The rate at which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are placed in out-of-home care has risen since governments committed to cutting it, and now sits above where it started. The national figure was 47.3 children per 1,000 in 2019. In 2025 it was 52.2.
That is Target 12 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, which commits every Australian government to reducing the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in out-of-home care by 45 per cent by 2031. The Productivity Commission, which reports on the agreement, assesses the target as worsening and records a high level of confidence in that assessment.
The National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People, Sue-Anne Hunter, put that trajectory to the Garma Festival on Friday morning. "We could possibly be looking at another Stolen Generation," she said.
Hunter, a Wurundjeri and Ngurai Illum Wurrung woman, told the festival that children inside the system are not heard. "The system does not listen to our children," she said. "They do not feel safe in these systems." She said the answers are not missing. "The solutions are there. We need to listen to the people who have the lived experience."
Hunter is calling for compliance with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle, which sets the order of preference for where a removed child is placed, and for implementation of the recommendations of the Bringing Them Home report. That report was tabled in 1997 and made 54 recommendations.
The children counted in Target 12 are removed and placed by state and territory agencies, working under eight separate sets of legislation. The Commonwealth reports the national number and does not remove or place a single child. The agreement that set the target carries no penalty for missing it.
The Placement Principle applies to Indigenous children specifically, and the case for it is that placement with family and community produces better outcomes than the alternative. The case against separate mechanisms is that the measure that matters is whether a child is safe, and that a system unable to keep children safe will not be repaired by changing the order in which it places them. Both arguments were in front of governments when the target was written in 2020.
Neither argument explains the direction of the number. The Productivity Commission records the 2025 rate as higher than 2024 and higher than the 2019 baseline, in a period when every jurisdiction was formally signed up to bringing it down.
Garma runs to Monday. The 2025 reading is the most recent on the Productivity Commission's dashboard, and the target date is 2031.
