IN 2009-10, 36,000 children were in out-of-home care in Australia and more than two-thirds had been there for at least two years.
Many of these children will remain in out-of-home care indefinitely after being cycled in and out of the system following failed attempts to reunite them with their dysfunctional parents.
Most will suffer life-long disadvantage due to abuse at home and instability in care. Almost all would be better off if adopted, at the earliest opportunity, by suitable families.
Yet in child and family welfare circles, a self-fulfilling myth has been cultivated to rule adoption out of bounds.
Those who are ideologically opposed to forced adoptions maintain that Australians have, on the whole, been less willing to adopt children (from out of care) than their counterparts in the United States and Britain.
This claim is mischievous. The real obstacle is that family preservation-obsessed Australian child protection agencies refuse to take action to legally terminate the parental responsibilities of bad or inadequate parents who could contest adoptions.
What seems to be different here compared to comparable countries is that the official taboo on adoption appears to be much stronger.
The number of children in care per capita in England, the United States, and Australia is very similar. Yet significantly more children are adopted out of care each year in England and the United States.
In England, 3200 children were adopted from care in 2009-10. If Australian children in care had been adopted at the same rate, there would have been approximately 1700 adoptions from care in 2009-10.
In the United States, more than 50,000 children are adopted every year from out of care. If Australian children in care had been adopted at the same rate as in the US, there would have been approximately 4800 Australian adoptions from care in 2009-10.
In reality, however, a mere 61 Australian children were adopted by non-relatives and 53 by foster carers in 2009-10. Australia's lagging adoption performance has got nothing to do with the so-called unwillingness of Australians to give needy children good homes.
The true culprits are the academics, social workers, and other activists who cling to the meta-myth that vulnerable children are almost always better off with natural parents.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. Read his full report here