Page 1110 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 23 June 1992
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Even your Government's acknowledgment that prevention is better than cure is both belated and inadequate. Why, now, do you talk in your presentation speech about contraceptive methods, including, I note, perfect contraceptive methods, which even Mr Connolly had the sense to disclaim? Perfect contraceptive methods - this must be a world breakthrough, Madam Speaker. Yet, in spite of the report of these methods, perfect or not, you make no recommendations whatsoever. Again I would refer you to report No. 26, where there are eight contraceptive recommendations listed. They are sensible; they are humane; they are responsible. Why do you not incorporate such recommendations in your proposed legislation?
I suggest, again, that it is because you are in too much of a hurry to satisfy Labor Party ideology and, I would suggest, to get this policy up well before the next Assembly election or, indeed, the next Federal election. After all, Mrs Kelly and Mr Langmore will not be too happy with this. I noticed Mrs Kelly's expression when she was at St Peter's College on Sunday when Archbishop Carroll spoke out against this proposal. She was not too happy at all, and I wonder why anybody else would have confidence in you people. You simply do not know, I believe, what you are doing on this divisive community issue. I predict that even some of your supporters will be concerned at the irresponsible way in which you have not addressed very fundamental aspects of abortion and the safeguards. I have no confidence whatsoever in what appears to be your solution, and that is to leave it in the hands of whoever might take up the task of providing the service. I do not believe that that is the right way or indeed the safe way to go.
I say this, mindful of the fact that 1,100 ACT abortions per annum - your figures, Mr Berry - might not provide sufficient profit for a private clinic. If that is the case, the prospect of the service falling into the hands of a local sisterhood is both very real and very worrying. Whilst they are very strong on the idea of women controlling their own bodies, they are not too enthusiastic, in my experience, about women accepting the financial consequences of such control. To date, I have yet to see any women's health service here that is not heavily government sponsored. I fully expect, therefore, to see the taxpayer footing the bill for a government funded but female run abortion clinic, no doubt listed as supported accommodation and thus shrouded in secrecy. What I do not expect to see is any evidence coming before this Assembly listing the checks and the balances, the controls and the safeguards that formed the basis of report No. 26 in 1977 and are just as relevant today as they were 15 years ago.
For this reason I will certainly be opposing the repeal. I believed 15 years ago that the Federal Government was wrong when it opted for the pragmatically sublime, and I believe in 1992 that you people in the ACT Labor Government are just as wrong for swinging to what I regard as the dangerously ridiculous.
MS SZUTY (8.56): Madam Speaker, we in the ACT Legislative Assembly have before us today a Bill to repeal the termination of pregnancy legislation, which for the past 23 years has meant that women in the ACT who wanted and needed an abortion had either to go through a rigid and humiliating process or to travel interstate, where they were able to undergo the procedure but were in many cases denied adequate health and counselling follow-up. Abolishing this legislative dinosaur will not establish an abortion clinic in Canberra. That is a question for another day and no doubt there will be lengthy debate before that becomes a reality.
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