The question we should be asking is not simply whether the Australian child protection system is failing children. It is whether the community can reasonably be expected to trust government to make decisions about children when government departments entrusted with their safety cannot demonstrate that they can adequately govern themselves.

That question becomes even more confronting when we consider the children at the centre of the system. Children who are already vulnerable, children who may have experienced trauma, and Aboriginal children who remain disproportionately represented in child protection.

Recent Freedom of Information documents revealed that over two dozen employees of one Government Department meant to protect Children were stood down between July 2025 and February 2026. 

That Department employs around 2,600 people, and the government is at pains to point out that being directed away from work can happen for a range of reasons, including performance, misconduct, medical incapacity or the loss of an essential qualification.

Two employees were terminated for misconduct during the period covered by the FOI documents, while two others were dismissed after losing essential qualifications.

None of this necessarily means that every person stood down was a danger to children. It would be wrong to suggest that. But that is not the point.

The point is that when the state takes responsibility for children, particularly when it exercises the extraordinary power to remove children from their families, it assumes an enormous responsibility. The community has every right to expect the highest possible standards of accountability, professional oversight and transparency from the department exercising that power.

And if government cannot get those fundamentals right within its own organisation, why should families be expected to simply trust that government will get the far more consequential decisions about their children right?

This is not an argument against child protection. It is an argument for a child protection system that is genuinely worthy of the authority it has been given.

The problem becomes even more significant when we see that one Department made the decision to scrap it's social worker registration scheme. The scheme, legislated in 2021, was designed to provide another layer of professional accountability.

Registered social workers, or those working under the supervision of registered social workers, would have been required for comprehensive psychosocial assessments and interventions in high-risk settings, including situations where social workers have the authority to remove children.

Organisations would also have been required to report complaints and dismissals involving registered social workers to the Social Worker Registration Board.

That system has now been abandoned.

And with it goes the Social Worker Registration Board, which had been established with $4.7 million in government funding, as well as an Aboriginal Authority intended to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices, knowledge, wisdom and experience were embedded in the system.

That last part should concern every Australian. 

Because Aboriginal families have particularly good reason to question whether government systems can be trusted to make decisions about their children.

The history of child removal in this country is not ancient history. The consequences of government intervention in Aboriginal families are still being experienced today. Aboriginal children continue to be disproportionately represented in child protection, making culturally informed oversight and Aboriginal participation not an optional extra, but an essential component of a system that claims to act in children's best interests.

Former SA Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People April Lawrie, who was one of four Indigenous leaders appointed to the Aboriginal Authority, described the abolition of the scheme and the loss of the authority as a missed opportunity to address that disproportionate representation. She also questioned why the government was not drawing the connection between professional misconduct and its potential impact on vulnerable children.

That is the heart of the issue.

Government repeatedly tells communities that decisions are being made in the best interests of children. But trust does not come from saying the right words. Trust comes from building systems that demonstrate accountability when things go wrong.

It comes from independent oversight. It comes from professional registration. It comes from culturally competent practice. It comes from listening to the people who have lived experience of the system. And it comes from being prepared to accept that government itself must be scrutinised.

The Australian Association of Social Workers has argued that registration is fundamentally about safety and accountability, including ensuring that people who commit professional or ethical offences can be removed from the workforce so that others are not exposed to the same risks.

That seems like an entirely reasonable expectation when the people involved are making decisions that can fundamentally alter the lives of children and families.

Government departments have enormous resources available to them. They have legislation, public servants, executives, legal teams, policies, training programs, funding and ministerial oversight. They have far more institutional power than the families who find themselves on the other side of a child protection decision.

So when those departments fail, the answer cannot simply be to ask families to trust them anyway.

And this is where the issue extends beyond Aboriginal families.

If a government department with thousands of employees and significant public funding cannot ensure that its own workforce is properly accountable, supervised and professionally regulated, then every Australian should be asking how that same government can be trusted to decide what is best for somebody else's child.

The burden of proof should not sit with families.

It should sit with government.

Families should not have to demonstrate why they deserve to keep their children. Government should have to demonstrate why its intervention is necessary, that its workforce is competent, that its decisions are culturally safe, and that there are genuinely independent mechanisms to hold it accountable when it gets things wrong.

That is particularly important for Aboriginal communities, where government intervention in family life carries the weight of generations of forced removal and institutional control.

You cannot ask communities to trust a system simply because it calls itself a child protection system.

You have to earn that trust.

And if government wants the authority to remove children from their families, then it should be held to a standard far higher than simply having policies that say children's safety is its "top priority".

The real test is whether the system is capable of protecting children from harm and protecting children and families from the failures of the system itself.

Because if government cannot adequately regulate, supervise and hold accountable the people working inside its own child protection department, the question is no longer just whether the system is protecting children.

It is whether the system has earned the right to make those decisions in the first place.

The realiity is that Child Protection in this country is so bad that a recent United Nations Security Council Bid was rejected by Aboriginal Voices, and the issue isn't restricted to just one state.