The forced removal of First Nations’ children has not slowed down. It has doubled since the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his “apology” to survivors of the Stolen Generation and their families in February 2008.
In that year, the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care was 9070 — already a tripling of the number identified in the Bringing Them Home report of 1993.
But, in 2024, it was found to have doubled to nearly 20,000. This figure does not include the approximately 3000 children on guardianship orders.
According to social policy scholar BJ Newton in the National Indigenous Times, the die was cast back in 2008, as both Rudd and then opposition leader Brendan Nelson failed to confront the racist and colonialist framing that had allowed the state to harm so many families throughout the 20th century.
Newton, a proud Wiradjuri woman and Associate Professor at the University of NSW, where she leads the Bring Them Home, Keep Them Home research, said Rudd’s framing of the Stolen Generation as a “blemished chapter” and his emphasis on a future relationship built on mutual responsibility, allowed the government to “mutualise blame” for the damage done by policies past and present.
Meanwhile, Nelson had gone further suggesting in February 2008 that the forced removal of children, leading to the Stolen Generation, had emerged from a place of concern. He described the removal of First Nations children as a “necessary part of public policy in the protection of children” and suggested that the poverty experienced by many Aboriginal families had made this okay.
Newton described Nelson’s comments as “paternalistic white saviourism” and said they had set the scene for forced removal of children to be understood as acceptable — or even morally righteous — while the racist and colonialist underpinnings of these policies were not recognised.
Indeed, the rolling out of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) in 2007 — under John Howard’s Coalition government — had already made it clear that child removals from those communities would be allowed to continue under the guise of “concern”.
To achieve his goals under the NTER, Howard suspended the Racial Discrimination Act, allowing the state to target remote Aboriginal communities under the pretext of suspected child sexual abuse. According to Nelson a year later, this approach represented a “victory”.
But a crucial feature of Australian governments’ continued targeting of Aboriginal children was its adoption of Structured Decision Making (SDM) tools, first used in the United States.
On the surface, these “risk assessment instruments” are designed to aid the investigation of child abuse and neglect allegations. However, Newton said that they had been found to “disproportionately classify Aboriginal families as high-risk and routinise removal under bureaucratic box‑ticking”, adding that SDM use had been suspended in Queensland and New South Wales as the tool’s objectivity had been proven false.
Even though this tool has been found to be racially biased, children removed because it had been applied to their cases had not been returned to their families, instead remaining in the state system.
Newton said they are now “trapped in systems designed to keep them from going home”.