Page 3467 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 11 October 1994
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of policy, we have made the decision that we will make the commercial activity criminal and the non-commercial activity non-criminal, it can be seen to be wrong in principle to make the aid and abet criminal in all cases. The doctor, the lawyer or whoever is facilitating or assisting or giving advice is guilty of a criminal offence, whereas the people who are engaging in the conduct that we are seeking to avoid are not guilty of a criminal offence. We can see the illogicality of that, so we are prepared to accept those amendments.
We will not take issue with the other amendment to be moved by Mrs Carnell. The Bill provides for the cancelling of a private hospital's registration if we find that they are rorting on surrogacy, if they are actually running commercial surrogacy operations. Mrs Carnell proposes to amend it to say that we need to give them notice before we cancel the registration. As a matter of administrative law we would have to do that anyway, so I do not think that adds anything; but nor does it detract from the legislation, so we will not take issue with that. We will not be opposing that amendment.
I thank members for their support for the legislation. I am very pleased that an issue which, when it was first floated, was the subject of some quite vigorous and controversial debate has now got to a point where there seems to be near unanimous support for the Government's basic proposition that commercial surrogacy agreements are something that, as a matter of public policy, we should outlaw; that they are a potential source of great evil, of exploitation of vulnerable women in our community, and the source of great damage and trauma for children who can become very much the innocent victims of very complex legal manoeuvring if and when a commercial surrogacy agreement goes wrong. The sort of litigation and trauma that we have seen in the United States is something that we do not want to see here. I am pleased that the consultative process has taken us to a point where we do have that unanimous agreement to the Bill.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Bill agreed to in principle.
Detail Stage
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole
MRS CARNELL (Leader of the Opposition) (10.36): I move:
Page 3, line 17, clause 8, before "substitute", insert "commercial".
Madam Speaker, I addressed this issue in my previous speech. This amendment seeks to change the Bill to make it not illegal for a person - a doctor or a lawyer - to give advice on or to facilitate a non-commercial surrogacy agreement. I believe strongly, as I said earlier, that it would be very unwise to have that provision in the Bill, for all of the reasons that the Minister has given. I do not think there is any point in my
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