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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2772 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

whether they support that basic proposition or in other ways complicate and perhaps undermine the simple proposition I have stated to the house which is the reason for my support for this legislation.

I also give notice of the fact that I support the provision that I understand is in here to have a sunset clause in the legislation in order that the report of the Law Reform Commission which I commissioned some time ago can be prepared and presented for this Assembly's consideration. I also indicate that I will take that report into account in due course in determining whether the legislation should be made permanent with the removal of the sunset clause in a couple of years' time.

I think on balance it is appropriate to support Mr Stanhope's amendment because I think that it is appropriate for two or more children born in this arrangement to move together into the custody of genetic parents. If genetic parents wish to reject one child, they should reject both or all of the children. That is one judgment which I make in adopting the God-like position that one has to adopt in these circumstances of trying to make decisions about the life and welfare of such people in these circumstances, but other decisions may be more complicated and less easy to discern. I look forward to looking at the amendments in more detail to determine whether a similar view can be taken.

MS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (4.33): I think that it is important for me to make some comments right now because I suspect that my view on this matter may be somewhat different from that of everybody else in this Assembly. I do not find it extraordinarily worrying. I believe very strongly that the situations whereby couples enter into these sorts of arrangements ensure that the child born has much more chance than a child born under any other normal circumstance of being loved and wanted regularly not by just the genetic parents or just the birth parents but by everybody because everybody wants it to happen so much.

The fact is that we do not seem to go through the same moral dilemmas about young ladies going down to the pub on Friday night and then having a baby that they do not want. That is because it is just part of normal life. It is always difficult to come to grips with new technology. It was hard when we started to be able to transplant hearts. Very shortly we will have to deal with cloned organs. All sorts of things are changing, and they are changing for the better because they give us more opportunities as human beings to live our life to the fullest and to live our life healthily.

I believe that the situation whereby a woman is willing to bear a child for a couple who are otherwise unable to have children and who are genetically related to the child and willing to care for it is not necessarily unlike conception and birth by more conventional means; that is, it is based on love and it is on a natural inclination to have children. Knowing what these couples go through to get to the stage of producing a child, I know that it has to be based on love because of the difficulty. I know that it is significantly tougher and that more hurdles are put in place than would ever be the case with more natural methods of childbirth. The safeguards that are in place for that child are a thousand times greater than is the case for children born every day all round this world.

I think that we can get to be a little bit precious in terms of our approach to this matter. This legislation does have in it a number of safeguards, as does the whole in-vitro fertilisation program. The National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines are

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