For these reasons plus a few others, Australian adoption of Australian children is rare. Thus, childless couples in Australia usually must look outside the country to find children who can be adopted. For those who are able to find children within Australia to adopt, the laws now favor less secrecy about the birth parents of those children. Because of those laws, adopting couples find that pretending that a child is their own offspring is difficult. The laws require letting adopted children know more about their biological families than previously.
Because there are so few Australian children available for adoption, foreigners cannot be considered to adopt Australian children. The children can only be adopted by residents of the state or territory in which the children are residents. No children are now adopted by non-Australian couples.
Australian adoption of children from other countries is a debated subject. Some people feel that it is helpful to adopt needy children and bring them into Australia for a better life. Other people feel that the idea of foreign adoptions borders on baby trafficking and should be discouraged. There are reasonable arguments on both sides if the issue. Regardless of the negative arguments, there are Australian couples who see no other way to have children besides inter-country adoption. With so few Australian children available for adoption and with a number of laws forming hurdles to Australian adoption, few childless couples see much likelihood of adopting within the country.
For the Australian couples who consider adopting from outside the country, there are many concerns. One of them is the obvious corruption in adoption programs of some other countries. Some of the children are claimed to have been stolen from their families or removed for bogus reasons and then resold. This is clearly bad for everyone involved except the operators of the programs.
Some children have been taken from the areas of natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and even wars and sold into many markets. Some are forced into prostitution while others are sold to have body parts transplanted into other people. Some of the children have had little or no opportunity to try to move in with relatives because they are stolen and sold.
The baby trafficking claim seems to be very real. However, there are children whose families are completely destroyed. Those children would benefit from being adopted by couples who want to love and nurture them, giving them a home in a modern country such as Australia. A street child, whose life is completely taken up with begging for food and shelter, surely would benefit from an Australian adoption.
Adoption can benefit a couple as well as an orphan child. A shortage of adoptable children in Australia makes it more logical to consider adoption of children from other countries. It looks like a win-win situation.