Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

In the few minutes that are remaining in this debate on the report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services titled Overseas adoption in Australia, I begin by thanking the chair of the committee, the member for Mackellar, for her oversight of the hard work of this committee, together with the hardworking secretariat attached to the committee. One thing that is interesting about our work in parliament and that is often not seen by people outside this building is the fact that on many issues there can be bipartisan conclusions reached on issues that transcend party political positions. I was a member of the committee that looked into this issue of overseas adoption, and I must say that I learned a lot from it. I think we all look forward to learning as we go along—on a range of issues on which previously we may have had no particular expertise.

As with other inquiries that I have been on that have led to bipartisan recommendations—like the committee that produced the very memorable report Every picture tells a story, which is finally coming to be debated in this parliament in a bill that will be introduced this week—I want to commend all the members of the committee for really delving into an issue that hitherto had remained largely hidden from to public scrutiny. I myself was incredibly surprised at the massive decline in adoptions that has occurred in our country, particularly adoptions within Australia. Local adoptions dropped from a peak of over 9,000 back in the 1970s to only 73 in 2003-04. Yet, as we all know, there are tens of thousands of children in foster care and other forms of out-of-home care. When I read stories about the plight of some of these children, I sometimes wonder whether they would be better off having a secure adoptive family relationship in which to live.

In the course of our inquiry we uncovered a culture that has been very antiadoption. There are a number of reasons for this, but it seems that today adoption is not seen as a positive means of adding to a family and family formation. That cultural attitude, which is expressed at the level of a number of bureaucracies, is the wrong attitude. There are many people in Australia who would willingly open their homes to many children suffering very poor circumstances, with no hope of adoption in their own home countries.

There are currently about 300-400 overseas adoptions each year in Australia. But when we look at how we fare compared to other countries, the statistics say it all. Our per capita rate of adoption is less than one-third of the rate of most First World economies. I will give just one example. In 2003-04, there were 370 overseas adoptions in Australia, compared with 1,109 in Sweden, a country that has less than half of Australia’s population. We can see that there is something really amiss in the processes that lead to an outcome where Australia is faring so poorly compared to Sweden and where it has, as I say, only one-third of the adoption rate of most First World economies.

The recommendations that come from this committee address the reasons for this poor performance on the part of Australia and recommend ways in which the federal government can take a more proactive role as a signatory to the Hague convention and can renegotiate the Commonwealth-state agreement to provide better outcomes in this very important area. As the member for Mackellar rightly says in her resolution before the parliament, there are no reasons why children in adopted situations ought to be treated any differently from biological children in terms of access to benefits and entitlements. We did find a number of areas of discriminatory practices against children in adoptive relationships that we believe ought to be addressed by the federal government.

In the time that is left could I say that the four things that were drawn out in the motion moved by the member for Mackellar point to the issues, based on the evidence presented to the committee, and point the way forward for many more Australian couples to be able to adopt children from overseas and have that choice accepted as a positive choice in adding to family and family formation. (Time expired)

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