The crying shame of South Korea’s adoption scandal for Australia

A landmark South Korean inquiry has found systemic fraud involving falsified registrations in the country’s adoption program, leading to a profit-driven “mass exportation of children”, including thousands of Australians, with minimal procedural oversight.

The inquiry broadly found that children were falsely documented as orphans when they had known parents, while in other cases authorities failed to secure proper consent from biological parents for adoptions or adequately screen adoptive parents.

The Herald’s North Asia correspondent, Lisa Visentin, has caught the anguish of the Australians adopted from South Korea confronted with harrowing new questions about their identities. Australia only ratified The Hague Convention on overseas adoptions in 1998, and Visentin also showed the slipshod way that Australian authorities, especially in NSW and Victoria, facilitated the adoptions with almost hands-off oversight. The few red flags raised by concerned professionals were ignored by governments.

Responsibility for managing inter-country adoptions in Australia is splintered across federal and state departments. Following a 2005 federal parliamentary inquiry into overseas adoptions, the NSW government relinquished its lead responsibility for the Korean adoption program, which was then transferred to Canberra. The federal Department of Social Services (DSS) now has oversight of the partnership with Seoul-based Eastern Social Welfare Society, while state authorities are responsible for assessing cases, facilitating adoptions and providing post-adoption support.

Labor has promised to investigate concerns about the Australia-Korea adoption program if it is re-elected to government. “We recognise the distress this has caused those affected. If re-elected, Labor will ask the Department of Social Services to investigate the allegations and report to the minister,” a government spokesman said in a statement.

But the plan for an in-house investigation under the aegis of the DSS is myopic. The department has overseen inter-country adoptions for nearly two decades without the penny dropping that something was terribly wrong.

The South Korean investigation has triggered painful reckonings for some Australian Korean adoptees. The newly formed KADS Connect group advocating for South Korean adoptees is pushing for a federal parliamentary inquiry. It would examine Australia’s relationship with the Eastern Social Welfare Society, one of four privately run agencies under investigation for human rights violations by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It facilitated about 3600 adoptions to Australia from 1978 as well as thousands to the United States. At one stage during the peak, between 1980 and 1988, Eastern was sending five children a day to Australia or the US.

Retiring Liberal senator Linda Reynolds has also called for a wide-reaching parliamentary inquiry after the federal election to “review and report on the situation across all Australian jurisdictions”. “This is to ensure that we protect the rights and best interests of adoptees, and to align Australia’s inter-country adoption practices with international best practice,” she said.

The adoptees and Senator Reynolds are right on the need for a parliamentary inquiry. Labor’s promise of an in-house investigation lacks the necessary transparency and real commitment to get to the bottom of something that remains a crying shame for both Australia and South Korea.

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