Right: Australian actor Ernie Dingo, with wife Sally. Both of their children are adopted. The Dingos have featured in an ABC documentary series stressing the importance of an extended family for Jurra and Wilara. Found a word you're not familiar with? Double-click that word to bring up a dictionary reference to it. The dictionary page includes an audio sound file with which to actually hear the word said. |
Further implications
It will be interesting to see what actually results from the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott's pledge to have the process for local adoptions within Australia streamlined. The sad history of Indigenous children being taken from their families and placed either in institutions or with white families, often with damaging results, has left a nation-wide caution around adoption. Equally concerning was the previous practice of forcibly taking children from unmarried mothers within Australia. It was only in March 2013 that former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, delivered a national apology in parliament to the thousands of unwed mothers who were forced by government policies to give up their babies for adoption over several decades. More than 800 people, many of them in tears, heard the apology and responded with a standing ovation.
Ms Gillard stated, 'We deplore the shameful practices that denied you, the mothers, your fundamental rights and responsibilities to love and care for your children.'
In such a context, it is understandable that local adoption has been approached with scepticism.
Changes to local adoption procedures are also likely to proceed more slowly as they are a State not a federal government responsibility. The most the federal government could do would be to make a recommendation to State governments and perhaps host a meeting of the relevant state ministers to discuss the issue. The likelihood of local adoption procedures being relaxed will be in part dependent on the perceived success of the federal government's relaxation of inter-country adoption procedures.