Jenny,
Last month I was talking to a couple who have fostered/adopted four children in addition to their own three offspring, they told me that there were 20 babies waiting for homes at the hostel in Melbourne.
Australia does care for "those less fortunate" but fostering and adoption here comes with significant burdens and responsibilities, running off to be a White Knight in a foreign land is simply the all too familiar Anglo Saxon bourgeois vanity, self congratulation and the easy way to esteem and status within that ethnic group.
The family I was talking to have many obligations and many trials to overcome with their (White) foster kids, especially surrounding access by the natural parents and other relatives who are drug addicted and mentally unstable. I can see why bourgeois Anglo Saxon White Knights would want to take the easy way out by adopting from overseas, no pesky DHS looking over your shoulder and no loopy "bogan" parents to deal with.

Jay, there is a big difference between fostering and adopting children.

I very much doubt there are 20 ' babies ' waiting for adoption in a hostel when there is a huge waiting list for adoption in Australia. The waiting time to even hope of adopting a baby here is many years.

Fostering babies and children is another matter entirely, and takes some very special people to take on this usually short term care of kids.

Many go overseas in desperation to find a child to adopt.
Luckily, most of these people don't worry about the colour of the children's skin.

Jay of Melbourne: You never ever seem to lose an opportunity to bag white folks do you?
I spent most of my formative years in foster homes/orphanages!
And if it wasn't for decent caring colour blind white folks, I'd have never known any happiness at all!
If you're looking for the racist in the room mate, suggest you only need go as far as the nearest mirror?
As for Russian kids?
My Russian friends will tell you that institutionalised alcoholism, drug taking and hedonist/chauvinist chest thumping males are the problem!
This invariably leads to failed relationships and endless unwanted or unaffordable kids.
An Irish Grandmother writes in her diary, when poverty comes in the front door, love flies out the window!
You seem to have borrowed some of the Putin mentality? i.e., punish the poor hapless kids, for the perceived sins of a few frank politicians.
What would you prefer, Romanian style state orphanages, where staving children covered in lice and or bed sores or worse, were left laying in urine soaked, excrement smeared beds, in faeces loaded nappies, to largely fend for themselves, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade?
Or is that just normal in your world; or the underlying reason, you seem to be angry at all white folks?
Why should innocent and unwanted babes be asked to pay Putin's price?
Surely there is a more decent human way of showing his annoyance?
Or is he just another dehumanising power hungry Russian dictator, not all that dissimilar to Stalin?
Rhrosty.

Suse,Rhrosty,
The article is written in a way which portrays overseas adoption by middle class Anglo Saxons as altruistic when it isn't, it's self serving, I wonder how many Chinese and Russian orphans are adopted by the middle classes of Singapore or the U.A.E? How many well off Chinese Australians are adopting from their own country?
Suse you've nailed the issue in one go, given the options it's all too much work and pain for the Anglo Saxon White Knight to foster and there's no prestige involved in helping disadvantaged White Australian kids generally.
Overseas adoption is widely seen as a creepy and ostentatious display of bourgeois WASP values and prestige, Madonna and Sandra Bullock make most people uncomfortable, that's just how we view all overseas adopters, they do these things for themselves and for the edification of their peers, it's not altruism it's vanity.

Another point,
If there's such a pressing need among the WASP bourgeoisie for adopted children why aren't they using their considerable political and economic power to have the Australian adoption laws relaxed?
The Greens are a bourgeois party, do they have a position on facilitating in-country adoptions?
All I hear is calls for more overseas adoptions, so it's logical that I'd come to the conclusion that it's proponents are driven not by altruism or any sort of community spirit but by ideology and vanity.

One more for the road,
Interracial adoption and fostering is not socially acceptable in Australia, for example placing Aboriginal children with White families is frowned upon.
In that context this article seems to advocate working around social conventions and ideological taboos by adopting overseas, whether or not it was intentional on the part of the author or not she seems to be saying that as long as they commit to altruism the WASP bourgeoisie can have their cake and eat it too.
There's a big contradiction here, if it's taboo for the WASP bourgeoisie to parent Aboriginal children, some of whom suffer the same or worse indignities as Chinese or Vietnamese infants then how is it socially acceptable for them to parent overseas adoptees?

Jay there are rarely any babies available for adoption in Australia these days...of any colour!
Abortion is more easily available now, and if they choose to go on with the pregnancy then most single mothers now keep their babies.

So that is the main reason that childless couples look for babies overseas, and not because they want to look good to others!

Many countries now refuse to let their citizens be adopted by parents in other countries, saying they should remain with their own kind.