Aboriginal kids in care not about race: NT

THE NT attorney-general says claims that foster care is creating a new stolen generation are fanciful and misleading.

THE over-representation of Aboriginal children in foster care has nothing to do with race, the Northern Territory attorney-general says.

A senior researcher with the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at UTS, Paddy Gibson, said on Tuesday that Aboriginal families who lived a traditional lifestyle were being punished with the removal of their children in "a new stolen generation".

He said cultural practices such as long-term travel and overcrowding in homes when family visited were being construed by child protection services as neglectful and abusive of children.

However, NT Attorney-General and Minister for Children John Elferink said that assertion was "fanciful".

"It's more about strapping on a black armband than it is about the reality of child protection," he told AAP on Wednesday.

"To simply say an Aboriginal practice is something we target is misleading and inflammatory. If there is an Aboriginal practice that does constitute neglect, then, quite frankly, the human right of that child will come ahead of the cultural right."

As of June 30, 2013, there were five times more Aboriginal children (624) than non-Aboriginal children (126) in care, the NT Children's Commissioner's annual report shows, and while the number of non-Aboriginal children has plateaued, the number of Aboriginal children is rising.

Mr Elferink said it was not about race but due to the over-representation of Aboriginal people on welfare or in jail as a result of a federal reliance on welfare.

"(Welfare) says to its recipients, 'You are useless' ... That is entirely the wrong signal to send to any human being, irrespective of their cultural background."

The government was not overly intervening in cases of Aboriginal children in care, he said.

"Government does not make a good parent; institutions generally don't make good parents. They are the lesser of a number of evils," Mr Elferink said.

"We have generated in recent years this nebulous concept that somehow government can make children happy and give them normal lives, but what we are doing is protecting their fundamental human rights and we are flat-strapped doing that. We certainly don't need or desire to go out and drum up extra business."