One of Victoria's leading First Nations family support organisations has urged Parliament to pass legislation this week to prevent the permanent separation of Aboriginal children from their families from being entrenched in law.
Victoria's upper house will this week debate the Children, Youth & Families (Stability) Bill 2025 (Vic), after it passed the Legislative Assembly last year. The legislation removes fixed time limits on Family Reunification Orders, giving the Children's Court greater flexibility to allow more time for families to make necessary changes before reunification, where safe and in the child's best interests.
Currently, parents in Victoria are only given at most 24 months — but sometimes only 12 — to have their children returned to their care. After this period, they can be permanently removed.
Furthermore, the Children, Youth and Families Amendment (Supporting Stable and Strong Families) Bill 2025, based on Scotland's Corporate Parenting model, is designed to ensure more coordinated support across government agencies, including schools, health services and housing.
Victorian-based Djirra, which supports Aboriginal women, says safety and healing "take time". Chief executive Antoinette Braybrook says the system is not broken but functioning as designed, arguing it "continues to expand while Aboriginal women are left grieving the permanent loss of their children".
She describes it as "separation driven by government and backed by legislation".
"Permanent removal is not protection, it is punishment," Ms Braybrook said. "It is the continuation of policies that has impacted our people since the commencement of colonisation."
Victoria has the highest number of Indigenous children in out-of-home care, a system research shows can funnel young people into youth justice. Last year, Commissioner for Indigenous Children, Sue-Anne Hunter, said the child protection system was "failing First Peoples".
Introducing the bill last year, Children's Minister Lizzie Blandthorn said child protection requires a whole-of-government response, arguing, "by working together across Government, we'll give children the support they need to thrive".
"Every child deserves a safe, loving home — we're making sure families get the right support, at the right time," she said.
The legislation is in response to a major recommendation of the Yoorrook Justice Report — Australia's first truth-telling body — which called for the Children's Court to "extend the timeframe of a Family Reunification Order where it is in the child's best interest to do so" and work with Aboriginal organisations to enact legislative and administrative changes to protect Aboriginal children's rights.
Evidence before the commission included claims unborn notifications result in one in five First Nations children being removed before three months of age, alongside accounts of domestic violence victims being misidentified as perpetrators and poverty being treated as neglect.
Ms Braybrook urged the bill's passage to "stop embedding permanent separation into law and to ensure Aboriginal children are not denied the right to grow up safe and thriving with their mothers".
Labelling arbitrary reunification deadlines "cruel and punitive," she argued they ignore the realities Aboriginal women face and amount to "a form of systemic violence".
"Healing cannot happen on a government stopwatch," she added.
In 2024, Coroner Simon McGregor found systemic racism within Victoria's child protection system after the death of a 17-year-old Wemba Wemba child, known as XY, who died by suicide after multiple requests to connect with her Indigenous culture were ignored.
The state government has been open in their acceptance that more needs to be done in the OOHC sector, whilst highlighting Victoria has the highest rate of Aboriginal children placed in kinship care in the country; almost 20 percentage points above the national average.
