Page 925 - Week 03 - Thursday, 3 April 2008
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There are many cases where there may be potential for this—Parkinson’s disease, muscular dystrophy and a lot of the muscular wasting diseases. When I discuss these things, I always bring to mind someone who has had a great influence on my life and who has been a great spokesman in favour of therapeutic cloning and all of this research. That is Paul Brock, a Sydney resident who taught me many years ago and who instilled in me a love of English. I follow Paul’s progress very closely. He is a person who has been afflicted with a muscular degenerative disease. When you are in this situation, I can understand that you do look for solutions everywhere you go. I hope that one day we will find a solution for this, but I believe quite firmly that we cannot use any means available to us. As legislators, we must draw back from that which is unethical.
From my own point of view, I recall when the precursor legislation that we are amending today was first introduced into the commonwealth parliament in 2002. My daughter Olivia and I made a joint submission to the Senate inquiry. As members would know, some of my children suffer from cystic fibrosis, and it is held out that some of this research may provide cures for cystic fibrosis. The point that Olivia and I made in our submission was essentially that it is not ethical that somebody, no matter how small, should die to provide Olivia and Conor with a cure for their disease. By all means, look for cures for their disease, but not at the cost of another human life. That is the position that I have taken consistently on this issue and that is the position that I will take today.
Another thing that we must take into account is that if we pass this amendment bill we are essentially throwing out everything that we debated here in 2004 and that the commonwealth debated in 2002. When the commonwealth passed this legislation, the thing that set all this in train in 2002, almost every person who stood up in the debate said: “We do not want to go down the path of cloning. We do not want to go down the path of creating hybrid embryos. We do not want to go down that path.” Yet in four short years some of the people who put those views have radically changed their positions.
In fact, the principal sponsor of the commonwealth legislation which this copies, Senator Kay Patterson, changed her position quite radically from the position that she espoused in 2004 to sponsor the bill. It would have been much more ethically honest for Senator Patterson and the co-sponsors of the bill, and for the minister coming in here today, to have presented us with a piece of legislation which repealed the original Human Cloning and Embryo Research Act and set in place a new piece of legislation. When you do it in this form as an amendment bill, it belies the radical nature of what is being proposed in this legislation. What is being proposed in this legislation is not a small, incremental change; it is a quantum leap and a radical change, and it should be recognised as that.
The first thing we are doing today is amending the long title of this legislation. The original long title of the legislation that we are amending said “An Act to prohibit human cloning”. The act that we are amending today is a piece of legislation that outlaws human cloning. If the minister wants to introduce legislation that now makes human cloning legal, she should do it in an open and up-front way—come in here and repeal the existing legislation, bring in an act that repeals the existing legislation and
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