Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today in support of the private motion before the chamber. Adoption in Australia is in desperate need of reform on a nationwide basis. Only a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of participating in National Adoption Awareness Week. I would like to acknowledge in this chamber the hard work done by the founder, Deborra-lee Furness, CEO Jane Hunt and the board of Adopt Change. Their vision, their commitment to creating a better future for children in need and their support for families willing to adopt those children are inspirational. I met numerous families with wonderful stories to tell about adoption. I came away encouraged by the possibilities for adoption in this country.

Australia is a rich and prosperous nation. We enjoy a unique lifestyle and stable government. Political, social and economic opportunity abounds for all. As a nation, we have a generous migration program where we, the body politic, welcome people freely into our social, political and economic order, and they adopt Australia as their country. We practise adoption of sorts at a macro level. So it is troubling to read that Australia has one of the lowest adoption rates in the developed world. In fact, last year Australia had its lowest number of adoptions in history, with only 203 local adoptions and 114 intercountry adoptions. How do we explain this? What is at play here? It is true that demographic changes, changes in the levels of support for at-risk and vulnerable families and changes in societal attitudes toward single women that now ensure that single mothers can care for their children are perhaps behind the drop in numbers of adoptions.

In August 2015, Adopt Change commissioned independent research to better understand Australian attitudes to adoptions. Their findings are instructive. Let me highlight a few: 89 per cent of Australians view adoption in an overwhelmingly positive light and believe that adoption gives a child a better chance in life. Australian culture is receptive to adoption. It is positive towards adoption. My own experience with adoption is illustrative.

When my wife and I applied for the adoption process through the Department for Child Protection in Western Australia just over two years ago, we found that family, friends, work colleagues—even strangers—were very supportive of our plans to adopt. Not a single person counselled us against it. The Western Australian Department for Child Protection were very helpful, but our experience with department culture, especially during the introductory seminars, was not overly encouraging. We got a lot of negative stories about the cost and the time and all the caveats that make adoption difficult. In fact 17 per cent of the people involved in the research by Adopt Change indicated that they had actively looked into the adoption process or given serious thought to adoption. However, of that 17 per cent, 87 per cent did not proceed with adoption.

There is a large disconnect between Australians attitudes in the culture and those that you encounter in the bureaucracy that administer adoption. The adoption process is framed in negative terms. The testimonies that we received during the initial seminars were largely negative. For us, it felt like only the strong survive. I do not deny the legitimacy of some of the stories that came out about adoption but certainly we should be encouraging people to adopt.

So I suggest that we need a cultural shift in the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy should be looking to prepare, equip and encourage people who are keen to adopt. As it is, it is already a very emotional time, when you feel vulnerable and uncertain about the future. I might add that there were two people in WADCP who I would like to publicly acknowledge, Linda Joye and Mandy Birch, who do a great job and who supported us through our process.

The hard reality is that there are 15,000 children in Australia who have been in and out of care homes for two years or more. They are not living with family. Almost half of those children who can be adopted move six or more times in their life in foster care. As we know, impermanence harms them; relationally and developmentally, they end up compromised as adults. This is not good at all. We need to do more to make adoption easier so that we look after the children who are in desperate need. There are kids desperate for security and stability. There are parents committed to helping. And we need to make it easier. At the moment there is a five-year wait time in Australia; in the US it is 18 months on average.

So I support this motion and I call on the federal government to push this issue at the Council of Australian Governments. We desperately need reform on a nationwide basis. I back this private motion.

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