When baby Leevii came to live with foster carers Rachel and Peter Maxwell as a three-month-old, it was only supposed to be a short-term stay.
But as the weeks turned into months, the Grafton paramedics grew increasingly attached to the little boy and decided to investigate adoption.
After six years, Leevii's adoption was formalised in February, with he and the Maxwells enjoying regular contact with his birth mother and siblings.
"It was a long process and it takes a lot out of you," Mrs Maxwell said. "We sometimes used to wonder which documents were sitting on whose desk. Each step seemed to take forever but the result was absolutely worth it. After waiting for so long to adopt, it was such a special feeling."
Long delays are partly responsible for Australia's historically low rate of adoption, with only 87 NSW children adopted by their carers last year despite the number of children in out-of-home care ballooning to almost 20,000.
There is no data on local adoption time frames but anecdotally it can take between about 18 months and more than eight years, with delays attributed to a resistance by some agencies to consider adoption and a slow legal process.
There are 272 children stuck in an adoption bottleneck in NSW, waiting for assessment, formal approval or final court orders, according to figures from the Department of Family and Community Services.
The real number of pending adoptions might be much higher, according to Jane Hunt, chief executive of pro-adoption advocacy group, Adopt Change.
"The community groups representing current foster carers who'd like to adopt estimate there are 700 families wanting to adopt," she said. "The bureaucracy and delays are a source of frustration."
The NSW government aims to triple adoption figures, spending $2 million to address the bottleneck through boosting the number of staff with expertise in adoption and $2.85 million on the Institute of Open Adoption Studies at Sydney University, which will research best adoption practice.
A NSW woman who has been waiting almost eight years to adopt a boy who has lived with her and her partner since he was a baby, said devoting more funds to increase adoption would not necessarily speed up the process.
"The money is there but no one in the department is trained in what is needed to be done to move an adoption forward," she said. "The problem is with incompetence and idiocy, not a lack of money.
"It's misleading to tell prospective parents that adoption is an option because in many cases, that's just not true."
Jeremy Sammut, a research fellow of the Centre for Independent Studies and author of The Madness of Australian Child Protection: Why Adoption Will Rescue Australia's Underclass Children, said $2 million was a "spit in the bucket" compared with the billion-dollar cost of out-of-home care in NSW.
"The real problem is a cultural one and the cultural problem is that the departments are anti-adoption," he said.
Catherine Lynch, head of the Australian Adoptee Rights Advocacy Group, said resources would be better directed to "fixing the broken foster care system".
"There is a massive financial incentive to get children into adoption because it saves money for the government which no longer has to cover their costs of foster care," she said.
