Adopting a child from australia

Time and costs | Intercountry Adoption

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How long does the adoption process take?

Waiting times of several years are not uncommon. Many factors can affect the time the process takes, including:

• the number and characteristics of children needing intercountry adoption
• the number of applicants the partner country has already received
• the age and needs of the child/children you have been approved to adopt
• how long the partner country takes to process your application.

You can contact us or your state and territory central authority (STCA) for current waiting times for each partner country.

How much does adoption cost?

Adopting a child from overseas can be expensive. Fees vary between STCAs and the partner countries.

You can expect STCA fees to cost between $3,000 and $12,000 per application.

You will also need to pay fees to the partner country, as well as paying for:

• document preparation and translation
• travel and accommodation costs
• incidentals

You can read about each partner countries’ fees.

Remember that paying your application fees doesn’t guarantee that a child will be placed with you.

State and territory central authority intercountry adoption fees

Below is a guide to state and territory central authority (STCA) fees. You should contact your local STCA for detailed costs.

	SA	TAS	VIC	WA
Administrative application fee	$4,422	$324	$1,879. 40	$1,009
Home study		$1,526.04	$3,834.30	$1,328
General preparation, education and training programs				$350
Post-adoption services		$810	$3,472.90
Expression of interest	$885		$143.70
File preparation to be sent overseas	$2,947	$810	$1,880.90
Placement (after allocation)	$3,749
Total	$12,003	$3,470	$11,211	$2,687

Other costs

Below is a guide to immigration and documentation fees you will also need to pay.

	ACT	NSW	NT	QLD
Birth certificate	$65	$60	$46	$48. 20
Change of name certificate	$192	$195	$46	$183.60
Passports	$150 (under 16) $298 (over 16)	$150 (under 16) $298 (over 16)	$150 (under 16) $298 (over 16)	$150 (under 16) $298 (over 16)
Adoption Visa (subclass 102)	$2665	$2665	$2665	$2665

FAQs | Intercountry Adoption

Below are frequently asked questions about intercountry adoption.

• FAQS about the adoption process
• FAQS about eligibility
• FAQS about support
• FAQS about general information

FAQS about the adoption process

What is intercountry adoption and how does it work?

Intercountry adoption is the adoption of a child from one of our partner countries. All intercountry adoptions need to meet the principles and standards of the Hague Convention.

You can view a short video that explains what intercountry adoption is and how the process works.

The adoption process depends on what state or territory you live in, as your state and territory central authority handles your application and the adoption process.

Does Intercountry Adoption Australia handle my application?

No. We act as an advice and referral service. Your state and territory central authority handles your application and the adoption process. They also provide the education and support you will need throughout the adoption process.

How much does it cost to adopt a child from overseas?

The cost varies depending on which partner country you want to apply to adopt from and what state or territory you live in. You can view your state and territory central authority adoption fees on the time and costs page.

How long does the adoption process take?

Waiting times depend on which country you want to apply to adopt from. Waiting times of several years are not uncommon. You can find out more on the time and cost page.

What else do I need to do after the adoption when I bring my child home?

There are other responsibilities you have once you bring your child home. You can discuss these with your state and territory central authority. Some of these responsibilities include organising immigration, citizenship, passport and birth certificate for your child.

FAQS about eligibility

Can anyone adopt a child from overseas?

If you want to adopt a child from overseas, you will need to meet specific eligibility criteria. Each of our partner countries has their own eligibility criteria. You will also need to meet the eligibility criteria of your state and territory central authority.

Can I apply to adopt if I’m single?

Many of our partner countries don’t accept applications from single people. You can read the eligibility criteria on each partner country page to check which countries accept applications from single people.

Which countries can I adopt a child from?

If you meet the eligibility criteria of your state and territory central authority, you can check if you’re eligible to apply to adopt from one of the following partner countries:

• Bulgaria
• Chile
• China
• Colombia
• Hong Kong
• India
• Latvia
• Poland
• South Africa
• South Korea
• Sri Lanka
• Taiwan
• Thailand

I’m a dual citizen and/or I have rights to live in another country: can I arrange an adoption in that country?

Even if you hold citizenship in another country, we warn against other types of overseas adoptions—such as expatriate and private adoptions—that don’t fall under our formal intercountry adoption arrangements. It’s unlikely a child adopted through these arrangements will be able to meet Australian immigration requirements. If this is the case, they won’t be able to enter Australia.

