Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are increasingly overrepresented in out-of-home care. Protecting children means making the system answer for the warnings it misses and the failures it repeats.

Child protection asks some of the hardest questions any government can ask of a family. Is the child safe? What went wrong? What must change? The family’s answers are recorded, assessed and tested. But when the system repeatedly fails children and families, who asks those questions of it?

The Productivity Commission’s 2026 Closing the Gap report provides an urgent reason to ask. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children remain dramatically overrepresented in out-of-home care, and the national trajectory is worsening. In 2025, 52.2 Indigenous children per 1,000 were in care. In 2024, they were 11 times as likely as non-Indigenous children to be in out-of-home care, up from 9.6 times in 2020.

These figures do not mean every removal was unnecessary. Some children face immediate danger and must be protected. But a worsening pattern cannot be explained only by what families did or failed to do. It also demands scrutiny of the institutions deciding their futures.

Recent contributions to P&I reveal failures at both ends of the child-protection system. Ruth Clare described children living with serious adversity who remain unseen because services and research often assume that a functioning parent will recognise the danger and seek help. Children most practised at hiding distress may therefore be least likely to receive support before crisis arrives.

Fabian Webber follows the story beyond intervention.........

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