Adoption rates in Australia have hit a record low and prospective parents are waiting more than five years to adopt overseas children.
Adoption numbers are declining despite more people wanting to adopt children. 
In Australia just 292 adoptions were completed in the past financial year, a decline of 8 per cent on the previous period.
Those figures emerged in a report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, which showed the adoption rate plummeted by 74 per cent from the level 25 years ago.
Parents postponing having children and a reduction in fertility rates led to fewer children in need of adoption. But more families were seeking to adopt, the report said.
However, there was an increase in adoptions of children by their carers, rising to 94 with NSW driving much of that change.
In 2014-15 known child adoptions in which parents already knew the child accounted for 52 per cent of the total.
Federal Social Services Minister Christian Porter told the ABC that in a "variety of instances" there was too much emphasis on family reunifications and there were circumstances in which that could not be "rationally achieved".   
Victoria had the greatest number of local adoptions with 24 compared to Queensland with 10 and NSW on nine. In these local adoptions the child was not previously known to the adoptive parents.
However, in Victoria there were only five known child adoptions, compared with 108 in New South Wales.
Anglicare chief executive Paul McDonald said there were many more adoptions in the US where people often went through the process for "altruistic reasons".
He said in Victoria there was also an emphasis on permanent care, in which guardians are granted similar rights to adoption but the arrangement ceases when the child turns 18.
"There should be all options open," he said.
In Victoria there were 277 permanent care orders granted in Victoria in 2014/15.
The report's release comes after same-sex couples were this month granted the right to adopt children in Victoria.
Nearly half of the intercountry adoptions were into families with no other children.
The median waiting time to adopt children from Taiwan was 3.5 years compared to almost eight years for China.
The report said many prospective adoptive parents looked overseas for a child because they wanted younger babies and thought older children would have more health and behavioural issues. Many also believed finding younger children was more likely overseas.
However, the report found those perceptions were not necessarily supported by available data.
The process for placing local children with adoptive parents includes education seminars, an approval process and selection of the parents' application from a pool of applicants.
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