The final report for an inquiry into same-sex adoption in NSW was released today. The major recommendation to come out of the report was for same-sex couples to be given the same adoption rights as heterosexual couples. You can read the whole thing here.
The committee was made up of 3 Labor MP’s, 2 Liberals and 1 Green.
Strangely, the recommendations weren’t passed by the Labor/Green majority, but by a strange alliance of Labor/Liberal/Green with both a Labor MP and Liberal MP issuing dissenting statements. On top of Liberal MP John Ajaka, the Labor Whip Greg Donnelly opposed the recommendation on the grounds that children should only be raised by both a mother and a father. I never got this argument and it doesn’t make any sense in an Australian context where 20% of households are single-parent families.
Same-sex adoption has been something Labor has been promising for a while and it looked like it was ready to be legislated after this inquiry reported back. However, there were suggestions that Labor had a done a deal with Fred Nile from the Christian Democrats that involved dropping this bill in exchange for Nile’s support on other pieces of key legislation. With Labor having lost control of the Upper House once already, to much criticism, it’s unlikely they’ll risk bluffing Nile.
Hopefully the recommendation will become law and NSW can move a little bit beyond its woeful record on gay rights.
That report’s magnificent. There’s just so much reading between the lines—the committee room must have been like a Mexican wrestling match, only more passive-aggressive.
Am I understanding this correctly then that the Liberal MP who supported the recommendations was David Clarke?
Nah, I made a mistake. Ajaka supported the recommendation but wanted to add in something minor.
David Clarke, lol.
You know that he thanked Piers Akerman for his contribution to free media in his maiden speech.
He’s the reason I’ll always preference Labor.
A ridiculous recommendation and a ridiculous blog post. The fact that 20% of children are raised by “single parents” does not justify the government mandating this be deliberately expanded by advancing the agenda of the gay lobby – in fact, we know that children not raised within a traditional family unit are, on average, far worse off on a range of economic and social indicators.
If you truly had the interests of children at heart, you would be looking for ways to decrease the phenomenon of single parenthood, divorce and conception outside wedlock.
Would you care to point who is advocating an expansion of single-parent families?
You do realise that a same-sex *couple* by its very definition is not single-parent?
The hypocrisy I was pointing out was those who apparently see little problem with divorce and raising children in a single-parent household, by making it legal, but for some reason think a same-sex couple raising children is wrong, by making it illegal.