major win - post-adoption services in Australia

Congratulations, Ripples! This is huge!!

Ripples, Well done - what an amazing feat you and your friends have accomplished! An amazing resource for adoptees to utilize when before there was nothing... Good job and hopefully the funding will continue and people will realize that this is a service that is long overdue. Australia again proves to be more aware than other countries. BTW: QLD has to be one of the most beautiful places in the world...everything you could possibly want at your fingertips. Kind regards,Dickons

Many thanks Dickons and WCurry66! Well actually before today, there was/is a small not-for-profit called Jigsaw Queensland. Today the Minister during the opening ceremony clearly stated that the post adoption services was part of the government's focus on equity and justice and 1) knowing one's history and 2) who one is are included as part of that. One of the post-adoption community groups, Jigsaw Queensland, had been lobbying for this for nearly 9 years! (I only got actively involved from 2005 onwards). The leaders of Jigsaw said that they were able to achieve such wins since when they approached the Department of Child Safety, they came across as consistent, calm (i.e. no heavy axes to grind) as well as provided helpful evidence/research to help the Department seek funding from Treasury. The CEO of Jigsaw is in the documentary, "Gone to a Good Home", that's listed in the Screen Australia catalogue. Apparently ever since records were opened in February 2010, the Department of Child Safety has had 460 requests for information - that's about 100/month. And Jigsaw receives about 10 new enquiries per week!

This statement is a major major win...did anyone film it? D

Well done, Ripples. And of course Jigsaw has always been there for adoptees in Australia. You know, I never realised until a few months ago that Queensland didn't have open records until this year. NSW has had open records for about 20 years. NZ, where I was born, has had open records for 25 years. So I always assumed the other states in Australia were the same.

This is key, I think, to obtaining successful change. This is also why we have such a hard time with it here in the states – as a result, they’re often seen as bitter, angry and unbalanced. It’s a great step forward for QLD :)

Congrats Ripples What huge wonderful news! :cheer: :cheer: :cheer: I'm so proud of you all for sticking to your guns in a calm and consistant way to make this happen :happydance: :happydance::happydance:

Thanks for the congrats! Yeah, Qld is definitely one of the slower, more backward states compared to New South Wales (state of Sydney). And New Zealand has been very progressive in many aspects - wasn't it one of the first countries to provide women with the right to vote? Apparently there are lots of states in the USA that still have closed records too. According to the CEO of Jigsaw, apparently some of the big pro-privacy lobby groups in the USA are the adoption industry organizations. They claim that if records were open, fewer women would relinquish and therefore there wouldn't be enough babies supplied for people to adopt! He was able to use information from the UK that demonstrated that opening records did NOT result in a decline in the supply of babies to be adopted. He did say that being able to point to solid research and evidence, rather than just individual anecdotal opinions, really helped. I'll see if I can dig up the Minister's speech from the Department of Child Safety or PASQ. In the meantime, my adoptee friends and I are sending in big thank-you letters to the organisations involved. Again, I think Jigsaw did most of the hard work in lobbying and the intercountry adoptee groups did play a slightly smaller part. I'm in the midst of organizing a celebratory dinner for the adoptee groups here in the meantime. Many thanks again for everyone's positive feedback - knowing that there are other supporters around the world really helps strengthen the impetus.

Good news! The manager of counselling services of the Post-Adoption Services Queensland centre has invited me and my InterCountry Adoptee (ICA) friends to run a staff training session on intercountry adoptee issues!!! As my friends already run info sessions for the state government, I think the PASQ training sessions should be pretty good. Amazing what a few committed people can do. I encourage you all to get your voices heard - even if it means helping out answering anonymous surveys for the various academic research projects posted on adoption.com.

I think you will be wonderful, Ripples, Congratulations.

Ripples - you are the shining example and wow what a difference Australia is to other countries...imagine if over hear they went to the source.... Good for you!D