Diver Dan: I would suggest the primary reason for removing children from their parents is more an issue of failure of successive Governments to acknowledge and deal with, the difficulty in Australia for families who fall into poverty traps through unemployment and other social failures.

I would suggest the primary reason for removing children from their parents is more an issue of failure of the parents. Some parents just shouldn't have children. Rich, poor or in between, it doesn't matter. Drugs, alcohol, or just plain Bogan head banging Durs. These are the people that should be tested for suitability before they start breeding. Some people just need to be neutered to save the Gene Pool.

Harsh, Politically Incorrect, yep. Never-the-less true.

Pilger’s outstanding feature is his propensity to tell lies. He seems to particularly enjoy telling lies about aborigines, such as his confection about the Battle of Patonga, which,.in reality, never happened, but was asserted by this author, to be fact.

I started to read this article, until I gave it a few second’s thought, and desisted. Rubbish like this should never be read, when the time could be far more profitably spent staring into empty space.

"Pilgering" is the trait of getting people righteous and ANGRY - accuracy doesn't matter.

Pilger then makes money from his loyal audience - dreary old British socialists who need a bit of little revolution in their otherwise quiet lives.

We'll never pass the Pilger test - that test being Pilger's unchanged view of Australia in the 1960s.

Best to disregard this sun-lamp codger.

"Stolen" for good reason.

Case 1 Deborah Melville.

Foster child Deborah died in the dirt in a suburban Darwin backyard, propped against a trailer. She was suffering from a leg infection which had spread into the bone, and was visited by FACS case workers the day before she died. A FACS worker assured the child, “I am not here to take you away.”

A manslaughter trial and coronial inquiry was told that Deborah probably died in excruciating pain, and that she had been unable to control her bowel and bladder in the days before her death. Because of this, her carers, Denise Reynolds and Tony Melville, put her outside to sit in the dirt. One witness told the manslaughter hearing that Reynolds's had said that “If Deborah wanted to wet and soil herself, she can go outside and do it like an animal.”

Case 2 "Peter."

Seven week old Peter starved to death in the back of a hot car on the Stuart Highway in 2005. Peter was born to a drug using mother who’s six other children were known to FACS. In 2002, one of the children, a daughter, was taken (stolen?) and taken to Alice Springs Hospital at three months old, “haunted and looking like a bony skeleton.” Peter at death weighed 1kg less than his birth weight.

Case 3 "Joy."

Joy was assessed by health workers as being ‘at risk of severe harm”, and she was one of eight teenage girls in a remote mining town who were being sexually abused by a government official. The teenager, who was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, had a long history of neglect in her aboriginal family. As early as two, she was deposited at a local health clinic because nobody was looking after her. But repeated attempts by the police to get FACS to intervene to protect Joy came to nothing.

When I read this article my first thought was that I must live in a different country from the author. I live in the Kimberley now, having spent the past 44 years in the top end, surrounded by aboriginal people of all types, from full blood tribal to almost white urban. I have a huge indigenous family myself. My passion in life, after my family, is child protection, especially of indigenous children.
For the past four decades I have watched in disbelief as indigenous children are left in conditions the RSPCA wouldn't leave a dog in. Unfed, unwashed, uneducated, sexually and emotionally abused. Reported repeatedly to Child Protection officers by Health and Education department workers. But to no avail. Indigenous children are invariably left in conditions that wouldn't be tolerated for white children. The standard of care requirement has been set far lower for the indigenous than the nonindigenous.
One of the cases that horrified me was that of a malnourished 16month old boy from a remote out station who has been sodomised within 24 hours prior to his admission. This was not conjecture, he had the evidence still in his body, yet this poor infant was returned to his family, due to lack of evidence of a perpetrator. Imagine the outcry if that child had been white!
John Pilger is wrong, not enough children are being removed from the hell that is their life. We now have the abandoned generation.

It won't be too long now & John Pilger will accuse his fellow bad, bad whities for abandoning indigenous children by not taking them away from unfit parents, same goes for white parents but they're not in fashion.
Why not do a program on the victims of ALP policies over the past 40 years since Goaf ?