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THE Queensland Government has moved to make it easier to place abused indigenous children with white foster parents. It's the first time the Government has moved to "set in stone" the principle of white foster families for indigenous children, albeit as a last resort. Under the laws to be passed this year, adoptive parents will have to agree to help the children maintain links to their culture, family and heritage. But Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Protection Partnership chairwoman Rachel Atkinson said the news "scares the hell out of me". "We're moving back to the old days where a generation of kids grow up with limited identity," Ms Atkinson said. "It's another form of the stolen generation." She said the Government's process for recruiting indigenous foster parents was too rigid. In 2003, Premier Peter Beattie was accused of opening the way for another stolen generation by saying some indigenous children could be better off with white foster parents. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy Minister John Mickel said this week that he supported removing indigenous children from their families if they were being abused. A spokeswoman for Child Safety Minister Mike Reynolds said the new laws recognised that indigenous children should be placed with indigenous carers but that was not possible in every case. She said there were a number of placements options for indigenous children, with priority given to a member of a child's family, a member of the child's community or language group, an indigenous person compatible with the child's community or language group or another indigenous person. The new laws would refine the Indigenous Child Placement Principle by recognising that "placement in accordance with the hierarchy is not always possible, and provides guidance when non-indigenous carers must be considered". "This is subject to the additional stipulation that placement with a non-indigenous carer must not occur unless the department is satisfied he or she is committed to facilitating and maintaining contact with the child's family, community or language group and preserving and enhancing the child's sense of cultural identity," she said. Placing indigenous children with white families would be done if there wasn't appropriate indigenous foster parents or if the children were too close to perpetrators of abuse. An indigenous agency would have a say as to where abused children were sent and the Government was developing a campaign to recruit more indigenous foster carers. An audit into foster care in Queensland in 2003 revealed sickening statistics for indigenous children. Although they only make up about 5 per cent of the state's child population, they represented 23 per cent of children subject to the former families department's final orders and almost half of the indigenous children in care had been harmed. The Courier Mail (4-6-2005) Renee Viellaris |
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