Page 4007 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 16 December 1992
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All of this ambiguity about definitions, about what a lawyer may say when reading a definition and what a medical professional may say when reading that definition - bear in mind that we have no authoritative ruling on these regulations as this matter has never been litigated - was resolved by the Minister bringing forward into this Assembly a set of regulations which clarify the position. Members opposite disagreed with that revised set of regulations. We had a debate about it and at the end of the day the regulations that this Government brought forward were upheld. Had perhaps Independent members gone the other way, you may have had a set of legislative changes that Mrs Carnell may have introduced; but that is not the issue. The issue is that ambiguities have been resolved by a Minister on taking advice.
There is some legal advice on the file which is in the document that has been tabled. That 1986 advice, which Mr Stevenson tabled and which he makes a lot of, goes through what your definition of AIDS is - the presence within the body of the organism presumed to cause the infection. You have medical difficulties in so far as that definition really does not match the way we would now define HIV, because we know that the medical test shows an antibody, not the organism. When that definition was written we did not know that. So, you have a law that is susceptible to the views of lawyers and is susceptible to the views of health officials. The overwhelming health advice has consistently been - as, indeed, has been accepted by the New South Wales Government, amongst others, and the National Committee on AIDS - that one should have reporting in a certain form, and this Minister brings to this Assembly regulations to provide that system of reporting.
Madam Speaker, Mr Stevenson's indictment, which suggests conspiracies to breach the law and all sorts of dire consequences, when examined - taking a step back from Dr Proudfoot's very strong views on this subject - really shows a Minister who is grappling with a very complex issue and with a set of regulations drafted in 1983 and dealing with a public health problem. When those regulations were drafted the experts really did not know the causation of that disease. They thought it was a virus, but they did not know how that occurred. There were not appropriate tests. You have a deeming clause which refers to the presence of the organism causing the disease, and you have a medical test which can show the presence of an antibody from which a medical person may make a deduction but which one queries as to whether the definition establishes the presence. You have ambiguities from a health policy perspective and a Minister taking the sensible course of action, which is to bring forward some regulations.
Members may criticise the speed at which regulations were brought forward, and that gets us back to partisan political debates about whether the regulations were right or wrong or whether they were brought forward too fast or too slow; but at the end of the day this Minister, given those ambiguities, brought forward clear regulations which were endorsed by this Assembly and which solved the problem.
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