This Government bill makes temporary amendments to the Adoption Act 1955 aimed at preventing harm to children and young people adopted overseas and brought to New Zealand to live. It was enacted as the Adoption Amendment Act 2025.
Parliament advanced this bill under urgency (committee of whole house, first reading, second reading, third reading) — moving it through faster than usual, with less time than normal for public submissions.
This Bill amends the Adoption Act 1955 to strengthen safeguards around international adoptions - cases where a child adopted overseas is brought to, or recognised in, New Zealand. It temporarily suspends the automatic recognition of certain overseas adoptions (under section 17 of the Act) for citizenship and immigration purposes, and limits the Family Court's ability to grant an adoption where the parent or the child lives outside New Zealand (under section 3). The restrictions are not blanket: the Bill allows exemptions for countries judged to have adequate safeguards, preserves the established pathway for adoptions carried out under the Hague Convention, and keeps a ministerial discretion to approve individual cases on their family circumstances. The aim is to close a gap that allowed some children to enter the country through adoptions with weak oversight. Prospective adoptive families and children adopted from overseas are those affected.
This is a government bill introduced as a protective, temporary measure after evidence emerged that some children brought to New Zealand through international adoption had been subjected to neglect, abuse or exploitation. It is intended as an interim step while the government develops broader, permanent reform of intercountry adoption law. Supporters argue it is a necessary stopgap to protect vulnerable children from being placed through unsafe or poorly scrutinised overseas processes. Critics caution that a broad suspension is a blunt instrument that could delay or block genuine, safe adoptions, keep some families apart, and create uncertainty for those partway through the process, and they argue the deeper problem is New Zealand's outdated adoption law, which needs comprehensive rather than piecemeal reform.
See the Parliament.nz ↗ site for the full bill.