Page 1106 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 23 June 1992
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law; we would have on the table tonight a Bill that addressed those issues, not issues that are incapable of solution because people have their minds made up and they are miles apart.
I think I have said just about everything that I want to say. For heaven's sake, let us not have an emotional, divisive debate on a subject on which we will never all be reconciled. Let us look at the smaller issues where there is the possibility of some reconciliation of view in the interests of this community. If we could only achieve that, we would be setting a milestone in the ACT. We would be setting the lead for the rest of Australia, instead of blindly following what others have done, which is not necessarily in the best interests of their communities either.
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (8.35): Madam Speaker, I respect the views of members opposite; but I really think it is important that we focus, and continue to focus, on what this debate this evening really is about. We are not debating the threshold issue of termination of pregnancy. Mr Humphries made that almost singly the issue which he focused on in his remarks, and Mr Kaine strayed into it as well. That is not the issue that we are debating. We are not debating whether abortions may or may not be performed in the ACT. We all know that they have been performed here for many, many years. They were performed under Mr Humphries as Minister for Health; they were performed under the Tasmanian, Mr Hodgman, who I believe drafted the current legislation which we seek to repeal. We are not debating whether abortion should or should not occur. It has occurred over many years. It will continue to occur. I might say, Madam Speaker, that it will continue to occur regardless of our vote this evening. It is not the issue, so put that aside.
Nor are we being asked to define the criteria under which terminations may occur. We have all mentioned what those criteria are. Mr Kaine knows them; he has told us what they are. The criteria before tonight, and after tonight, will remain that a termination is not unlawful if it is carried out in the honest belief that that termination is necessary to preserve the woman from serious danger to her life, or to her physical or mental health. No-one is going to change all those criteria this evening. No-one proposes to change them at all. So that is not the issue either.
What we are debating is whether terminations in the ACT should continue to take place exclusively in our public hospital system and whether they should, therefore, take place under the protocols and the administrative arrangements laid down by the hospital system. That is the issue. It is an issue of whether the public hospital system has the exclusive right in the ACT to undertake terminations. I think members ought to be very clear on that and not stray into emotional references to slaughterhouses and all the rest of it.
Madam Speaker, I believe that the most important point that we can make this evening is that of the rights of the woman involved. We have heard an awful lot about the rights of the unborn child. We have heard almost nothing about the rights of the woman. I would like to advise members of the current arrangements for terminations of pregnancy in the ACT, as I understand them. There does appear to be something of a lack of understanding. In our hospital system, under the current system - this is my understanding, Madam Speaker - a woman may, of course, have a termination in a public hospital. She must first find a doctor
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