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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (5 September) . . Page.. 3172 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

In 1994, when the whole question of surrogacy was being debated, there was very wide consultation. The Women's Consultative Council consulted widely and advised on the results of their consultation. In a letter to the director of the human rights and community law section they make a statement that I think is very revealing. They say:

Further, surrogacy re-interprets the status of a child to that of a product or commodity which may be "sold" or "given". Council would find a practice with these implications unacceptable. Both exploitation and commodification are concerns whether commercial or non-commercial arrangements are involved.

I think that lies at the heart of the difficulty I have with Mrs Carnell's Artificial Conception (Amendment) Bill. There is that element of commodification - that one woman is really just a womb for hire. In fact, in her speech Mrs Carnell referred to the donors as the real parents, and I have difficulty with that concept. It may well be that that is the concept the community wants adopted, but I think we need to hear extensive debate within the community, particularly the legal community, the ethical community, the professional people, who will undoubtedly have a view on this matter. Once we have that information, I, for one, will feel in a much better position to debate the Bill as it stands, but I could not support it at this moment.

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (3.45): Briefly, Mr Speaker, because I could speak for a very long time on this issue, Ms Follett raised a couple of very important issues that do need to be clarified right now. One was the issue of why we did not use the Adoption Act in this case. The fact was that we set out to use the Adoption Act in the first instance and spent quite a lot of time attempting to do that. The reason the Adoption Act was not used in the end was that, from a national perspective, it was perceived that directed adoption would undermine the very basis of adoption.

In adoption as it stands, the adoptive parents and the adopting parents do not know each other. There is not a relationship between the birth mother and the adopting mother, and to have a situation of directed adoption, with the birth mother being able to direct whom her baby goes to, under an Adoption Act, was going to cause some significant cross-border problems and some significant problems with regard to national agreements on these sorts of issues. It was determined that that was not an appropriate way to go, but it certainly was my initial view that the Adoption Act would be the appropriate way to go. Directed adoption, as those opposite would know, is available only inside immediate families. You can direct an adoption to a brother, sister, aunt or uncle, but not to a best friend, and that was the reason. So yes, we would like to have gone down that path, but it turned out not to be legally possible.

On the second issue - as to why the Family Law Act was not used - Ms Follett actually answered the question herself. It is a Federal Act, and in this particular case we were looking for an outcome that would make the genetic parents the legal parents of the child, not only guardians of the child. A lot of these issues were looked at in depth. I have no problems with the referral. A lot of the work that I am sure the Community Law Reform Committee will cover has already been done; so, hopefully, this will expedite the process.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

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