Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Like the member for Forde, I am an adoptee. I was adopted from New Zealand by two very loving parents who continue to support me in all my endeavours. As the member for Forde said, when we were growing up in the 1960s there was a stigma attached to children who were adopted. I always knew that I was adopted, and I think that is a really good thing and it made understanding it a lot easier. But, like the member for Forde said in terms of his experience at school, it was through regular interaction and telling people, ‘I am adopted’ that you found that people looked at you in a different way and you were told that this was not the sort of thing that you should be saying. I got it from one of my cousins, who said that I must feel very lucky that I had been adopted and that I should be grateful to my parents for adopting me. There was a stigma attached in the manner in which it was said, and this is something that National Adoption Awareness Week is about trying to break down. It is about trying to make sure that we are able to talk about our experiences and that we feel free to go and find our birth parents, if that is what we choose.

I waited until I was well into my 30s before I decided to look for my birth parent. My wife at the time was probably more excited than me and encouraged me to do it. Part of the reason that I did not do it earlier was the stigma that was there. I also felt some sense of betrayal to my actual parents in taking this particular step, but I can say that I am really glad that I did take it. I have a fantastic relationship with both my adoptive parents and my birth mother and birth family. In my adopted family I have a sister but with my birth family I now have two brothers, whom I am in regular contact with. In fact in the next month or so I will travel to New Zealand to be with one of my brothers and his partner for the birth of their first child. So you suddenly have access to this enormous new family and it is incredibly rewarding.

It is also an incredibly difficult thing for all of the people involved. Obviously the people here can see the emotion that is still there when I talk about this. But that emotion should not be there in some senses. That is part of the issue and the problem in this—we are made to feel that there is something wrong with our upbringing; that adoption is the wrong thing to do and that in some senses we have failed. Of course that is not true. My birth mother did not tell her family—her husband whom she married subsequent to me being born and her children—about me. When contact was made that caused all sorts of problems for her—having to sit down with her husband and say, ‘Look, I’ve had a child before and he’s been in contact.’ But she always carried a photo of me in her diary.

Clearly this was a woman who had gone through a great deal of pain after our separation. It was a difficult thing for her to do but she did not hesitate—in New Zealand they had an adoption system that was more advanced than the Queensland system in that it had been open for many years—and she put her name down hoping that one day it would happen even though she knew it would completely upset her life in terms of her new family. I can say that it has been an incredibly rewarding experience for all of us. It is something that this motion goes to in terms of trying to make adoption more open so that people are able to speak about it and so that people are encouraged to unite, and these sorts of experiences—which was a very happy one for me, even though it might not sound like that—can actually take place. I commend the motion to the House.

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