ALECOMM

More than 8 per cent of Aboriginal children in NSW have been removed from their families, a situation the peak body for indigenous childcare services is now openly comparing to another Stolen Generations.

The Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care will this week launch a national campaign to reduce the numbers of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care, calling for greater investment in early intervention and support services for struggling families.

"Removing children seems to be a knee-jerk, almost first response," said SNAICC chief executive Frank Hytten. "We need to work much, much harder at the prevention end and the reunification end."

Nationally, 55.1 Aboriginal children per 1000 are in out-of-home care, according to the latest figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. That compares with 5.4 non-indigenous children per 1000.

Indigenous child removals are highest in NSW, by a large margin, at 83.4 children per 1000.

This compares with 20.7 indigenous children in out-of-home care in the Northern Territory, which has the lowest rates of removal nationally and where Children's Commissioner Howard Bath has criticised the threshold for taking children into care as "obscenely low".

Ms Goward said the high rate of removal of children in NSW reflected the state's low threshold for triggering a removal, and a "risk averse" culture within DOCS.

"There's no explanation for why our removal rates should be higher than other jurisdictions," Ms Goward said.

"We've got to get much better informed about which children we take and remove into kinship care, and much better informed about how we make wise judgments in that area."

Mr Hytten said he accepted that "stolen generation" was a "very loaded term".

"The Stolen Generation was built on a deliberate racist policy of removing Aboriginal children because they were Aboriginal, and that is not, at least not openly, happening now," he said.

"But the fact is that the de facto nature of what is happening now results in the same place."

NSW has introduced a policy known as Practice First, aimed at turning around the pro-interventionist culture in DOCS.

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