National leadership on adoption reform

It is promising that both Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Minister for Social Services Christian Porter have endorsed the growing calls for greater use of adoption to provide permanent families for the tens-of-thousands of Australian children living in ‘out-of-home’ care.

While national leadership on adoption reform is welcome and overdue, the difficulty is that child protection is a state government responsibility. The federal government has pledged to raise the issue in future talks with state community services ministers.

The problem here is that state ministers (and their opposition shadows) are creatures of their departments. They defend the virulently anti-adoption attitudes prevalent in child protection authorities, and resist policies that would facilitate more adoptions.

Before entering any talks, the federal government should be aware of the myths and distortions likely to be advanced to justify the status quo.

For example, the states are sure to claim that they are trying to reduce the number of children in care by investing in support services for parents. This is despite that fact that identical ‘family preservation’ policies have been standard practice for 40 years and have ultimately lead to rising numbers of children entering care after being damaged by parental abuse and neglect.

The states are also likely to claim that adoption is not the solution because there are many older children in care with ‘high needs’ – abuse and neglect-related developmental, psychological, and behavioral problems – which make them ‘unadoptable’. This ignores the fact that most of these children have been damaged by the failures of the system – by prolonged parental maltreatment and by prolonged instability endured when they are churned in and out of care in the name of family preservation.

This is why a crucial feature of adoption reform involves a shift away from the current ideology of removal only as a last resort, and towards ensuring that timely decisions are made about removal and adoption for children who are unlikely to be ever able to live safely with their highly dysfunctional parents.

The best contribution the federal government can make is to force the states to be publicly accountable for their non-performance on adoption. Despite more than 43,000 children living in care nationally last year, there were only 89 children adopted from care – 84 in NSW and just 5 in the rest of the states and territories.

This is why my new book proposes that National Adoption Targets be established to highlight the chronic under-use of adoption in Australia compared to similar countries such as the US and the UK.

Jeremy Sammut’s book, The Madness of Australian Child Protection: Why Adoption Will Rescue Australia’s Underclass Children (Connor Court) will be launched this month with a series of panel events in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane.  Click here to book for these events.