Julia Irwin (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Standing Committee on Family and Human Services reported to the House last November on its inquiry into adoption of children from overseas. The committee made 27 recommendations and a number of those recommendations are included in this motion. As I have now had two opportunities to speak on the report—once in the House and also in the Main Committee—I will use the time in the debate on this motion to look at the potentially greater role for the Commonwealth to play in intercountry adoption.

While the committee heard many complaints against various state agencies, pointing at difficulties faced by parents seeking overseas adoption, the states’ responses could be summed up in the remarks of the New South Wales Department of Community Services, which said:

In New South Wales, we wish to return to a situation where the primary focus of our social work resources is on assessing and supporting the 105,000 children who are the subject of 216,000 risk of harm reports every year in New South Wales. That is what we need to focus on ... New South Wales does not consider it to be appropriate to deploy scarce casework resources to negotiate and administer a plethora of intercountry adoption agreements ...

New South Wales also concluded:

... it would be more appropriate and efficient for the commonwealth to assume responsibility for management of the intercountry adoption program.

This view was supported by adoptive parents. Mr Cec Pedersen, a former Vice-President of the International Adoptive Families of Queensland, outlined the need for the Commonwealth to take the primary role in managing Australia’s external relations in intercountry adoptions. Mr Pederson told the committee:

The area of adoption generally, but in particular intercountry adoption, is a very complex one. It is not a simple matter of procuring children from relinquishing countries. There is a very complex set of relationships. Most of the countries are very embarrassed about the fact that they cannot care for their own children. We see over the last couple of decades that a change of government in a country will also result in a change in policy. For example, Romania, with a change of government, made a decision that, instead of relinquishing children, they would care for them internally.

The sensitivities that are involved, I believe, are much better handled—the relationships are much better handled—by the foreign minister as part of the portfolio of discussions that they have. In some instances it may be that foreign aid is the most appropriate way of supporting children. Although I am an adoptive father, I have a very strong belief that the ideal situation is to care for the kids in their own country and culture; reality is something quite different. In some instances, foreign aid may be the preferred way to go. In other instances it may be sponsorship programs—whether or not that is for education or health reasons. In others, it is the facilitating of the adoption. I believe that, out of all the departments, the foreign minister has probably the best capacity to have those sensitive discussions at senior government to senior government ministerial level. The states do not have the resources and I do not believe they have the capacity to be able to have those discussions.

The frustration being felt by so many adoptive parents is understandable when you consider the following statement given to the committee by one state adoption official. As deputy chair of the committee I was absolutely appalled by this statement:

Parents have an agenda. They are desperate people and they believe it is their right to be able to do this, and it is not.  No one has the right to adopt a child. You can have an altruistic view that we are a global society and we should be looking after all our children, and that is great. And we do it successfully, but we also make sure we do it damned right.

I say to that state adoption official: you do not have to carry a child from within; you do carry that child from the heart. When this is the mind-set faced by adoptive parents, clearly there is a need for the Commonwealth to take a greater role in overseas adoption. With a sensitive understanding of the culture and political climate of relinquishing countries, the Commonwealth is far better placed to facilitate and regulate overseas adoption.

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