Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday we marked the 10th anniversary of the Australian government's official apology to victims of forced adoptions. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard delivered the apology in this place, in the Great Hall of Parliament House, and, this morning, the Minister for the Social Services, Amanda Rishworth, made a statement to the House marking that anniversary. Ten years ago in delivering the apology, Prime Minister Gillard said:

Parliament, on behalf of the Australian people, takes responsibility and apologises for the policies and practices that forced the separation of mothers from their babies, which created a lifelong legacy of pain and suffering.

  …   …   …

We know you have suffered enduring effects from these practices forced upon you by others. For the loss, the grief, the disempowerment, the stigmatisation and the guilt, we say sorry.

In making this heartfelt apology, Prime Minister Gillard remarks that as Australians we are rightly used to celebrating past glories and triumphs. We are used to celebrating the things that make Australia a wonderful place to live. But, as we well know, our triumphs are not the full story of Australia, and the full story is sometimes hard to face.

Our First Nations people know this all too well, and we continue to work to face our history, to make amends for the hurt and the suffering inflicted on their communities. And so it was, 15 years ago, when we as a country were inspired by the courage and bravery of those who told their stories of suffering and pain to apologise to the Stolen Generations. And then, 10 years ago, we were once again forced to face those hard truths of our past as the Senate Community Affairs Committee handed down its report of the Commonwealth Contribution to Former Forced Adoption Policies and Practices. We were forced to look at the shameful and distressing parts of our history and find the resolve to do something to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

It's truly shocking to read over parts of the report and to read some of the stories shared at the time—of mothers denied their rights and unable to provide informed consent to adoption; of mothers coerced and deceived into giving up their babies; of women physically shackled to beds and blindfolded; of women being told their baby had died; of consent being achieved only by forgery or fraud; of children growing up thinking they were not wanted and not loved; of babies removed at birth, denied the arms of mothers who had done nothing wrong; of the suffering in silence that went on for far too long for far too many; and of a paternalism that wreaked such great harm while claiming to know what was best for women and their children, ignoring their cries. For the approximately 250,000 mothers and 250,000 babies this happened to, it was between the 1940s and up to as recently as 1975. The apology was important to so many Australians: mothers who spent lives missing their children, hiding the shame that this system told them they should bear, wondering what had happened. Were they okay? Did they think about their birth mother?—and the children who grew up not knowing their birth identity, making assumptions or being told their mother had not wanted them.

I was privileged to hear of just one of these women from her daughter. The woman's mother became pregnant to her partner, an older man, in the mid-sixties, when she was 16. She had hoped to marry him but instead was abandoned. Her family, in shame, sent her away to give birth in secret, away from the small town where she lived. She gave birth to a baby boy, who was taken at birth and adopted. She never saw him. She never held him. Some years later, she married and had three more children, but she never forgot the baby boy she gave up. While her new husband knew of the baby, the rest of the family did not. Not even her children knew there was an older brother somewhere. The pain of the loss coloured her parenting and made her fear losing her children again. Her daughter said that she always felt her mother was holding something back—in retrospect, perhaps the fear of being hurt again or the fear of being too attached because it made her vulnerable to the pain of loss again.

Many years later, when he was in his 40s, her baby boy made contact with her through a tracing service. It turned out he lived a couple of suburbs away from where her eldest daughter lived and, while they had never met, they actually had friends in common.

This story has a happy ending. The woman in question now has an ongoing relationship with her firstborn, the son who was taken away from her, and regularly stays with him and his wife and babysits their child—her grandchild. While you can never make up for the lost years, the misunderstandings and feelings of abandonment and loss, they now have a relationship that they both value and she has a relationship with her grandchild. But so many other stories do not have that happy ending—children and mothers who could never overcome the feelings of loss and abandonment to reach out; children who were not sent to loving homes but instead experienced abuse, neglect or institutionalised living; mothers and children who died before they could reconnect.

This is a shameful part of our shared history that caused very real harm to so many. The apology was well overdue. At the time of the apology, the Gillard government sought to match important words of sorrow and regret with concrete action to help survivors of forced adoptions. Today the government continues to provide $1.8 million annually to forced adoption services, which includes a national helpline, case work and assistance and counselling for those assisted. Minister Rishworth announced this morning that the government is committing an extra $700,000 to ensure that aged-care providers and forced adoption support service providers can offer trauma informed care that is targeted to people who have experienced forced adoption as mothers or as children. This will see the delivery of training packages for allied health, aged-care services and support services to help them deliver the trauma informed care as people age.

I'll finish as I started, with some words from former prime minister Julia Gillard. In delivering the apology, she spoke directly to those who had suffered from forced adoptions. She said:

We can declare that these mothers did nothing wrong.

That you loved your children and you always will.

And to the children of forced adoption, we can say that you deserved so much better.

You deserved the chance to know, and love, your mother and father.

We can promise you all that no generation of Australians will suffer the same pain and trauma that you did.

We must always remember what happened so that we can ensure that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

See this speech in context