And oftentimes excusing of a
fault
Doth make the fault the worse
by the excuse,
As patches set upon a little
breach
Discredit more in hiding of
the fault
Than did the fault before it
was so patch’d.
King John, Act four, Scene two
In his 2009 weird fiction/crime novel, The City and the
City, British author China Miéville sets his narrative in two
geographically overlapping fictional European cities which jointly cooperate in
ensuring that their citizens do not ‘see’ or acknowledge the institutions and
residents of the other. An enigmatic supervisory organisation known as ‘The
Breach’ maintains the separation, and ‘breachers’ (ie citizens who fail to
maintain the mandatory degree of separation) are taken into custody and face an
unspecified punishment and generally are never seen again.
I was reminded of Miéville’s novel when, while following an
ongoing and as yet entirely unresolved political crisis in Western Australia, I
decided to take a closer look at the status and underlying basis for the Closing
the Gap target related to family violence and child protection as laid out on
the Productivity Commission dashboard. These are two separate issues, but are
clearly often related, and impact on the life circumstances and opportunities
of those affected in synergistic ways.
According to the Dashboard (link
here), target 13 is framed as follows:
Target13: By 2031, the
rate of all forms of family violence and abuse against Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander women and children is reduced at least by 50%, as progress
towards zero.
Nationally in 2018-19, 8.4% of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander females aged 15 years and over
experienced domestic physical or face-to-face threatened physical harm (figure
CtG13.1).
There is no new data since the
baseline year of 2018-19.
The data for the baseline was sourced from the ABS 2018-19
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health survey. A further survey,
the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey (NATSIHS)
2022–23 was conducted by the ABS between August 2022 and March 2024. For
reasons I do not comprehend, this survey apparently didn’t collect data on
family violence. The absence of regular data updates makes the notion that
this target is being actively monitored by policymakers nonsensical.
The Dashboard entry for Target 13 does include a section on
Supporting Indicators, which includes links to actual hospitalisation data for Indigenous
women and children. This allows us to at
least get a sense of the scale and import of the issues facing women and
children in relation to violence and family safety. Taking just the latest year
available (2023-24), Indigenous women (aged 15yrs plus) were hospitalised due to
domestic violence at a rate of 783/100,000, and Indigenous children at a rate
of 43/100,000. In the NT (a rough proxy for remote regions), those two figures
were 4041/100,000 and 143/100,000. In other words, NT Indigenous women’s
hospitalisations were five times worse than the national Indigenous rate.
According to an AIHW webpage on the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Health Performance Framework (link
here):
First Nations females were 24
times as likely to be hospitalised for assault as non-Indigenous females
between July 2021 and June 2023. The difference between the two populations was
largest in Remote and very remote areas where First Nations females were 48
times as likely to be hospitalised due to assault as non-Indigenous females.
[Note
this is for assault generally, not by a domestic partner].
According to the Dashboard (link
here), target 12 is framed as follows:
Target 12: By 2031,
reduce the rate of overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
children (0–17 years old) in out-of-home care by 45%
Nationally in 2025, the rate
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aged 0–17 years in out‑of‑home
care was 52.2 per 1,000 children in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
population (figure CtG12.1).
The 2025 rate is above
the rate in 2024, and it is an increase from 47.3 per 1,000 children
in 2019 (the baseline year).
Nationally, based on progress
from the baseline, the target is worsening. This assessment is provided with a
high level of confidence.
The data underpinning Figure CtG 12.1 shows the non-Indigenous
national rate as 4.5 per 1000 children in 2025, down from 5.1 per 1,000
children in 2019. In other words, the national Indigenous rate in 2025 is 11.6
times the national rate.
If you then dig deeper within the available
disaggregations, there are high level summaries of the progress of each
jurisdiction over the period 2019 (the baseline used) to 2025. In the NT, the
rate for Indigenous children has been falling and was 29.5 per 1,000 in 2025.
This is mirrored by a clear fall in non-Indigenous rates, from 3.0 in 2019 to
2.3 in 2025. The data suggests an across-the-board reluctance to remove
children in the NT for reasons that are unclear. It is also unclear whether
this is a jurisdictional policy issue, or a wider trend across remote regions
generally.
In relation to child protection, there is a deeper
conceptual problem which appears to have attracted no attention in public
discussion around these issues. It is embedded within the Closing the Gap framework
but also has a wider prevalence in ways of thinking about child protection
generally, and within Indigenous contexts especially.
