On the 21st anniversary of the Bringing them Home report, child protection policies that have dangerous resonance with past forced removals are being implemented. Australian community services ministers across the country have adopted a “permanency policy” for children in care that does not respect Aboriginal human rights but instead continues a long colonial tradition of removing Aboriginal and Torres Strait children from their families and culture.

Past removals have led to well-documented trauma, loss of family and culture and vulnerability to physical and sexual abuse. Yet much contemporary debate around permanency planning reignites racist ideas around “saving” Indigenous children from their “dysfunctional” families and culture through removal.

This is fuelled by representations in the media of Aboriginal children as needing to be saved through removal from their “dangerous” families. For example, there is a concentrated media focus on child sex abuse in Aboriginal communities yet Aboriginal children have a lower percentage of substantiated findings for sex abuse than non-Aboriginal children.

Ironically, at the same time, Indigenous child victims are treated as less valuable than other children harmed. For example, in contrast to the enormous police resources and sympathetic media coverage of the tragic and horrific deaths of non-Indigenous child sex abuse and homicide victims, such as Daniel Morcombe, Aboriginal communities are still fighting to gain justice for Aboriginal child victims like the three children murdered in the small New South Wales country town of Bowraville.

What’s more, important recommendations for reforms aimed at addressing Aboriginal child sexual abuse made by Aboriginal women for well over a decade are ignored. It is a sadly racist climate when the obvious needs to be stated: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children’s agencies and advocates would never support policy or practice which leaves children in unsafe situations.

Current policy around child placement risks facilitating the highest removal of Aboriginal children from their families in Australian history. Aiming for permanent placements is justified on the basis of the importance of stability for children who experience out-of-home care.

The importance of stability in relationships and the harm caused by multiple placement breakdowns is not contested. However, the artificial rapid exit of children from public support to private responsibility does not fulfil governments’ responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable children in our community.

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, it does not fulfil governments’ responsibility for reparation for past harms through non-repetition. Permanency planning reforms have been rejected by the peak Aboriginal children’s agency, the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC); by state and territory Aboriginal children’s agencies; and advocacy groups such as Grandmother’s Against Removals (GMAR).

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children will be disproportionately impacted by permanency planning laws and policy because they are grossly over-represented in all contact with child welfare systems. As at June 2017, 17,664 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children nationally were in out-of-home care, at a rate 10 times that of non-Indigenous children nationally.

The services and resources needed for Aboriginal parents to address issues to enable them to get their children back are often not available, or not available within the prescribed permanency time frames and are not culturally appropriate. For example, in NSW a permanency decision has to be made within six months if the child is under two and within a year if they are over two.

This is not enough time for birth families, usually mothers, to deal with problems such as homelessness, family violence and drug and alcohol abuse. Aboriginal community-based healing programs are critically needed but typically not on offer to parents whose children are removed. The placement principle, embedded in law in all states and territories, requires Indigenous children to be first placed with family, as a second option with an Aboriginal community member, as a third option with another Aboriginal person, and, as a final option, with a non-Aboriginal person.

Increasingly, departments are not placing children with their Indigenous family or in culturally appropriate placements. Many Aboriginal children are instead being placed with their non-Aboriginal kin as a first option. Aboriginal families, often grandparents, perceive bias in the choice of placement with non-Aboriginal relatives rather than them. In the decade since 2006, the rate of children being placed with Indigenous carers has fallen from 65% to 50%.

The problems which underlie contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families’ contact with child welfare departments, such as family violence, unemployment, homelessness and drug and alcohol abuse are often a result of previous government policies. These past policies impacted all aspects of Aboriginal peoples’ lives and allowed for racist and discriminatory conduct as a matter of course, resulting in high levels of intergenerational trauma and poverty.

Indigenous women are up to 35 times more likely to experience family and domestic violence than non-Indigenous women. Notwithstanding such high levels of victimisation, there has been a significant underinvestment by successive governments in culturally appropriate, community-based prevention and intervention responses. Many Aboriginal women facing family violence will not call police for assistance because they know it will lead to removal of their children. The UN special rapporteur on violence against women in her 2017 visit admonished the Australian government for continuing the removal of Aboriginal children from women who are victims of violence, policies she mistakenly thought were “belonging to the past”.

While permanency planning may provide an attractive solution to governments in terms of cost cutting and reduction in embarrassing child protection statistics, we need to take a closer look at the experience it is providing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people. Metrics and/or legal permanency are not the same as permanency in practice or safety and wellbeing.

As the royal commission found, children who experience neglect and abuse are more vulnerable to sex abuse. In this climate, the support for children in out-of-home care is being removed with artificially short permanency time frames. The need for rapid placement, in particular for children who have complex problems, not only undermines opportunities for restoration but also risks less than suitable matches between “permanent” carers and children, and increases the risk of abuse in care.

A new and holistic framework for Indigenous child welfare, based on principles of self-determination and reparations, is urgently required. We have examples of promising practice with trials in Victoria and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family-led decision making trials in Queensland.

Aboriginal children’s advocates’ and agencies’ voices, which have for decades called for systemic child welfare reforms, need to be heeded. Saying sorry means we must stop repeating the mistakes of the past, especially failing to address the contemporary consequences of colonial policies aimed at destroying the integrity of Aboriginal family and community life.