The head of one of Australia's best known child welfare agencies says NSW urgently needs to provide better services for Aboriginal children in care.
Louise Voight, CEO of Barnardos for 30 years, said on Friday the lack of support for Aboriginal children and for their carers - usually overburdened grandmothers and aunties - was a matter of extreme concern.
"NSW needs to do better," said Ms Voight.
On Friday she concluded her evidence to a royal commission hearing examining out-of-home care (OOHC) for up to 50,000 children across Australia.
OOHC covers foster care, care by relatives - known as kinship care - or small group residential care. It has replaced the large residential homes for children at risk.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is looking into how safe OHCC is for children. There have been 3639 reports of child abuse in OHCC in the last two years.
There are almost 20,000 children in care in NSW and 36 per cent of them are Aboriginal, but only eight of 60 agencies providing OHCC in the state are indigenous.
Ms Voight, who retires in July, said Aboriginal children in kinship care "have the very lowest of visitation (by caseworkers) the very least opportunity for support and they have the greatest need for that."
She would like to see better services, not just for child sexual assault support but across all the standards - such as education and health - "because they are the most left out group in NSW."
Ms Voight had been asked by the commission what aspect of OHCC needed urgent attention.
She said Aboriginal carers, often in poor health themselves, "have very significant numbers of children that they are devotedly caring for because they want to keep them as part of the family."
But the standards and support for kinship carers were not being met, she said.
Care capacity for Aboriginal kids needed to be urgently built either in indigenous or mainstream organisations, she said.
Earlier on Friday Ms Voight raised concerns a carers register planned for NSW might have the effect of locking Aboriginal carers out of the system.
The register, to be rolled out in July is a centralised database of people who are authorised, or who apply for authorisation, to provide out-of-home care for children at risk in NSW.
One of the proposed checks for carers was that they had clean drivers' licences for ten years.
Ms Voight said this could turn away desperately-needed Aboriginal carers.
The hearing continues before Justice Jennifer Coate.
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