Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The report of the Community Affairs References Committee entitled Common­wealth contribution to former forced adoption policies and practices is a unanimous report from the Labor Party, the Greens and the coalition. We worked very hard to achieve this outcome because this is such an important issue. It was not an issue where there should be any dissent. I add my thanks to those of Senator Siewert and Senator Moore: the people who travelled to be here today, all the submitters, the many dozens of people who appeared as witnesses and particularly the secretariat, who really did go above and beyond. When you get emails that are timed at 1.45 am from people trying to get drafts exactly right so that we could be here to release this report today, you know they are caring just as much as we are. There are, as we have said, 20 recommendations in this report, and seven of those 20 specifically deal with apology. They set out not only who should make formal apologies—the Commonwealth, the states, the territories, the organisations, the hospitals and the institutions that were involved in the forced adoption industry—but also how to make them. We thought this was very important. It is perhaps not uncommon now for general apologies to be made to people who have been harmed by behaviours of the past—but there are apologies and there are apologies. It is very important to acknowledge that, whether you think people were doing what they thought was the right thing at the time, you know it was not the right thing—to acknowledge that people need reparation, they need redress, to get on and to move on from the issues.

This inquiry took us 18 months. We started in November 2010. We were intending to report much earlier than this but there were the sheer volume of information, the type of information and the need to, in most cases, have a community forum. We had nine hearings; we went to every capital city and in most cases we had a community forum as part of our inquiry system. It was so important to give as many people as possible the chance to tell their story. As Senator Siewert said, there were a lot of people who had not told their story until this inquiry was held, and many found it very helpful to be able to give their account of what had happened to them.

Before we started this inquiry I knew of five people, three of them within my extended family, who had been affected by what I now call forced adoptions. It was not a term I had even thought about, and thank you for giving me that opportunity. Since we have started this inquiry, it is not just the hundreds of submitters but people who you meet in everyday life who tell you that this happened to them. I was even talking to an adviser to a senior politician yesterday and she said, 'My mother was one of those people' She has an older sibling that they cannot find.

Perhaps my first experience of the problems of forced adoption was a woman who worked for me many years ago. This was just on the cusp of the internet and she was looking for her son whom she knew had been adopted to the UK. She was 17 when she became pregnant with him. She put that child up for adoption because her parents told her to, but she went on to marry the father and have two more children with that man. She was looking for the full brother or sister of her existing children, and it was something that got to her every day. She said: 'I was 17 and my mother said to me, "Come home without that thing or don't come home at all". I did not know what to do.' So she came home without 'the thing'. Luckily, she had repaired her relationship with her mother, but she had not at that time found her son.

In some ways that is a mild form of the stories that we heard around forced adoption. There were so many more violent stories about people being literally held down, being drugged and being smacked across the face in front of policemen. As Senator Moore said, some were threatened with their partner being jailed for carnal knowledge if they were to reveal his name, even though the two of them were teenagers together. Even amongst all of this, we cannot claim that we did not know what was going on, and there was quite a lot of evidence that we received around what was known at the time about what was the right way to go about it. I would like to quote briefly from Marie Coleman, who I think is probably well known to many people here as a great advocate for women. She said:

We had a situation where women who became pregnant outside of a marital relationship fundamentally had three options. One was a shotgun wedding, one was an illegal abortion and one was adoption. There were no benefits or supports to enable women to keep their children with them. When one looks at some of the other literature … the state of orphanages and children's homes through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was pretty shocking.

She was dead right; it was pretty shocking.

As we have said before, this inquiry is about forced adoption. We attempted to flesh out and tease out some of the reasons why adoption became, I guess, the flavour of the decade. Adoptions in Australia peaked in 1971 and 1972. There were 9,798 adoptions in 1971-72. Last year there were 412. That gives you an idea of how we got very excited about adoption and how we have learned some of the lessons about the problems with adoption. Forced adoption is defined as meaning 'adoption where a child's natural parent or parents were compelled to relinquish a child for adoption'. So we are not talking about situations where an adoption may have been willingly entered into knowledgeably and in an informed way by people who did genuinely consent to having their child adopted, whether they were married or not. We are talking about where people were forced into the situation.

We talked also about the area of knowledge that was held at the time and the types of accounts that we have. The Royal Women's Hospital, for instance, has been criticised at some length in our report. We did not do this because we think it was a particularly bad example but simply because we have quite a lot of evidence from people who were affected by what happened at the Royal Women's Hospital. Perhaps I should clarify: it is an awful example but it is no worse than many, many others and perhaps better than some. We had a lot of evidence about it. The Royal Women's Hospital had 5,000 adoptions between 1940 and 1987, and we have significant evidence from some of the people there. Yet they could say in a report that they found 'no evidence of illegal practices' at the RWH and 'no evidence of hospital-wide policies that discriminated specifically against single mothers'. We go on to outline nine witness accounts—and there were many more that we could have used—which would suggest that there had been policy-wide practices and that there was knowledge at the time about the brutality of what was happening. One nurse who worked in the Royal Women's Hospital in the 1960s and 1970s, who has apologised herself, said:

Yes, we had taken babies from their mothers at birth, without them holding or even seeing their child. The mothers were then admitted into wards without their babies and ostracised in many different ways, finally being discharged about 1 week later … I felt very sorry for what I had done even though at the time we believed what we were doing was "right" for the child and the mother. However I now believe that the process was very cruel, unjust and very dehumanising to both mother and child.

These are eyewitness accounts that the Royal Women's Hospital could use to perhaps re-examine the idea that they could find no evidence that forced adoption practices occurred in their hospital in the fifties, sixties and seventies. I hope that what our report does is add to what should already exist: the legitimacy of these eyewitness accounts of the treatment that went on not just of the women but of their children and the fathers of those children.