Page 1604 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 July 2020
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While the number of adoptions in the ACT is small, for those children and families involved it is an immensely significant experience. Adoption establishes a new legal identity for the child who is being adopted, permanently severing legal ties with their birth family. For this reason, our approach to domestic adoption must sensitively and consistently reflect best practice. This is particularly important in circumstances where the court must decide whether to set aside the requirement for parental consent to the adoption.
This bill upholds the government’s strong commitment to supporting children and families by ensuring that our approach to dispensing with consent puts the best interests of children and young people at the centre of decision-making.
In 2016 this government established a cross-directorate domestic adoptions task force to identify issues related to domestic adoption in the ACT. The task force made six recommendations about the timely and appropriate completion of the adoption process, which were all agreed by government.
Four of these recommendations are complete. As a result of this work we established stronger communication practices within child and youth protection services and improved the availability of online information about the domestic adoption process. The government also made a commitment to provide more than $4 million over four years from 2018-19 to employ staff who specialise in adoption. This investment is strengthening the assessment processes and delivery of adoption services and permanency planning to better support children and young people in long-term out of home care.
One of the remaining recommendations was to consider the use of integrated birth certificates to maintain the identity and heritage of adopted children, and better support the recognition of both birth and adoptive parents. Amendments to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1997 that are being introduced in the Assembly today by my colleague Minister Rattenbury address this recommendation by enabling integrated birth certificates.
The bill that I am presenting completes our response to the final remaining recommendation from the task force. This recommendation proposed that further work be done to explore amendments to the dispensing with parental consent provisions in the Adoption Act 1993 to enable the system to better respond to complex out of home care circumstances. Establishing parental consent is a critical component of the adoption process, and a decision by the court to set aside this requirement necessarily involves careful consideration of the needs and rights of all parties—children and young people, birth parents and carers.
When we began this work we knew it would be critical to consider diverse views and learn from the lived experience of people across the community. While we received a wide range of feedback from individuals and organisations, a clear theme that emerged across many submissions was the importance of upholding the best interests of children and young people as being paramount. Many people also wanted to see stronger support for children and young people to have their views and wishes heard.
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