Of course we have already had a national apology from Julia Gillard for "forced adoptions". See https://www.ag.gov.au/About/ForcedAdoptionsApology/Documents/Nationalapologyforforcedadoptions.PDF.

Dr Sammut says, ‘Based on the international evidence comparing adoption to family preservation and foster care, the inquiry concluded that at-risk children who are removed early, speedily, and permanently have better outcomes than children who are removed later and cycled through multiple temporary foster placements and failed family reunions. Adoption for children protection purposes promotes child welfare because, as studies have shown, it produces better outcomes for abused and neglected children by providing them with the certainty and stability of a permanent family’. These are not the only alternatives and pretending that they are is dangerously and irresponsibly misleading. Australia has been leading the world in reducing the number of adoptions over the last forty years and it would be a tragedy to see this trend reversed. The way to prevent another national apology is to learn from the mistakes of the past and replace adoption with more child-focussed alternatives such as appropriate guardianship orders which have the positive elements of adoption in terms of security and stability without the negative elements such as altering birth certificates and severing legal relationships with all family members.

I was sufficiently surprised by the figures concerning an increase in out of home care to look at them myself. Please note that the figures include family placements - care by grandmothers and aunts and uncles etc - more than half in some states.. however, there does seem to be a shift towards removing at risk children..

I am also surprised that adoptions have fallen to zero, but it would have a bad name at the moment..

Well as someone who spent most of their formative years languishing in orphanages and various levels of okay and unbelievably horrific foster care; I'm afraid I just have to agree with Dr Samuels.

As alway with most(combative) posters they focus on parent's and carer's alleged rights and completely miss what's really important in this debate! Namely, halfway decent outcomes for often routinely abused/neglected/abandoned children!

And please save the patronising, I'm sorry for your abominable childhood for someone who believes professional BS.
Rhrosty.

I have spent most of my adult life surrounded by children from dysfunctional families, some of whom have remained within the family system, others going on to multiple foster homes.
Rhosty and Samut are correct. Children need to be removed at an earlier age and given permenance in their life. By the time abused and neglected children have reached school age they have already developed strong protective behaviours that make transition to normal family life very difficult. They also lose the ability to live without constant stimulus and drama in their daily life so always need to seek entertainment in forms not provided in a house that has calm structure and boundaries. This often takes the form of juvenile crime or experimenting with drugs. This makes adaption to stable foster care difficult and results in frequent change of carers in an attempt pacify the child.
Current practise seems to be more about the rights of the parent than the rights of the child. If we were truly concerned about the welfare of our children we would be putting them into loving, protective families at an age they could develop normally without the ingrained dysfunctional behaviours older children have adopted in self defence.
Nor should " culture" ever take precedence over the physical and emotional welfare of amy child.

"The Wood Report (2008), commissioned to report on the New South Wales Department of Child Safety, highlights that 330,000 reports were received by the department in that year. Of the 330,000 reports only 7500 families accounted for fifty percent of these reports, that is, twelve percent of the families accounted for fifty percent of the reports. On average each of these 7500 families where reported twenty times within the year."

These twelve percent should particularly be singled out for adoption before it reaches that stage. Rhosty and Big Mama seem to be the only ones with some compassion for the children in their bones.

David

It's exactly because I have compassion for children in need of care that I urge our government not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Louisa, why do you think that the "mistakes in the past" were actually mistakes. Do you have any first hand experience of the conditions under which children were taken, particularly those aboriginal children?

David

The previous posters just about said it all!
A Western Australia academic said that there were a few thousand people in the State responsible for most of the crime and child cruelty. He thought it made more financial sense to put them in five star accommodation with liveried attendants than leave them alone. I assume he would have ensured they would have no more kids?
Surely we can have a system where these people are offered money to undergo sterilization and use this to reduce the problem.
Alternatively after three kids welfare reduces? How about that?

Having been 'hosted' in a church boys home from 6-14 I got through by having a great mother who visited us every 2 weeks without fail after my father got conned by a mother and daughter team and stupidly fell for it in Darin. Since then I have worked in child protection in both NT and Qld after getting a social sciences degree in Welfare at 51 years 'young'. I agree that some parents either are not interested in changing dysfunctional lifestyles or haven't got the capacity to even consider that they could change. They can be recycled abused kids themselves who do not have the emotional, mental health or understanding that it is possible to address issues. Successive govts continue to put bandaids on this and many social disintegration issues while the iceberg grows under the freezing waters of political apathy as admitting that prostitution of innocent childhood by clever marketing strategies to have children "mature" at 12-15 + agreeing to trendy social mechanisms where parents are no longer in charge of responsibly discipline their children is just put in the 'too hard' basket as there aren't a lot of votes in it. 'When families cracked the nation falls'.

I can assure you that I have a great deal of experience of the long term outcomes of adoption separation.