The cycle was built. So it can be ended.

An Aboriginal child in Victoria is taken into care at about twenty times the rate of a non-Aboriginal child. More than one in ten have been removed from family. Nationally, the numbers are still climbing.

Care rarely ends gently. In the first year after leaving, around half of young people are without a home, without work, in the justice system, or raising a baby of their own.

And the children of parents who were removed are more likely to be removed in turn. The pattern doubles back on itself.

This is what a system produces. It is not what a child is. Systems are built by people, and people can build them differently.

Culture is protective. A child who knows where they come from stands steadier in the world.

Connection comes first. To Country, to kinship, to Elders, to a name and a history that are theirs. Everything else is built on it.

The cycle runs across generations, so the work has to run across a life. Not a weekend. Not a program that opens a child up and then leaves.

And the system has to move too. Heal one child while ten more are removed, and the count never changes.

End the cycle. A generation of young Aboriginal people who leave care grounded in who they are and pointed at what comes next, and who never watch their own children taken the way they were.

As the system shifts, fewer children are removed at all.

This is our share of two national goals: Closing the Gap Target 13, and the Family Matters goal of ending over-representation within a generation, by 2040.