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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (5 September) . . Page.. 3170 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

We have a fundamental difficulty in debating Mrs Carnell's Bill. As matters stand, Mrs Carnell's Bill applies at this time to only one person, one child. I believe that it is extremely difficult for a political forum such as ours to debate a matter knowing that it is really only one child's fate that is at issue. That puts us under an enormous amount of pressure, and I believe that it runs the risk of making for bad law. There is also the very grave risk that any adverse comment on the Bill or on the circumstances surrounding the Bill may well be taken to be adverse comment on the parents, the surrogate, the child, and so on. It personalises the whole debate in a way that I think is most undesirable.

I understand that there are some dozen additional couples going through the IVF surrogacy arrangement that Dr Stafford-Bell is pioneering. It is my understanding that they are all from interstate. I believe that we should not be forced into a rushed debate on this matter simply because we have been presented with a fait accompli, in the form of one child born under the program. I have the greatest sympathy for that child and for all the adults involved. Indeed, I know as well as anybody does the difficulties of not being able to have children. Nevertheless, I do not think we should fall into the trap of making poor laws.

One of the biggest problems I had with Mrs Carnell's Bill was that it overturns most of the underlying principles in relation to children and their parentage that are present in other laws dealing with such matters. The underlying principle has always been that the woman who gives birth to a child is its mother, and that is a principle I have always adhered to very strongly. There is another underlying principle, and that is that in all matters relating to children the welfare of the child must be paramount. It seems to me that, in looking at the whole of the surrogacy arrangement, you are in fact looking at the welfare of parents rather than of children, primarily. I would hesitate, therefore, to go down the track Mrs Carnell has indicated with her Bill without a good deal of advice from the community, from experts, and from representatives of organisations with an interest in the matter. In fact, I am not prepared to go down that path without having heard from a much broader range of people.

A large number of legal questions hang over the Bill Mrs Carnell has put forward, which the Community Law Reform Committee may well be able to shed some light on. The biggest question in my mind is why Mrs Carnell did not use the Adoption Act rather than create a new Act. Under the Adoption Act, it is possible to fast-track an adoption order where there is a relationship between the baby and other persons, such as its grandparents, siblings, uncles and aunts, and so on. I would have thought it would make far more sense, as an interim and fairly cautious step, to use the Adoption Act, even if we had to amend it to include a broader range of persons who might be fast-tracked as adoptive parents. The Adoption Act has tremendous advantages, one of which is that there does exist a whole national and international protocol around adoption that safeguards predominantly the child's interests. There is a national minimum set of principles for adoption, which has been adopted by States and Territories right round the country. The general principles state:

(1) The interest of the child is the paramount consideration.

I support that view.

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