing Them Home ‘Stolen Generations’ report by the Australian Human Rights Commission blamed the over-representation of Indigenous children in care on culturally arrogant attitudes; white, western social workers were accused of labelling Aboriginal family practices — such as lax parental supervision of children, and the way that kin (extended families) supposedly take care of children who roam the streets of the Indigenous ‘village’ at all hours — as neglectful and as grounds for removal.

Even 20 years ago, claims of cultural bias downplayed the problems in the worst Indigenous communities. But in the wake of the national attention focused on the legacy of the Stolen Generations, the effect on Indigenous child protection practices has been profound.

Hence the notion that Australian child protection services lack cultural sensitivity is absurd. To the contrary, contemporary Indigenous child protection policies are awash with cultural awareness – to the point of being detrimental to children’s best interest.

Child protection services have a powerful reason or excuse to overlook serious child welfare issues: to avoid appearing culturally insensitive, at best, or ‘racist’, at worst. This chiefly involves attributing one of the major problem with indigenous child welfare — the chronic neglect of Indigenous children’s physical, educational and other basic needs — to the ‘specialness of Aboriginal culture.

The upshot of this ‘culturally appropriate’ approach is that Indigenous children can end up not being removed when they should be. The ‘cumulative harm’ these children therefore suffer – which often includes third-world standard malnutrition and other medical conditions and diseases of poverty – are a major cause of the shameful ‘gaps’ in health and other social outcomes between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

Take, for example, the death from rheumatic pancarditis of four year-old Aboriginal girl Kia Shillingsworth at Brewarrina in 2012. The NSW Coroner found that Kia was not removed from her family — despite suffering gross neglect and being reported numerous times for child welfare —concerns because local social worker were so ‘culturally aware’ that they tolerated the poor living conditions of Aboriginal children.

This suggests that the crisis in Indigenous child welfare is worse than even the shocking removal figures indicate. The real problem with Indigenous child protection in this country is not that too many indigenous kids are removed – tragic though the number is — but that fewer children overall than should be are saved from the dire circumstances in which they live.

As West Australian Aboriginal elder Carol Pettersen said in August: “The children must be taken, they have to be taken away (from dysfunctional families), because there is a risk there . . . rape and alcohol, and violence, and the trauma.”

If we are ever to close the gap in Indigenous outcomes, it’s time to call a halt to the double standards and hypocrisies of the Aboriginal Industry about Indigenous child protection.

The Indigenous groups that back the Secretariat’s Family Matters campaign are staffed by members of the professional, university-educated Aboriginal middle-class that the official statistics show do as well in life as their non-indigenous peers. They live, work, and raise families in normal Australian cities, towns and suburbs — are basically integrated (to use a ‘bad’ word) into mainstream society.

They do not live on traditional lands or practice traditional ways. Yet they assert via the Family Matter’s campaign that it is essential for some Indigenous children to live on or near the rural and remote ‘homeland’ settlements so they can live ‘close to culture’ in order to maintain their Indigenous identity.

The definition of Indigenous identity that is applied to abused and neglected Indigenous children, isn’t applied to professional Aboriginal people and their families. Moreover, the selective impact of ‘cultural appropriate’ Indigenous child protection will ultimately limit the most vulnerable Indigenous children’s opportunities for integration, advancement and prosperity.

These children will end up trapped in the homeland settlements because they lack the capabilities to leave and thrive in a modern economy – an outcome that will perpetuate the need to persist with the ‘Separatist’ homeland experiment that has caused such Indigenous suffering over the past 40 years.

Ultimately, this will necessitate government’s continuing to expend the billions of dollars of taxpayer funding on the tens of thousands of professional jobs and well-off middle-class lifestyles enjoyed by the members of the Aboriginal industry, who staff the bureaucracies and NGOs that deliver ‘Indigenous-specific’ services in the homelands.

‘Culturally appropriate’ Indigenous child protection will ultimately serve the self-interests of the most advantaged Indigenous Australians at the expense of the most disadvantaged Indigenous Australians.

Jeremy Sammut is a Senior Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of The Kinship Conundrum: The Impact of Aboriginal Self-Determination on Indigenous Child Protection and The Madness of Australian Child Protection.