Identifying the rate of child removals as measured by data
and/or trends in out of home care is an important indicator of a problem. It is
akin to a doctor taking your temperature or blood pressure; it provides an
indication of whether a problem of some kind exists. The data available
nationally and across all jurisdictions makes clear that we do have a problem;
but it doesn’t tell us what the nature of that problem is. To go a step further
and make reducing the level of child removals a policy target in its own
right is deeply problematic for at least three reasons: first, it creates
incentives within agencies responsible for child welfare and safety to not
remove children when their safety is at risk and removal is required; second,
it addresses the symptoms and not the causes of the underlying family issues;
and third, it incentivises governments to not focus on those causes and
simultaneously creates expectations that governments are both responsible for
and have the capacity to solve all these issues.
What then is the takeout from this relatively deep dive
into the data in plain view on the Productivity Commission dashboard and other
Commonwealth webpages?
One might draw the following conclusions:
· In
terms of establishing a policy target for family violence, the current Closing
the Gap Framework is not fit for purpose (an argument laid out in some detail
in this November 2025 post: link
here);
· There
is an urgent need to reformulate the target if the current architecture for Closing
the Gap is to be maintained (an issue which I have recently argued would be
unwise: link
here);
· There
is a need to understand the drivers of family violence in remote regions much
better than we currently do. The issues are of a different dimension in
remote regions, and thus arguably are of a different nature, and thus have
different causes and drivers.
· The
overwhelming conclusion however is that, as with hyper-incarceration (link
here), the nation is confronted by a national crisis of monumental
proportions in relation to family safety, domestic violence and child protection,
and at present despite all the rhetoric around closing the gap the nation is bereft
of an effective national policy response.
What this quick overview of the state of play in relation
to child protection and family violence suggests, especially when considered in
conjunction with the rhetorical ubiquity of ‘commitments’ to closing the gap is
that our policymakers, and crucially our political system, are unable to ‘see’
what is in plain view. Data and analysis appear to count for little; pushed
aside by self-interest, the influence of interest groups, and the
incomprehension of the wider electorate in the face of the barrage of ongoing
change that pervades the modern world. What appears to have been lost is a deep-seated
and disinterested commitment to the wider public interest.
Emotion cuts through where analysis fails
Over the past two months The Australian has
published a flurry of deeply concerning revelations concerning the
circumstances leading up to the murder of three children by their Indigenous mother,
Margaret Hawke in July 2022 in Port Hedland in WA. Margaret Hawke was
subsequently convicted of murdering her children and sentenced to life imprisonment
and will serve a minimum of 25 years (link
here).
Following the deaths, the children's grandmother Dorothy
Papertalk called for an inquest, but this was denied by then Coroner Phil
Urquhart in July 2025. His reasons were provided to Ms Papertalk in a 13-page
letter where he argued that an inquest was not in the public interest, and that
he considered that the children’s deaths were not ‘predictable or preventable’.
In his view ‘there was nothing [the Communities Department] could have done
differently’. Mr Tony Buti, the WA Attorney General argued consistently that he
could not overturn the Coroner’s decision without fresh evidence. In response,
the WA Opposition introduced a Bill into the Upper House seeking to clarify the
Attorney General’s powers to order a coronial inquest.
The Australian’s extensive
coverage, which amounts to in excess of fifty reports, opinion articles and editorials
(likely totalling in excess of 50,000 words) began when it uncovered evidence
that internal communications within the Department of Communities (the agency
responsible for child welfare) identifying that the children were at risk of
harm had lain unseen for over a week over the period when the deaths occurred.
The revelations expanded to report issues in Port Hedland
relating to inter alia unsupervised Indigenous children living in public
housing, allegations of sexual abuse of young girls by older men, reports that
other agencies such as the police and the housing agency were aware of issues
that were not addressed by the child protection staff. Coverage initially focussed
on the WA Government’s refusal to reverse the coroner’s decision in 2025 to refuse
an inquest and then segued into criticism and a political debate centred on the
alleged failure of various ministers including the Premier to visit Hedland and
respond appropriately to the crisis.
A wide range of commentators were also quoted or given
space to express their views, including former Federal and State politicians, prominent
Indigenous commentators, legal experts, and local community members most
notably the children’s grandmother Ms Papertalk. At one point, the Commonwealth
Minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, called on the
Premier to initiate a review or inquiry, and Liberal Party Shadow minister for
skills and training, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price made comments arguing that the
Commonwealth should take over responsibility for Indigenous child protection.
In recent days several developments have occurred. In
response to the mounting public pressure, the WA Ombudsman released details of
an investigation he undertook in 2025 into the deaths of the children (link
here and link
here). The Commonwealth National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Children and Young People has announced that she will undertake
an independent review into the Pilbara Child Protection system (link
here) and has released terms of reference (link
here).
