TD-VET-01 · Sourced exhibit
Search the national register of Australian vocational qualifications — training.gov.au, the single database that governs what every registered training organisation in the country is allowed to teach — for the word “Adoption.” It returns four results. One qualification: RGR40419, Certificate IV in Greyhound Racing Industry. One current unit of competency, CPPHES4009, “Promote the adoption of home sustainability practices,” and its superseded predecessor CPPHSA4007A — a unit about persuading residents to take up water-saving habits. One skill set: RGRSS00069, Greyhound Adoption Skill Set. Two results are about dogs. Two are about a homophone. None are about a human being separated from their family of origin by the state.
I did not misplace that meaning. It was never filed.
My father — Mark Moffatt, DNA-verified, a working record as public as any musician’s — produced music that ran through The Saints and sat in the orbit of Jimmy Barnes, Swanee, the wider Australian rock and pub-music scene of his era. Among that body of work is a production credit connected to “Treaty,” the Yothu Yindi song that turned a demand — that the state formally reckon with a sovereignty it had severed — into something people still hum forty years later.
My father helped make the record that carried that demand into the culture. He knew about me for eight years and never made contact. I found and was welcomed by his wider family anyway — the reunion just didn’t include him. He died in September 2024, in Nashville, having done both of those things — helped build the soundtrack for one country’s reckoning with a severed sovereignty, and left his own unreckoned with, quietly, to the end.
I am not placing my file next to that one and calling them the same size. They are not, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
The reunion cost me on both sides. Finding and being welcomed by Moffatt’s family didn’t cost me anything — that side opened, even where he didn’t. It’s the other side that closed: my adoptive family estranged me over pursuing it. That is the actual arithmetic of being an adoptee who goes looking — you can gain the truth and lose the family that raised you in the same transaction, and there is no line item for that in any qualification I have been able to find either.
This didn’t start with a search bar, and it isn’t going to end with one. Nearly four years before I found four results on a government training register, I opened a case with the department that owns it. It got a number: CAS-580321-Y5H0B8. That number outlived four years, five different agencies, two Human Rights Commissioners, an Ombudsman complaint, and a resignation, before the department that opened it finally told me, in June 2026, that the file was done. Here is that record, in order.
Formal letter proposing adoption and forced-adoption inclusion in vocational education training packages, sent to Queensland ministers, ASQA, and federal MPs.
The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations opens case CAS-580321-Y5H0B8. ASQA responds directly. Follow-up continues into Feb 2023.
Continuing advocacy for adoption and forced-adoption content in vocational education curricula, through Queensland training organisations and HumanAbility’s VET Workforce Research project.
Op-ed “When Will Australia Step Up?” published in The West Australian. Formal letter to federal minister Hon. Bill Shorten MP, copied to Queensland Child Safety, the Australian Human Rights Commission, and HumanAbility.
Formal complaint lodged with the Commonwealth Ombudsman against the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations over its handling of the issue (ref. 2025-820011).
Robert Tickner, the minister who delivered the 2013 National Apology for Forced Adoptions, and Professor Daryl Higgins (Australian Catholic University, a leading forced-adoption researcher), both contacted directly — both reply in support. Submission lodged with the Queensland Child Safety Commission of Inquiry.
Formal written proposal to two Australian Human Rights Commissioners for a Social Justice Commissioner for Family Separation & Reunification.
The Queensland Minister for Families’ office replies with a forwarded departmental letter. Rejected in writing as not an answer.
DEWR formally directs the matter to HumanAbility, Jobs and Skills Australia, ASQA, and the National Children’s Commissioner.
Five formal submissions lodged the same day — the OMISSION Platform’s audit of three CHC qualifications, scoring 24.5 out of 100 against eight survivor-centred rights domains — to HumanAbility, JSA, ASQA, the National Children’s Commissioner, and DEWR, closing case CAS-580321-Y5H0B8 after three and a half years.
Same-day filing: an individual communication to the UN Special Rapporteur on truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence; a request to the Attorney-General’s Department to amend the AHRC Act so “social origin” discrimination — the ground that covers being adopted — isn’t restricted to employment matters only; and a parallel self-reference request to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee.
The Senate Committee replies: no current inquiry covers it. Suggested response — contact your local MP.
Story pitch sent to SBS editorial staff proposing this exact throughline — Moffatt, “Treaty,” and the parallel erasure of forced adoption — as a national feature. Pending response.
Vocational education was twenty-five years of my working life. I left my last role in it — E-Learning Administrator at a Queensland community college — in May 2024, resigning on my own terms while this exact campaign was already running underneath the job. My manager accepted it “with a very heavy heart.” I won’t dress that up as a sacking, and I won’t flatten it into a tidy burnout story either. Here is what I can put on the record: I gave twenty-five years to a system I am now telling, in writing, to a Human Rights Commissioner, an Ombudsman, and a federal department, that it never built a single unit of competency for what happened to me. The industry trained me for a quarter of a century. It still hasn’t trained anyone to say my name.
Here is what I am placing next to it: a demand to be heard. Treaty asks a nation to accept that a severed sovereignty deserves acknowledgment — a name for what was taken, a process for reckoning with it. My father helped put that demand on a record people still play. If this culture can hold “a severed identity deserves to be heard” as true enough to build a whole political vocabulary around it, it cannot also decide my version of that same claim doesn’t count — not when the record proving I was never even worth a sentence in a training manual sits in a government database anyone can search in under a minute.
Refuse to hear me, and you haven’t silenced one adoptee. You’ve told on yourselves: the principle was never universal — it was something you were willing to sing about and not something you were willing to live by. That doesn’t erase what Treaty means to the people it was written for. It erases what it was ever supposed to prove about the rest of you.
