Parliament of Victoria | Legislative Council | Second Reading
3 March 2026
David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan Region):
I rise to make a contribution to the Children, Youth and Families Amendment (Stability) Bill 2025. The bill acquits recommendation 25 of the Yoorrook for Justice report that the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005 be amended to allow the Children’s Court of Victoria to extend the timeframe of a family reunification order where it is in the child’s best interest to do so.
Under the current legislation, parents are only given 12 or at most 24 months to have their children returned to their care. After this period they can be permanently removed. These family reunification orders were introduced in 2016 under the permanency reforms of the previous government. Prior to that time they did not exist.
The Yoorrook hearings heard that having the strict timeframe of two years was not enough time for Aboriginal parents to fulfil the requirements imposed by the courts to get their kids back. The timeframe disproportionately impacts Aboriginal families, compounded by the inevitable delay in being able to access the necessary services and supports.
The last thing we want is for more Aboriginal children to be taken from their families. We have heard many times in this place that these children are over 20 times more likely to be removed from their mothers than other children.
This critical reform will go some way to addressing the significant over-representation of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care. The bill also removes adoption from the hierarchy of case planning stability objectives and replaces the term ‘permanency’ with ‘stability’ throughout the act.
Legalise Cannabis Victoria will be supporting this bill. There are some amendments that the Greens will be moving to more fully acquit the Yoorrook recommendations, and we will also be supporting those. As I said, this bill rolls back some of the provisions enacted in 2014 through the Children, Youth and Families Amendment (Permanent Care and Other Matters) Act 2014.
The amendments no doubt were made in good faith to address some of the failings of the child protection system, and indeed the provisions around addressing the cultural support needs of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care were welcomed. However, there were at the time concerns about the bill’s lack of consultation and how it would affect Aboriginal families.
Stakeholders, including the Law Institute of Victoria, the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, Djirra and others, predicted that the permanency reforms and the introduction of family reunification orders with fixed time limits would adversely impact Aboriginal families in particular and see more children permanently removed, a continuation of the failed colonial interventions.
Stakeholders also pointed to the lack of commensurate funding for those foundational supports that would give Aboriginal families at least a fighting chance of meeting the rigid reunification conditions. A 2020 report by Victoria Legal Aid into the impacts of the permanency amendments found that:
‘… the intention of the amendments – timely, safe, permanent homes for children who need state intervention and prompt support for families at risk – are not being achieved.’
The status quo has not been working for quite a while.
I have raised in the house the issue of pre-birth child protection orders where the department can remove a newborn baby – they just turn up at the maternity ward and the mother has had no idea that her unborn child was under a protection order. She has not even been given the opportunity, much less the support, to address whatever issue is the subject of that order, so the child is removed.
Currently, every day a child is out of parental care counts against the parent. These periods are counted cumulatively and retrospectively. If a parent has had a child out of their care for more than 24 months, the Children’s Court has no power to make an order for reunification. They could still return the child to parental care, but where a staged reunification is more appropriate, they are unable to do that.
The Children’s Court is denied the ability to consider, for instance, whether the lack of services – housing, alcohol and other drugs or family violence supports – has prevented a parent from meeting that 24-month deadline.
This is what that might look like in practice. Let us say that a mother had her child removed on 1 January 2023. The clock starts ticking. Twelve months later, in 2024, the child is made the subject of a family reunification order by the Children’s Court, which will expire on 30 January 2025. The child is still out of family care when the matter comes before the Children’s Court for the final contest in January 2025, so the child has been out of parental care for just over two years by then.
The mother has been on the waiting list for housing for over 12 months, which was the biggest impediment to getting her child back, but by 2025 she is doing extremely well. She is engaging with a variety of services.
She has been meeting the conditions for overnight stays – namely, that she continue her ongoing engagement with services – so she is ready to begin the gradual transition of having her child back in her care. But the department decide that the child is doing well in the care of the non-Aboriginal carers, and by now that 24-month timeframe for reunification has expired, so they seek a care-by-secretary order, which removes all parental and custody rights and confers them on the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) to the exclusion of all other people and agencies. The Children’s Court has no ability to extend the family reunification order and really has no choice but to grant that order.
Care-by-secretary orders are disastrous in operation for Aboriginal children as they usually mean a significant drop in contact arrangements. The DFFH will only permit contact four to 12 times per year under these orders, and that is simply not enough. The decision can only be challenged by a parent in VCAT, but there is no legal aid funding for such applications, and of course there is an extremely long wait period for VCAT review.
We will be supporting the amendment to reinstate the power of the Children’s Court to make conditions on care-by-secretary orders. Another amendment will remove the requirement for the Children’s Court to consider the extent to which a parent of the child has engaged with services and supports necessary for the safe reunification with the child and other conditions.
This will mean that any extension of the timeframe is based on the best interests of the child alone and not on some arbitrary timeline, bearing in mind once again the barriers to accessing services and housing particularly faced by Aboriginal parents. The bill returns authority to the Children’s Court to make decisions based on the best interests of the child, and we commend the government for implementing the recommendation. That directive to make decisions based on the best interests of the child is key.
We have had several meetings with the minister’s office. I do want to thank the minister, her office and Liam for the very thorough briefings and responses to our questions. We are satisfied with the process and consultation undertaken in developing this bill. Permanent removal must be a last resort and way, way down the hierarchy of options, and we need to get serious about resourcing services that support families to thrive.
I want to finish with a quote from Antoinette Braybrook, the CEO of Djirra, which is an Aboriginal-controlled organisation that provides culturally safe services, including legal advice and representation, to support Aboriginal women who experience family violence:
“Arbitrary reunification deadlines are cruel and punitive. Ignoring the reality of Aboriginal women surviving violence, homelessness and systemic racism is itself a form of systemic violence. Healing cannot happen on a government stopwatch.”
We hope this bill results in a decrease in children being removed from their families and more practical and timely support for parents to allow them to resume permanent care of their child as soon as possible. The removal of a child should always, always be the last resort. Families need support, not punishment. I commend the bill to the house.
[Bill passed without dissent]