On Thursday 15 October 2026, Mr Buti finally announced that
after personally reviewing the relevant files, he had decided that there was
new evidence and had written to the coroner to request a Coronial Inquiry be
undertaken. He also announced an internal review of the Coroners Act (link
here and link
here).
There is clearly a way to go with these issues. The
Ombudsman Report is essentially a summary of what they considered but contains almost
zero substantive analysis. The three recommendations are so vague as to be
meaningless. For example, suggesting that the Department of Communities
develops a supervision
framework and implementation plan that includes the monitoring and evaluation
of case practice supervision for frontline child safety practitioners; and
takes steps to strengthen the
effectiveness of current strategies for frontline child protection service
delivery when the number of child safety practitioners in a District falls
below critical staffing levels.
strike me as hollow and inconsequential to the point of
absurdity. The third recommendation to the Police is similarly pointless. The review,
completed in November 2025, appears more like a box-ticking exercise than a
serious analysis of what transpired and what might be done better going
forward. The Inquest will likely take at least a year and may raise numerous
wider issues. The WA Government has now bent to the extraordinary public pressure.
While a Coronial Inquest is welcome, and necessary, it will by definition focus
narrowly on the deaths of the children. Important as that will be, it is not an
adequate response.
An editorial in The Australian on 9 October 2026 was
headlined: Inquest into child murders in Hedland only the start. It
argued that the official response to The Australian’s reports of widespread
abuse and neglect was ‘lamentable’. The editorial went on to say”
It is part of a bigger failing
by governments at all levels. It reflects a loss of moral authority not
confined to Indigenous affairs.
According to a statement issued by Catherine Liddle of
SNAICC (link
here), the WA Government commissioned from SNAICC a policy roadmap to guide
implementation of its Closing the Gap commitments in 2022, which was finalised
in September 2023, but then effectively shelved. According to Liddle:
The road map is a
comprehensive way forward, to address key drivers of children coming into
contact with the child protection system – poverty, housing insecurity and
homelessness, family and domestic violence, a lack of culturally appropriate
family-support services, and institutional racism.
But the government mothballed
its own report, ignoring the recommendations developed by the state’s
Aboriginal community and its years of expertise, while Aboriginal children
continue to be at risk. The government has never even made a formal response to
the report.
The Commonwealth National Commissioner’s review appears
designed to reflect Indigenous voices but given its tight time frames and the
wider pressures on the Commissioner, I suspect it will struggle to come to
terms with the underlying drivers of severe dysfunction across multiple fronts and
is unlikely to be taken seriously by either level of Government.
The Australian and
its reporters, especially Ros Thomas, have clearly been fearless in pursuing
this complex array of related issues and appear unlikely to let go quickly. I
don’t agree with the underlying tone of some of the coverage and opinion pieces
offered. Nevertheless, in my view, The Australian’s reports have made a remarkably
important contribution to raising the profile of these issues.
It is unfortunate that the extraordinary data available in
plain sight on the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap dashboard does not
engender an equivalent level of concern: emotion invariably trumps
analysis. However, if that concern is to
be transformed into substantive and effective policy change there will eventually
be a need for hard-headed and rigorous analysis to be fed into the
considerations of policymakers and governments. It strikes me that the issues
raised by The Australian are a microcosm of much more fundamental challenges
impacting Indigenous families nationally, and particularly across remote
Australia. We should not lose sight of that fact.
While I am loath to make recommendations that are unlikely
to be taken up, it is time for a serious, open and transparent national review
process run by a capable, qualified and independent reviewer or reviewers aimed
squarely at devising a new policy paradigm for family safety and child
protection. Such an inquiry would necessarily examine afresh the assumptions on
all sides of the political debate that have guided policy approaches to date. In
this context, I will mention just two words that suggest just how difficult the
challenge will be: alcohol and gambling.
There are no short term or easy solutions, and it seems
clear that our existing political institutions are incapable of taking the
nation forward in addressing these issues. Accordingly, there will need to be new
institutions created which are beyond the reach of short-term politicking, and
which are based on transparency and accountability to both Indigenous Australians
and the wider public.
The alternative is more of the same: more political
patchwork; more social and bureaucratic dysfunction; more violence against
women; more innocent children maimed, killed, and irreparably damaged and
harmed. In such a world, we all become ‘breachers’,
breaching the trust we inherited from the architects of our political
institutions, our forebears, and the trust we hope to pass on to our
grandchildren. We should all expect much more of those who resort to violence,
especially men, but those expectations ring hollow if we don’t expect more of
ourselves in the face of outbreaks of extreme violence which serve to
complement and reinforce the confronting and long-standing publicly available data
which once truly ‘seen’ for what it is cannot be ‘unseen’.
16 October 2026
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