Page 1940 - Week 07 - Thursday, 13 August 2020
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determine the appropriate balance between protecting the rights of birth parents and the best interests of children in challenging out of home care circumstances.
The bulk of this amendment bill seeks to fulfil this recommendation. It does so, firstly, by providing a fuller list of needs that decision-makers should consider when seeking to determine what is in the best interests of a child or young person. This expanded list seeks to provide a clearer picture of what research has revealed to be the issues intimately linked to a child’s wellbeing. It highlights, for example, the continuity and sense of belonging that comes from a child or young person having stable emotional and physical living conditions. This statement encapsulates precisely why we should care about the issue of permanency. Children who do not know with certainty, from one day to the next, if the place where they live now will be the place that they will live tomorrow, seldom feel safe or secure enough for proper development to occur.
A huge part of that is forming attachments to specific people, which can only happen when they know, again with certainty, that the people who they want to love and trust today will still be there for them tomorrow. This is, of course, a very complicated area because children also need to have a sense of identity. That includes where and who they came from. That is why these amendments also add needs like cultural inheritance, personal identity and a sense of belonging, which must also be considered.
These amendments also reiterate the importance of including the views expressed by the child or young person—but specifically views expressed with adequate and appropriate support so that the child can actively participate to the best of their ability in consultation related to the decision. Hopefully, this change will help to amplify the voices of children in these matters and expand the number of children whose views can genuinely be considered. The central goal of this amendment bill is to place the child more fully at the centre of decision-making. The feedback from many people has been that current legislation focuses more on the adults involved and not on the children. It is to be hoped that these amendments will help to improve that situation.
The bill then goes on to place these best interest considerations as the grounds for deciding when to dispense with parental consent in adoption matters. Again, this is a difficult matter. In an ideal world a birth parent’s wishes would never need to be dispensed with, but we do not live in an ideal world and decisions need to be made. Under current legislation, the grounds for dispensing with consent focus on the perceived failures of the birth parents. This bill seeks to alter that approach by making the wellbeing of the child the focus of such decisions by the court. I hope that the result will be less conflict between birth parents and adoptive parents, especially since a child, in most cases, is best served by having healthy relationships with all parents and family members.
Across portfolios, I and the Canberra Liberals have consulted with a broad selection of those who care about adoption matters—birth parents, adoptive parents, foster carers, people who have been in and out of home care, people who were adopted, and various community leaders. Included are those who represent the territory’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, who have very specific reasons to care deeply about this issue, both because of historical event, but also because of the current
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