You should contact your state and territory central authority before going ahead with any adoption application to an overseas authority.

FAQS about support

What support is available to adoptive parents?

There is a range of support available both during and after the adoption process. Your state and territory central authority is your main source of education and support during the adoption process and in the immediate period after you bring your child home.

The Intercountry Adoption Family Support Service is a free, nation-wide service that provides counselling support and case management service to help with the issues and challenges unique to intercountry adoption.

You can also find out about other Australian Government support.

Who do I contact for more information on intercountry adoption?

For local information, you can contact your state and territory central authority. If you would like to speak to someone about if the intercountry adoption process applies to you, you can contact us.

How do I contact Intercountry Adoption Australia from overseas?

People who wish to make contact with Intercountry Adoption Australia whilst overseas should contact us using our contact form.

FAQS about general information

What is the Hague Convention on intercountry adoption?

The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Convention) aims to protect children and their families from trafficking, and illegal and ill-prepared adoptions.

The Hague Convention focusses on the need for countries to work together to prevent the abduction, sale or trafficking of children.

Australia only facilitates intercountry adoptions with our partner countries. These countries meet the principles and standards of the Hague Convention.

What other options are there for adopting or caring for a child?

If you’re unsure if intercountry adoption is right for you and your family, there are alternatives to intercountry adoption.

What are the challenges when adopting from overseas?

There are challenges you may face and various realities and risks of overseas adoption, including:

• policies and processes can change in both the overseas country and in Australia
• country programs can be put on hold or closed
• there is no guarantee that you will be able to adopt a child once you have applied to adopt
• you may receive incomplete or inaccurate information about a child’s background
• on rare occasions an adoption can collapse due to complications with bonding and attachment

Who are the children in need of adoption?

While the age of children in need of intercountry adoption varies across partner countries, they are usually older, in sibling groups or may have special needs including special physical, intellectual or behavioural needs. Their language, culture and ethnicity may be different from your own and that of your community.

Many children are old enough to remember their birth family, and some may have lived in foster care, orphanages and other institutions.

You can learn more about things to consider when adopting a child from overseas.

How many children from overseas do Australians adopt each year?

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) provides a variety of reports and statistics on local and intercountry adoption in Australia.

Child Migration_eng

The Australian Embassy in Moscow can apply for one of the following subclass visas.

• Child (subclass 101) - For children of an Australian citizen; a person permanently residing in Australia; or an eligible New Zealand citizen

• Dependent Child (subclass 445) - For children with a parent in Australia on a Spouse Temporary visa and in the process of obtaining a permanent visa

• Adoption (Subclass 102) - For children who have been adopted or are being adopted by an Australian citizen, Australian resident or eligible New Zealand citizen at the time of adoption

• Orphan/Child left without parental care (relative) (subclass 117) - For children whose parents are deceased, incapacitated, or their whereabouts are unknown, and the children have an eligible sponsor

For more information on immigrant visas for children, please visit the Department's website.

• Types of immigration visas for children
• Reference material, immigration of children

How to submit an application

• Visa Application

The Australian Embassy in Moscow recommends applying for immigrant visas for children and dependent children by mail or courier.

1. Sending documents/application by mail or courier

If you apply by mail or courier we will send you confirmation of receipt of your application on the day we receive and register your documents. You must provide all documents listed in the checklist for applying for an immigrant child visa or a dependent child visa. Please check that the payment details are correct on the form, or attach proof of payment of the visa fee (if paid in Australia).

List of Required Documents

By clicking on this link List of Documents for Immigrant Child Visa you can find a list of documents required to be submitted to the Australian Embassy in Moscow for a child, adoption, orphan (relative) visa.

By clicking on this link List of Documents for Child Immigrant Visa subclass 445 , Dependent Child, you will find a list of documents required to be submitted to the Australian Embassy in Moscow for a Dependent Child visa.

List of required documents

By clicking on this link List of documents for a child immigrant visa, you can find a list of documents required to be submitted to the Australian Embassy in Moscow for a child, adoption, orphan (relative) visa.

By clicking on this link List of Documents for Immigrant Child Visa Subclass 445, Dependent Child, you will find a list of documents required to be submitted to the Australian Embassy in Moscow for a Dependent Child visa.

