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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 10 Hansard (25 November) . . Page.. 2912 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

I support this Bill, as I supported the original Bill which came before the house in August, because I believe in the sanctity of human life and the need for laws of the Territory to protect that life from its inception to the extent that it is reasonable to do so. This Bill in one sense does not go so far to protect the sanctity of life as the earlier Bill Mr Osborne introduced did, but it does, by the provision of clauses providing information to women and for the operation of a cooling-off period, go some way towards protecting that human life and the sanctity thereof, and a small step in that respect is better than no progress at all.

There has been an enormous torrent of nonsense spoken about this legislation. We have heard in the course of the last few days, and to some extent also in the preceding three months, exaggerated claim heaped upon prediction of cataclysmic outcome. The claims made in some cases are just too silly to be worth repeating, but the most hysterical of those claims has been the assertion made very matter of factly, and repeated in the chamber today, that the ACT Family Planning Clinic would close if the legislation were to pass today.

Putting to one side the amendments which Mr Moore will propose to the Bill today, even if those amendments were not to be moved, indeed, Mr Speaker, even if the original Bill Mr Osborne put on the table last August were to be passed by the Assembly today, it would be sheer nonsense to suggest that people would be unable to have abortions. That was not the effect of either of those pieces of legislation. The effect is not that abortion be prevented outright. Mr Speaker, it is sheer nonsense in the context of this legislation to suggest that the Family Planning Clinic is at all at risk in this process.

Following very close on that assertion is the assertion, again made in this house today, that the reference in the legislation to the Crimes Act is somehow a backdoor ban on abortion; that somehow, despite the clear intention of the legislation to prevent the Crimes Act operating any differently from the way in which it operates now, the Crimes Act is lifted up in some different way and has some different operation by virtue of this Bill. That also is a claim that is simply not borne out by careful and fair reading of the legislation before the house today.

I might say, Mr Speaker, that this fearmongering is understandable to some degree. The original Bill did generate some real limitations on Canberra's small but profitable abortion industry. I concede that it would be difficult to apply the brakes to this juggernaut that was set in train when that Bill first appeared, even when the Bill before the house is actually much less extensive in its operation than its predecessor was. Never mind that the Bill before the house today merely aims to introduce notions of full disclosure and a cooling off seen in many other pieces of legislation which this Assembly has passed and which no doubt will appear in many others in the future. Never mind that that is the case. Let us hunt down the sinister hidden agendas which are very clearly linked to the actual words of the Bill. Let us find the sinister hidden agenda and use them, the imputed motives, to condemn the legislation.

Mr Speaker, I am going to take the rare and daring approach of suggesting that the Assembly should consider the Bill for what it says, not what is imputed to be the motives of people who support it. There are some hidden agendas, I think, in this debate

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