What M?ori want from reforms to the adoption system

Adoption laws need to be overhauled to stop M?ori tamariki being “severed” from their birth family and culture, experts say.

The Government is seeking feedback on proposed options for a reformation of the adoption system.

New Zealand’s adoption laws are 67 years old and were ratified in the Adoption Act 1955.

Options in the proposed system would include giving adopted people access to their adoption records at any age, legal recognition of wh?ngai (a traditional method of open adoption to relatives) and post-adoption contact agreements.

Canterbury University’s Dr Annabel Ahuriri-Driscoll, a senior lecturer in M?ori health and wellbeing, said a reformed adoption system was important for M?ori.

The existing system was “problematic” for M?ori adoptees such as herself, she said.

Adoptive parents are currently the only parents noted on an adopted child’s birth certificate, which the Law Society has described as a “legal fiction”.

No information regarding biological parents is included.

“What [that] does is it erases your birth identity and your connections with your birth parents and your wh?nau,” Ahuriri-Driscoll said.

Some adopted people wanted to connect with their birth family and access entitlements, such as succession to M?ori land, she said.

However, sometimes the urge to reconnect was not for entitlements but to be “counted and acknowledged”, she said. “At the moment the law makes that really difficult.”

Otago University lecturer Dr Erica Newman, from the school of M?ori, Pacific and indigenous studies, said adoption laws had significant impacts on M?ori, both historically and contemporarily.

“The adoption law severed that connection between the child and their birth parents, mostly the mother. In doing that for M?ori, they were often raised outside of their own culture,” she said.

The adoption law said the purpose was to raise the child as if they were born into that family – which was often te ao P?keh? (the P?keh? world), with any M?ori heritage stomped out, Newman said.

“For M?ori, to know who you are is to know who came before you, what the events were before you, who your t?puna are. It situates you within te ao M?ori,” she said.

“The child becomes a person who is floating ... not able to connect themselves where they belong.”

Ahuriri-Driscoll said there was an opportunity to reform the current system to fully support M?ori.

“I do hold the belief that we might be able to create a form of adoption that is closer to wh?ngai, in terms of holding those values and principles, such as being child and wh?nau-centred and not severing relationships,” she said.

“I think for the Government, the real challenge is striking that balance between their kawanatanga (governance) responsibilities, and enabling that rangatiratanga (self-determination) for M?ori with regards for the care of tamariki.”

Newman said the pathway to connection needed to be made easier for adoptees and birth parents.

“It would be good if, when you contact Oranga Tamariki to get information about your adoption that everything is provided to you,” she said.

“At the moment it is redacted and they will only give you certain information.”

The Ministry of Justice said M?ori would be consulted throughout the feedback process and in implementing reforms.

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