Medical requirements

All applicants for a permanent Australian visa must meet established medical requirements.

Please do not undergo a medical examination until you have been instructed to do so by a member of the Australian Embassy in Moscow.

You do not need to contact your application officer to check if he/she has received the results of your medical examination. The officer will contact you if no results have been received.

More information can be found here: Medical Requirements

June 2014

Australia: National Adoption Considerations | RefNews

Rethinking contemporary and historical adoption experiences will help thousands of children in foster care, says a new report from Australian experts.

Australia is known as the Land of the Lucky, but the almost 40,000 children in orphanages waiting for a permanent home with loving parents and the many spouses who want to adopt a child are hardly lucky.

Adoptions in Australia have declined by a staggering 97% over the past 40 years, from nearly 10,000 adoptions in 1971-72 to to just 339 in 2012-13, with almost a third of them made overseas. Other countries also experienced a decline in adoptions, albeit not much compared to Australia.

Are we really taking better care of children in need? Or is the fact that a large number of them are in shelters a sign that we have preferred ideological and bureaucratic concerns to their interests? A new report from the Australian Women's Forum "Adoption Rethink" shows that the latter is closer to the truth.

The report examines the decline in adoptions from various perspectives, including the current rise in legal abortions, feminist theory and media coverage. It tracks how this practice, once seen as a natural and obvious solution to the needs of children who are unable to be raised by their own parents, has fallen out of favor in recent decades, and how it affects the growing number of children being raised outside the family.

Closed adoptions, stolen generations

At the forefront of this recent story are women who abandoned their children at birth in a time when single mothers were viewed with disapproval. Sometimes these women were under pressure to give up babies without knowing the adoptive parents or expecting to ever see their child again. These women speak of their grief and the wound they have received. Already grown children, who were adopted / adopted under the same “closed” regime, also complained about their painful “quest” to find their biological parents, their full identity. Studies conducted among such people revealed a high level of mental disorders in them.

Historical errors that lead us to speak of the Stolen Generations (separating Aboriginal children from their families), lost innocents (the "export" of 7,000 children from the UK in the early 20th century) and Lost Australians (hundreds of thousands of Australians who spent their childhoods in orphanages) have also contributed to the bleak notion of adoption over the past ten years.

At the same time, the population of children who could benefit from adoption has also changed. Early 19In the 1970s, at least half of the adoptions involved the children of young unmarried women. They, themselves almost children, were encouraged, even forced to give away a child they could not raise alone, and instead encouraged to strive to complete their education, find a job and get married. Now those norms have changed with benefits, abortions and birth control pills.

Is another lost generation on the way?

Today's picture is very different from the past. Most children in Australia (and similar countries) in need of foster parents have been taken from their biological parents due to physical, sexual or emotional abuse, neglect, and placed in foster homes. The number of these children has doubled over the past decade, however, despite this, it takes an average of four years to adopt a child into a foster family.

At a time when dramas about foreign adoptions fill the pages of magazines and newspapers, the uncertain future of these children is a growing scandal that calls for urgent action.

Rethinking Adoption reports that of 39,621 children in foster care in mid-2012, two out of three were in a state of permanent family-to-family transfer for two or more years, with an increasing number of children continually returning to the system . “Thus, children in foster care live in a state of more frequent change and instability, which leads to more complex needs and behaviors.”

Becky Hope, in her book All In a Day's Work, cited in the report, emphasizes the critical importance of stable, loving care during the earliest periods of a child's life:

who do not get their basic needs met in reciprocal, loving care, and who are forced to scramble through life on their own, suffer visible devastating effects of brain development even before they are a year old.

It has also been found that children who experience severe lack of parental attention as infants and are placed in long-term foster care before six months of age are able to generally make more progress than if they are adopted after six months.

Children need stability to form secure attachments, but guardianship, no matter how well it is done, is temporary in nature. While there has been an increase in permanent guardianship cases in Australia (and similar instruments elsewhere), a recent study in Queensland found that such arrangements "do not provide enough stability for children". On the one hand, the rights of guardians can be challenged by the family of origin, on the other hand, they do not give children the same sense of belonging to the family, unlike adoption.

