The headline says it all: “life-saving foster care system hits breaking point.” It is a familiar narrative, one that positions the foster care system as benevolent, overstretched, and in need of rescue. A system doing its best. A system worth saving.
But this framing does something dangerous. It tells only one story, and one truth is not the whole truth.
Jesse Bell-Myers’ story matters. It deserves to be heard. For him, foster care was stability, safety, and family. That is his truth.
But it is not the truth.
For many of the young people in our communities, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, the out-of-home care system is not life-saving. It is life-altering in ways that are violent, destabilising, and deeply traumatic.
The family policing system is a racist system of removal and surveillance. It is a system that separates children from kin, culture, language, Country and community, often permanently.
And we must not talk about foster care honestly without naming this truth: this system is built on the same foundations as the Stolen Generations. Today, Aboriginal children are removed at rates higher than at any point in history, higher than during the Stolen Generations themselves. That is not an accident. That is policy.
The pipeline no one wants to name
There is another story missing from this article, one that those of us working alongside criminalised adults and children know all too well: the pipeline from out-of-home care to prison.
Children who grow up in foster care and residential care are significantly more likely to be criminalised. They are more likely to experience homelessness, policing, institutionalisation, and incarceration.
This is not because they are “at risk.”
It is because they are placed into systems that produce risk.
When children are moved repeatedly, denied stable attachments, punished rather than supported, and raised under constant surveillance, the outcome is not surprising. It is predictable.
Out-of-home care is not separate from the prison system.
It is one of its feeder systems.
The violence of disconnection, dressed up as care
If we want to understand what this system actually does, not what it claims to do, we need only look at cases like that of the Aboriginal child known as X.
A child taken 1,700 kilometres away from his remote Northern Territory community. Removed from Country, from kin, from the relational world that defines who he is. Placed with a non-Aboriginal carer, where decisions about his life, identity, and future were made far from the people who hold responsibility for him under cultural law.
And then, only after years, a court is forced to intervene and state what should never have needed to be said:
That his cultural needs can only be met on Country.
That connection to kin is not optional.
That who raises a child matters.
But even in this so-called “correction,” the violence remains, because this is how the system operates, it removes first, justifies later, and calls it care in the meantime.
This case is not an anomaly. It is a window into the everyday functioning of the family policing system. A system that consistently devalues Aboriginal ways of caring, dismisses kinship structures, and treats culture as secondary, something that can be substituted with “access,” with phone calls, with occasional visits, with token gestures.
As if culture is an add-on.
As if Country can be replaced.
It cannot.
And what is most telling is how easily this removal was rationalised in the first place, through familiar narratives of “risk,” “safety,” and “best interests.” Narratives that are disproportionately applied to Aboriginal families, while the structural conditions imposed by the state, poverty, housing instability, over-policing, are ignored.
Even when the courts recognise the importance of cultural connection, it comes after the damage has already been done.
After the child has been displaced.
After attachments have been fractured.
After identity has been disrupted.
And then the system frames the return as the trauma, not the removal.
This is the inversion at the heart of the system.
Culture is not a secondary need. For Aboriginal children, it is foundational. To remove a child from Country is not simply a change in geography, it is a rupture: spiritual, cultural, relational.
And yet, the system continues to operate as though these losses are acceptable trade-offs. As though stability in a non-Indigenous home can outweigh disconnection from identity. As though love, in isolation, is enough.
It is not.
Funding foster care while starving families
The article we’re discussing calls for more support for foster carers: more payments, better access to services, and workplace flexibility.
And yet, buried in that argument is a question no one wants to ask:
Where was that support when the child was still with their family?
We hear: “getting access to the support that your kids need.”
But families, particularly poor families, Aboriginal and racialised families, criminalised families, are denied that same access every day.
Parents are told they are failing, that they are neglectful, and that they cannot provide. All while being locked out of the very resources that would make it possible to care for their children.
The government cannot claim to care about children while refusing to invest in the conditions that allow families to raise them. We cannot continue to pour money into foster care placements while leaving families in poverty, without housing, without healthcare, without community-based supports.
That is not child protection.
That is family policing.
A softer removal is still removal
In South Australia, a baby is being removed from their parents every four days. New approaches are being introduced to make these removals feel less abrupt, to give parents notice, to allow for skin-to-skin contact before separation, to create mementos, to “plan” the removal.
