Family Matters Report 2025: Strong, loved and full of potential

Family Matters 2025 is the tenth edition of the report. For more than a decade, the report has amplified calls from communities for accountability and contributed to real change, increased transparency about children and families’ experiences in child protection systems, and helped drive national reform, including playing a key role in the establishment of the National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People.

This year’s report shows that while Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled early intervention, prevention and family support programs are keeping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children safe and connected to family, they remain critically underfunded. Case studies throughout the report demonstrate how Aboriginal-led services are strengthening families, keeping children connected to culture and improving lifelong health, learning and wellbeing.

Key Findings in 2025

Family Matters Report 2025 finds that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children continue to be disproportionately represented at all stages of child protection systems across Australia; systems that fail to keep children safe and connected to family, community and culture.

Family Matters 2025 finds that:

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are 6× more likely to be in out-of-home care or on third-party parental responsibility orders than non-Indigenous children.
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander infants are 9× more likely to be placed in out-of-home care than non-Indigenous infants.
• Only 3% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care or on third-party parental responsibility orders were reunified with family, compared to 10.1% of non-Indigenous children.
• 6%of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children exited out-of-home care to other circumstances, including independent living, homelessness and detention.
• Only 6%of total child protection expenditure was spent on family support services, meaning roughly 16 cents of every $1 is invested in prevention.
• Nationally (excluding WA), only 8% of child protection spending was directed to ACCOs, with most jurisdictions spending under 10% of their child protection budgets through ACCOs.
• 1% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care were placed with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander relatives/kin.

These findings indicate that as a nation, we are still far from achieving Target 12 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap — which aims for a 45% reduction in over-representation by 2031 — and that there is an urgent need for system-wide reform, greater investment in prevention and family support, and the scale-up of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led, community-controlled, culturally safe services to keep children safe in family, community and culture.