Gregory Pike, director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture in Adelaide, also comments on this situation in the report “Rethinking Adoption”: adoptions. The cost to society and government of caring for these children and treating the traumatic consequences of their situation is enormous.

Adoption: open and closed

(Ed. With a closed adoption, the adoptive family can keep the fact that the child is not a parent, with an open adoption is not a priority)

In Australia in 2011-12, 95% of local adoptions were open - this is a continuing upward trend that has covered 80% of adoptions since 1998.

Although some adoptions did not really take into account the needs of the birth mothers (fathers were usually not in this picture at all) and the child, in the age of open adoptions, every effort is made to respect the rights and feelings of all participants in the “adoption triangle” . In any case, it is the adoptive parents who now suffer their own stigma for being on a side with a dark history, which has negatively impacted a significant number of people.

There is a tendency to exaggerate this influence.

Dr. Pike reviewed local and international reports on adoption outcomes for biological mothers, adopted children and parents, including those who belonged to the "closed" age. The literature provides a much more detailed picture than is evident from media reports of people who have gone through negative or unhappy experiences.

Undoubtedly, some mothers who were forced to give up children suffered, but “a significant amount of uncertainty exists about how common these outcomes were and how they relate to the characteristics of adoption and its process,” Pike says. There is evidence that finding and reuniting with a child has a healing effect.

Looking at the problems of adopted children, he found the following: Although adopted children represent the largest proportion of patients with mental disorders, the actual proportion of "adoptees" in a society with such problems is very small. Foster children face significant challenges in addition to those typically experienced by children in early childhood and adolescence, however, there is evidence that foster children have incredible resilience and there is official evidence of their ability to "catch up" on various occasions. For some adopted children, their experiences prior to adoption were often difficult and sometimes traumatic, and these experiences were associated with later outcomes. When compared with their peers who remained in the shelters, the "adoptees" had better physical and mental health and better circumstances in education and socialization. The key issues for adopted children were attachment, self-determination, search and recovery.

Little research has been done on foster parents and their problems.

International adoption

Despite the bad reputation and availability of reproductive technology, it appears that many couples would be happy to adopt a child if given the option. Frustrated by the barriers to adoption in Australia, they often turn to orphanages in developing countries. Here again they have to wait up to five years.

Obviously, special care must be taken to ensure that the adoption of a child in another country and culture serves his best interests. Pike says: “In the case of all adoptions, and according to the Hague Convention on Adoption, cross-country adoption should be used only in cases where the biological parents (parent) or relatives do not have the ability or desire to properly care for the child. Only if there are no suitable facilities available to provide ongoing care in the State where the child was born, should ethical inter-country adoption be considered in the best interests of the child.”

Tony Abbot's government in Australia has taken steps to expedite these adoptions by creating a new national agency that will be operational by mid-2015 to negotiate adoptions with most countries.

However, each country has its own special obligations to its children, and those under the care of the state deserve a new plan. Barnados Australia, a leading non-governmental agency for the protection of child survivors of abuse, urges Abbott to set a goal for open adoptions in every state.

So why delay?

According to a report by Martin Nary, UK Government Adoption Adviser, important factors include: take him to meetings with his parent or parents while the court decides the future of the child. This represents a shocking mistake with devastating consequences for children and society that will last for decades."

- Parents are given priority: the needs of the parents, not the rights of the children, are the priority.

-Loss of sense of urgency when a child is placed in care.

-Social workers: the need for a balance of social workers who have maturity (not necessarily skill level) and experience in the care and development of children and young workers who may be qualified. Everyone needs to be trained in a real child protection situation and taught to understand the priorities of the child, the need to act immediately, and so on.

Pike also noted that ideology plays a key role: there are a number of references in Australian sources to an anti-adoptive mentality in some educational institutions "and perhaps among professionals who are key intermediaries", such as employees of government welfare departments. A 2005 government report on foreign adoption noted that attitudes in these departments ranged from "indifference to hostility".

Feminist ideas about patriarchy and its "dominant prescriptions" are also included. Combined with revelations about previous scandals and forced adoptions, this has shaped public opinion that children should not be separated from their parents.

This is basically a reasonable principle: the child must be with the parents and reasonable steps must be taken to ensure that they can stay together. However, when a child is neglected or abused, despite the help of relatives and the intervention of the authorities, there must come a time when the best interests of the child dictate the need for his removal from the family.

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