Victoria will review laws that give struggling parents two years to reform their lives before permanently losing their children, after the state’s child protection minister labelled the legislation a “blunt instrument”.
Lizzie Blandthorn appeared at the state’s Indigenous truth-telling commission on Friday, where she delivered an apology for the harm caused by the removal of First Peoples’ children in the state.
But one commissioner, Sue-Anne Hunter, shot back that an apology without action was not enough.
Blandthorn told the Yoorook Justice Commission that she had ordered the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing to review legislative changes that were designed to prevent children bouncing between out-of-home care placements.
“They’re a blunt instrument and they’ve very limiting in capacity,” she said.
The changes relate to parents subjected to a children’s court order and came into effect in 2016. They had the impact of increasing the number of children the department could put up for adoption, in an attempt to give children in the out-of-home care system more stability.
The state’s Indigenous legal service previously told the commission that the changes had a “disastrous” impact on the Indigenous community, with parents often unable to access overburdened services such as drug and rehabilitation support or men’s behavioural change programs within the required two-year period.
Blandthorn said the government would wait until the Yoorrook justice commission handed down its second interim report in August before releasing the results of its review.
The state’s commissioner for Indigenous children, Meena Singh, told Yoorrook that the department of families needed to consider the harm that Indigenous children faced in the out-of-home care system, such as residential care homes, before they were removed from their parents.
“We see too often that Aboriginal children and young people experience harm once they are removed [from their family],” she said.
Singh said that Indigenous children in residential care facilities – considered a last resort in the out-of-home care system – often went missing, leaving them vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
The Yoorrook Justice Commission is holding public hearings focusing on Indigenous people’s interactions with the child protection and criminal justice systems.
On Monday, the state’s chief police commissioner, Shane Patton, made a historic apology for past and present actions of the force that inflicted trauma on First Nations people.
The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, has previously said the state’s over-representation of First Nations people in the child protection and criminal justice systems was a “source of great shame” for the government.
Yoorrook is Australia’s first Indigenous truth-telling body and has the same powers as a royal commission.
Its mandate is to investigate historical and current systemic injustices against First Nations people and it will produce a final report by mid-2025.
