Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to acknowledge all the speakers who have spoken so far about the 10-year anniversary of the apology for forced adoptions. I want to acknowledge Minister Rishworth, the member for Kingston, and her role. I also want to acknowledge your role, Deputy Speaker Claydon. This is one of many issues where you have been a shining light not only in our party but in the broader polity to make sure that there's justice—justice for victims of forced adoptions, justice for members of the Stolen Generation and justice for people who need champions. You've been a champion for them and you are a person of extraordinary integrity. I just wanted to let you know that.

I do also remember well when this happened. I was campaigning for the 2013 election. I remember when Julia, the former Prime Minister, offered that unconditional apology. It's been extremely heartening to hear all the tributes to former prime minister Gillard from all sides of politics. This awareness that some had for as long as Julia's been active in political life—and some who, through this anniversary, have cast a different view on her extraordinary leadership.

Standing in front of an audience of over 800 people in the Great Hall of Parliament House, Prime Minister Gillard officially apologised on behalf of the Australian people for the great and lasting harm that forced adoptions practised in the recent past inflicted on mothers, on the adopted people themselves, on fathers and wider families. The apology was addressed to the hundreds of thousands of Australians who were subject to forced adoptions, people like a forcibly adopted Darwin woman who I won't name but who I know was present at that apology in 2013. Derek Pedley's mother lived in the Northern Territory and has written a memoir on forced adoption. For hundreds of others with similar experiences from my electorate and from all our electorates across Australia who were affected by forced adoption and who were present that day, Prime Minister Gillard's apology was more than just words; it was a form of justice.

Through that speech the Australian Parliament took responsibility unreservedly and humbly apologised to mothers denied even that first precious moment with the child they brought into the world. We apologised to the children who are now adults who were denied identities and robbed of a sense of connection to family, to culture and to place. We apologised to the fathers and the ones who sought but were excluded from the births and the lives of their children, and to the wider families—siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. This is an intergenerational trauma that runs deep and wide and it's important for all of us to realise that none of it is ancient history. This was commonplace across the country, growing more frequent during the forties and peaking between 1950 and 1975.

It is amazing. I was born in 1971, like the previous speaker, and grew up in the seventies. Perhaps on 17 September 1971 there was another child born in Melbourne, a child who was taken from their mum and did not experience that early, special, sacred bond like I and my mum have and did not have that unconditional love from their birth mother because they were simply denied that opportunity.

Forced adoptions are a recent truth and the legacy of hurt that they caused lives on in the present and will live on into the future. It is intergenerational. But that apology lessened it to some extent, I hope. These practices were driven by a social judgement in those years and decades that children must at all costs be raised by married parents, and by a mother and a father. Obviously, those beliefs of the day are now seen as unconscionable. As the Prime Minister said on the anniversary this week, forced adoptions were driven by a culture that enabled and facilitated a practice of denying mothers even a single moment with the baby they had brought into the world.

We have heard shocking tales but they are important to let those listening who may have not met anyone who was taken away from their mother at birth in a forced adoption that mothers were restrained. They were shackled to their beds while their children were taken away. They were tricked into signing adoption papers. They were blindfolded to prevent any eye contact with their newborn to stop the slightest connection from forming. Some, at least, were deceived, and the evidence is pretty strong that it was commonplace that many were deceived and coerced by the very social services that should have protected them. It is difficult to confirm with many records either lost or unreliable but it is estimated that the total number of forced adoptions could be as high as a quarter of a million. That is a quarter of a million of newborn babies taken from their mothers and families by means of shame, coercion, institutional abuse, drugging, physical restraint, forgery and fraud. It's just horrific, and the aftershocks are still reverberating through communities as the consequences of forced adoption are still coming to light. It took decades to begin to recognise it and to call out that it was wrong, but that's what Julia Gillard's government did. I don't say that as a partisan comment; I just say it as in there are a lot of good people on both sides of politics, some with lived experience like Steve Lyons who he knew that it was wrong and that we must apologise because that would be part of the journey of healing. Through this marking of the anniversary, I hope those who were up in the gallery today and yesterday got a sense of how deeply we are still committed, however we can in society, to preventing the unnecessary taking of children away from their parents.

By way of some quick background that I think is important to put on the record, on 15 November 2010, the Senate commenced an inquiry into the Commonwealth Contribution to Former Forced Adoption Policies and Practices. As we have done in the Northern Territory, which was administered by the Commonwealth, responsibility has been taken for the actions of the Commonwealth in terms of the Stolen Generation, so we have had experience in seeing that intergenerational trauma and the way it can play out. But many did not know that it wasn't just First Nations people who were taken from their families—it was also people from all walks of life if it was deemed that they weren't going to be a fit and proper carer for the child.

This 10-year anniversary is an important milestone to mark in the journey of healing that many of those who were victims of this process and their children have gone through, but hopefully there is some comfort. There is work for us to do, and there's work that our government is doing to provide support to the victims of forced adoptions over those decades. We remain committed to doing what we can to help those that should not have been taken away from their mothers.

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