Let’s be clear about what this is.
It is not reform. It is refinement.
It is the same violence, repackaged.
Because there is nothing humane about removing a newborn from their mother. There is no “gentle” way to sever that bond. There is no version of this that is not traumatic.
Dressing it up with softer language does not change the outcome. It simply makes the system more palatable to those not experiencing it.
And while governments talk about improving the experience of removal, they continue to refuse to invest in what would actually prevent it.
It is outrageous that we are not resourcing families to stay together, that we are not ensuring access to housing, healthcare, drug and alcohol support, and community-led care before a child is taken.
Instead, we intervene earlier, not with support, but with surveillance. Monitoring pregnancies. Flagging “risk” before a child is even born. Expanding the reach of the state into the most intimate parts of people’s lives.
This is not prevention, it is pre-emptive control.
And once again, Aboriginal families bear the brunt.
Despite making up a smaller percentage of the population, Aboriginal babies are removed at vastly disproportionate rates. The system continues to target the same communities, under the same logic, with the same outcomes.
This is not incidental, it is structural.
The system is not “breaking,” it is doing exactly what it was designed to do
When we are told the system is “under pressure” or “reaching breaking point,” we are being asked to sympathise with the system itself, not the children, not the families, not the communities.
But what if the system is not broken?
What if it is functioning exactly as designed: to manage, remove, and control children from communities already targeted by the state?
More foster carers will not fix this.
More funding into out-of-home care will not fix this.
Expanding a harmful system does not transform it, it entrenches it.
Samantha Burns, advocate for women and children impacted by child removal and child abuse, knows all too well the impacts of foster care and says:
“As a former ward of the state, and someone who experienced child sexual abuse while in foster care, I know firsthand that removal does not equal safety.
We are told these systems are ‘life-saving,’ but many of us come out carrying deep, lifelong harm: from the instability, the disconnection, and the violence we experienced while in care.
We do not need a better removal system. We need fewer removals.
If we are serious about saving lives, then we need to invest in families, in housing, in community, in support, not in systems that take children away once those supports have already been denied.
Because the system is not ‘breaking.’ It is doing exactly what it was designed to do.”
The answer is not more care placements, it is an end to the removals
Ms Burns continues:
“We’re hearing a lot about pre-birth supports, about working with families earlier so babies don’t need to be removed. But if that was the real goal, we would see strong reunification rates. We don’t.
In South Australia, only 11.4 per cent of children are reunified with their families. That’s the lowest in the country. So what this tells us is that once a child is taken, the system is not designed to bring them home.
You can’t claim to be keeping families together at the front end while quietly abandoning them at the back.”
If we are serious about the wellbeing of children, then the solution is not to make it easier to remove them. The solution is to stop removing them in the first place.
That means:
- Investing in families, materially, not symbolically
- Ensuring access to housing, healthcare, and income support
- Supporting community-led responses, particularly Aboriginal-led and Aboriginal-controlled organisations
- Ending the over-surveillance and punishment of families in poverty
- Returning decision-making power to communities, not bureaucracies
Because children do not need saving from their families.
They need their families to be supported.
Whose lives are we trying to save?
Stories like Jesse’s are often used, intentionally or not, to justify the expansion of the foster care system. But we cannot build policy on exceptional outcomes while ignoring systemic harm.
For every story of foster care “saving” a child, there are countless others where the system has fractured lives, severed identities, and set young people on a path toward further institutionalisation.
If we are going to talk about saving lives, then we need to be honest about what is taking them apart.
And right now, one of those systems is the very one being held up as the solution.
What frustrates me most about all of this – and about so much of the advocacy work we end up doing as a whole – is that none of it’s unknowable.
Governments already have decades of evidence showing what drives child removal: poverty, housing stress, disability supports being absent, family violence, and the over-surveillance of poor and Aboriginal families. The answers aren’t missing. They are already well documented.
And yet we keep ending up in the same place – governments choosing to tinker around the edges of a system that continues to default to removal rather than actually investing in the conditions that keep families together.
Last year’s child protection reforms in South Australia are a good example of it. There was plenty of language about early intervention and better support, but far less action on the structural things that actually prevent removals – housing, income adequacy, Aboriginal community-controlled services, and properly funded family supports.
So we get reform that changes process and tone, but not the power or funding priorities underneath it. And that’s the exhausting part – the answers are already known, they’re just not acted on.