Victoria has announced a record $47.3m in funding to support Indigenous children in the child protection system following a landmark agreement to ensure community control over children placed into out-of-home care.
It has also announced $10.8m to fund dedicated diversion programs and support services for Indigenous children in youth detention.
The funding includes $13.3m to support Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to assume legal guardianship over children in out-of-home care. It also contains $8.6m to expand the Aboriginal children in care program to transfer management of children to Aboriginal organisations.
Since that change was announced in December 2017, the management of 30% of Indigenous children in care has been transferred to Aboriginal community-controlled organisations.
An agreement on the funding was signed by the children and families minister, Jenny Mikakos, and representatives from Aboriginal community-controlled organisations on Thursday ahead of the state budget on Tuesday.
It’s the first agreement in Australia between a government, community members and organisations on the management of children in child protection.
Victoria is also the first state to hand the guardianship of Aboriginal children in care from the state to the chief executive of an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation.
Muriel Bamblett, chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, is currently the legal guardian of 34 Aboriginal children. The funding means more organisations will be able to take on the role.
Bamblett said having Aboriginal guardianship over children in out-of-home care means those children are more likely to be safely reunited with their families.
“There’s always going to be children that need to be removed,” she told Guardian Australia. “There’s no way that Aboriginal people would want to leave children in situations that are unsafe. But we know the outcome is always better if children can be raised by their mum and dad.
“Guardianship is really the opportunity for Aboriginal people to make sure that they look after children but we also when possible do what we can to ensure those kids go home.”
Bamblett said previous attempts at reforming the child protection system had just resulted in “putting more money into systems instead of into children”, but said this would be a child-focused approach.
Wungurilwil Gapgapduir means “strong families” in Latji Latji, a language from the Mildura region in western Victoria
It is part of the $168m overhaul of Aboriginal child and family services announced in 2015.
The funding in the 2018 budget is Victoria’s biggest ever investment in Aboriginal-specific child and family support measures.
“I see this as a national tragedy that we have got more Aboriginal children coming into contact with our child protection system and going into care,” Mikakos told Guardian Australia. “We know that this is a product of dispossession, genocide and stolen generations policies. We need to do something radically different than what has happened in the past. Clearly the past approaches have not worked.”
Indigenous children are removed from their families and placed in out-of-home care at 10 times the rate of non-Indigenous children.
Children in out-of-home care are in turn more likely to go into the youth justice system, where Indigenous kids are jailed at 24 times the rate of non-Indigenous kids.
Bamblett said the agreement placed an obligation on Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to create an evidence base explaining how and why it was better for Aboriginal children to be looked after by Aboriginal organisations, and said that knowledge would help all children in care.
“Everyone knows that if you get it right for Aboriginal kids you get it right for all kids because you start to focus on the child, and not just the physical needs of the child but their cultural and social wellbeing as well,” she said. “And every child has a culture and a cultural base.”
