Why can't Sunrise apologise?

The story reported that Assistant Minister for Children, David Gillespie, was calling for white families to be allowed to adopt abused Aboriginal children.

In her introduction Armytage said that “currently they [Indigenous children] can only be placed with relatives or other Indigenous families”.

That is flat-out wrong. There is no law preventing white families from fostering or adopting black kids.

About 30 per cent of Aboriginal children removed from their families are in non-Indigenous placements.

Unhindered by facts, on they galloped.

First up was Prue MacSween, a public relations expert-turned-performative TV reactionary.

MacSween said the issue was a “no-brainer”, which was true insofar as she didn’t engage hers before talking.

“We can’t have another generation of young Indigenous children being abused in this way and this conspiracy of silence and fabricated PC outlook that it’s better to leave them in this dangerous environment,” she snipped.

“It’s crazy to even contemplate that people could be arguing against this.”

She is right there: it would be crazy if anyone was arguing to leave Aboriginal children in abusive environments.

No one is.

Then came the remark that took the segment from being mildly horrifying to really out-of-bounds.

“Just like the first Stolen Generation, where a lot of children were taken because it was for their own wellbeing, we need to do it again perhaps.”

Her co-panellist Ben Davis was right behind her.

“What culture are they growing up and seeing? They’re getting abused and hurt and damaged,” he said, casting Aboriginal families as universally unfit.

As Richard Weston, chief executive officer of the Healing Foundation, which helps indigenous communities deal with the inter-generational trauma of forced removal, asked me this week: “How do they think Aboriginal children watching that segment might have felt about what they were saying?”

“The fact that three white ‘journalists’ or ‘commentators’ with no experience, knowledge or understanding of the sensitivity and complexity of Indigenous issues feel competent to comment freely on the lives of Aboriginal families … is negligent and racist.”

Now for some facts. Indigenous kids are seven times more likely to end up in child protection. They comprise 37 per cent of the long-term foster care population. 

Speaking on ABC radio Brisbane this week, Natalie Lewis, director of Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Protection Peak, said it was a “nonsense” to suggest Aboriginal children are left in abusive environments.

“It’s not about ignoring the fact that a child has been harmed and leaving them in that situation,” Lewis said.

“That’s a nonsense, that’s absolutely ridiculous … the issue around placement is not a contributing factor in making that [removal] decision.”

In other words, all at-risk children are (in theory, anyway) assessed in the same way when it comes to removing them from their families.

But once they have been removed, Indigenous children (who are hugely over-represented in child protection) are considered differently to non-Indigenous kids.

If they can’t be placed with a relative, an effort is made to find them an Indigenous carer from another community.

And there are very good reasons for this protocol.

MacSween would have to be one of the most ill-informed people on Australian television, but for a topic as sensitive and historically freighted as this, she and Davis could have at least Googled “Stolen Generations" on their smartphones while in the make-up chair before going on set.

If these two Indigenous affairs commentators cared as much about Aboriginal children as they claimed to, they would tear their hair with grief as they read about the terrified children who were removed from their homes, and the parents who lived through that most elemental fear - having your baby taken.

The idea that this historical tragedy would be re-perpetrated is abominable.

Just as importantly, to anyone who values progress, it wouldn’t work.

The inter-generational trauma of the Stolen Generations is widely acknowledged as a causative factor in the dysfunction of many Aboriginal communities.

We have 30 years of research on how much it damaged children and communities, but you don’t need a PhD to know that anyone who has grown up in trauma has a hard time being a functional parent themselves.

Some Aboriginal communities face that problem on a mass scale. To prevent it being endlessly re-visited on future generations, child protection authorities do everything they can to keep Indigenous kids with their families or community.

There is another reason why authorities try to keep kids in their families, and this goes for non-Indigenous and Indigenous kids: foster care can have terrible outcomes for children.

Notwithstanding the dedication of thousands of foster carers, they often come too late in a child's life, and the reality of foster care tends to involve a lot of churn. Consequently, foster care, overall, tends to lead to terrible outcomes for kids.

It’s so easy to say we should remove kids from bad families. The people who make these calls rarely say where they should go.

Foster children are much more likely to end up homeless, they have poorer mental health, and according to the Australian Law Reform Commission, they are 68 times more likely to appear in the Children’s Court than other children. Lawyers call them “crossover kids” because if they turn up in the protection arm of the Children’s Court, they often graduate to its criminal arm later.

But we are talking about adoption, not fostering, right?

Australian children are generally only adopted after years of living with a foster family. And contrary to the faux-pinions of MacSween and Davis, who seem to have formed their views from watching Diff’rent Strokes re-runs, white families are not lining up to adopt black kids.

Most states have enormous problems recruiting foster carers at all, which is why so many of the religiously affiliated agencies have long allowed gay couples to foster, even when their churches are not so cool with gay people generally.

I’m no fan of knee-jerk cultural cringe about how racist Australia is. Generally our society is remarkably tolerant and cohesive. But when this kind of racially offensive, ignorant garbage is served up for breakfast television, which speaks directly to middle Australia and has a daily audience of nearly half a million viewers, we have a problem.

In 2008 prime minister Kevin Rudd said sorry to the Stolen Generations on behalf of the nation. Maybe Sunrise could deign to apologise too.

Twitter: @JacquelineMaley

Follow Jacqueline Maley on Facebook