Many children in our foster care system will never have a forever home. Photo: Pexels.
The number of children adopted from foster care in Australia continues to plummet, down to just 64 in 2024–25, according to data released this month.
That is an extraordinarily low figure when considering the roughly 45,000 children living in government care, thousands of whom are now being placed in institutions, and in some cases even living in motels due to the chronic shortage of foster carers.
In other words, children in out-of-home care are much more likely to end up in soulless accommodation with paid staff than to be adopted into a permanent, loving family home.
This sums up the modern tragedy of Australia’s oxymoronic “child protection” system.
In our necessary reckoning with the Stolen Generation and the era of forced adoptions, we have overcorrected in a way that has swapped one harm with another: the trauma of forced removal has been replaced by prolonged instability.
In doing so, we are inflicting immense harm on another generation of our most vulnerable children. And in an echo of the past, one thing has not changed: adults make the decisions, while we continue to ignore the voices of the kids whose lives are affected.
The problem with foster care
Children are placed in out-of-home care after being removed from their birth families due to serious abuse or neglect. It is meant to be temporary, with reunification the goal.
But in reality, reunification often never occurs, or takes years when it does. We should be doing far more to support birth parents – but we cannot ask children to put their future on hold while an underfunded system tries, and often fails, to get there.
Given the tens of thousands of children who remain in our overloaded care system for several years, we are more reliant on crisis responses than long-term solutions.
In NSW, a two-year-old baby was kept in a hotel for five months due to a lack of available foster placements. In another disturbing case, children were placed in the same household as a convicted serial killer.
It’s true that there are many dedicated foster carers doing their best within a broken system. But temporary care does not provide children with what they most need: permanence and a sense of belonging.
Foster carers are not the legal parents – the government is. And children in care know that at any point in time, a bureaucrat could knock on their door with an order to return them to a birth parent, move them into kinship care, or shuffle them to another placement entirely.
For kids who have already experienced abuse, neglect and removal, that feeling of living on eggshells can shape their entire life trajectory.
The outcomes for children leaving care are devastating. Around one-third of young people exiting out-of-home care become homeless within the first year. Fewer than three per cent go on to university. Clearly, this system isn’t providing the stability needed to build a foundation for adult life.
Resistance to adoption despite its benefits
Adoption permanently transfers full parental rights to adoptive carers, giving children something most people take for granted: a forever family and the legal certainty that they belong somewhere.
Research consistently shows that adopted children tend to have better long-term outcomes than those who remain in foster care, largely because of the stability and security it provides.
Many foster carers want to adopt children in their care if they have no prospect of going back to their birth families. But they are often not given the chance. Adoption is rarely raised proactively by caseworkers, and when it is, carers frequently describe long delays, repeated reassessments and processes that can take several years to finalise.
Adoption numbers in Australia have declined sharply since the 1970s. This is not accidental, but a response to the country’s shameful history of forced adoptions, where Indigenous and unmarried mothers were often coerced into giving up their children and were never able to see them again. That legacy rightly demanded reform, apology and caution.
Many caseworkers remain hostile to adoption, and state and territory governments are hesitant to make it easier, for fear of being accused of creating another Stolen Generation.
When caution becomes harm
But what we now have is not balance. It is a drastic overcorrection. Adoption has become so rare and so difficult that even when a child asks for it, their voice is too often ignored, drowned out by adults driven by fear, guilt and politics.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Adoption as practised today is vastly different from how it was done in the past. Children are taught about their history and connected with their birth families whenever it is safe to do so. There are examples of successful open adoptions that can serve as templates for others to follow.
Adoption isn’t a viable option for many children in foster care. But in a system where tens of thousands of children are growing up without a permanent home, it should be helping far more than just 64 each year.
Unless we are willing to make adoption easier, we risk condemning another generation of vulnerable children to the same cycle of instability the system was meant to prevent.
Original Article published by Oliver Jacques on Region Canberra.
