Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Given this is the first opportunity I have to welcome the new member for Wentworth, it's a great pleasure to see her sitting on the benches here today. I would like thank the chair and the committee for this opportunity to make some remarks about Labor members' dissenting report. I'm joined by all of the Labor colleagues who participated in the committee process; the member for Macarthur and the member for Lindsay are here today. I'd like to thank everybody who wrote submissions to this inquiry and took the time and effort to appear before it. I'd also like to give thanks at the outset for the support from the secretariat under the leadership of Shennia Spillane. I acknowledge their presence here today.

Regretfully, Labor cannot support the government's report, which, contrary to government claims, will ultimately see a return to Australia's reprehensible legacy of permanently removing First Nations children from their families. We know that this policy has a profoundly disproportionate impact on First Nations children. From the beginning of this inquiry, we have been dogged by complaints of bias and preconceived outcomes from organisational representatives and First Nations organisations and individuals in particular. Some stakeholders said that they had been actively excluded in favour of witnesses who supported adoption. I know that the secretariat have been very challenged, in trying to respond to these concerns raised by stakeholder groups, and that they have done their best. But, I have to say, Labor committee members held their own concerns that the outcome of this inquiry was a foregone conclusion.

First, some background: in March this year, the then Assistant Minister for Children and Families, David Gillespie, sparked community outrage with an unprompted public call to open up adoptions of Indigenous children from out-of-home care. Unsurprisingly, the proposal was quickly condemned by experts and First Nations representatives alike, with the AbSec chief executive labelling it 'incredibly offensive'. Rather than listening, the minister in fact doubled down by referring this inquiry to the committee just a few weeks after he made those inflammatory comments. If Labor was suspicious about the referral of the inquiry, its suspicions were indeed confirmed by the first of only two terms of reference, which called for the consideration of 'stability and permanency for children in out-of-home care with local adoption as a viable option'—a virtual echo of the minister's ill-conceived call.

Regretfully, but as Labor members predicted, the government members' report went on to recommend that we open up adoption to children in out-of-home care, exactly as the minister had suggested. Attempts by Labor to work through a bipartisan position for a consensus report were rejected. This is a shame, but it confirmed that the sole purpose of the report was to support the minister's original assertion. Labor members simply cannot countenance this recommendation, which would have a detrimental and disproportionate impact on First Nations communities, given that their children are 10 times more likely to be in out-of-home care. It will cast aside the evidence based Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle. It severs children's links to their family and culture, and risks creating another stolen generation.

The government members' report not only wilfully ignores the weight of evidence from submitters but also flies in the face of human rights conventions and the recommendations of countless inquiries that connection to kin, culture and country is critical to the safety and wellbeing of First Nations children. The proposed plan in the government members' report rests solely upon diverting children from out-of-home care into open adoption, which purports to be about providing an open exchange of information and contact between children and their birth parents and families. However, many witnesses told the committee that their lived experience of so-called open adoption was very different. Indeed, there is no agreed definition of 'open adoption', let alone how it works.

In my few remaining moments, I urge this government to reconsider its position. Organisations and individuals have pleaded with us not to return to those despicable policies of the past. Sadly, their concerns have been ignored. I plead with the government not to make the same mistake, and to reconsider these recommendations.

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