Page 3486 - Week 13 - Thursday, 26 November 1992
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inquiring into what is essentially a breach of the law and, of course, of public health. His answers have been designed to buy time. Now we have these regulation changes, and I must say that I strenuously oppose them. They are highly irresponsible.
How could the Minister agree to changes that ride roughshod over the interests of women who may have partners who have HIV? Under the Minister's scheme these women have no rights to be informed by their partners or by anybody else if their partners contract HIV either through bisexual activities or from other sources. This is not just scaremongering, as the Minister continually wants to assert. It is a very real concern. Yesterday the Australian newspaper reported results of a study carried out by the National Centre of HIV Social Research at Macquarie University. With leave, I would like to table this article before the Assembly. May I have leave?
Leave granted.
MRS CARNELL: The results reported in the Australian were presented to the Fifth National Conference on AIDS being held in Sydney right at this moment. The study shows that the incidence of bisexual men practising unsafe sex with female partners is extremely high. In fact, the figure was 71 per cent. That is, 71 per cent of bisexual men practise unsafe sex with their female partners. They surveyed 2,583 men who identified themselves as gay or bisexual. They said that 72 per cent of these men practised safe sex with their male partners. One must note that, although this is the majority of the men in the sample, it still leaves a whopping 28 per cent of men who engaged in unsafe sex practices with their male partners. Clearly, this is a large majority and clearly irresponsibility still plays a very large part in this community.
Of the 2,583 men, 761 or about 29 per cent identified themselves as bisexual. Of these bisexual men, 71 per cent reported that they had unprotected sex with women, yet 75 per cent of these men were concerned to practise safe sex with their male partners. This is a thoroughly disturbing trend, and again indicates the high level of irresponsibility and selfishness of this community. What this indicates is that these men were concerned about contracting the disease themselves from other men, but they were not concerned about transmitting it to women. The diligence, if you can call it that, of men towards male sexual partners was not felt towards the people they were supposed to love and cherish, their wives. Moreover, 28 per cent of the men surveyed are not even concerned about contracting the disease themselves from other men. This leaves women in a very vulnerable position. The possibilities of contracting the disease as a result of some chain of encounters between their husbands and other people that these women had no idea were occurring is very real indeed.
Yet the regulatory changes that the Minister seeks to introduce blithely ignore this evidence. The Minister's changes are couched in platitudes which have abounded over the last few years - all this stuff about driving people underground. Unfortunately, it appears that such unexplored arguments still appear to dominate policy. Right at the moment the Fifth National Conference on HIV is being hosted in Sydney. Why was the Minister not prepared to consider the new information produced at this conference? The seriousness of the partner notification issue is not just highlighted by statistical surveys; there is also good anecdotal evidence highlighting the risk women face.
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