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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 9 Hansard (2 September) . . Page.. 2828 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

The issue for me, as for Mr Kaine, is not whether abortion is available. It is whether we as a bunch of well-intentioned amateurs are best placed to ensure that balanced information is made available to people. I do not believe that we are. I think that the intensity of the debate that we had last time showed how emotionally charged we all are. We need only to consider the depth of some of the comments of people. There were some pretty horrible ones. Therefore, I ask whether our judgment has been clouded a little by this incredibly emotive issue.

One of the things that enabled me to support the Bill last time was the use of the word "may". I believe everybody has said enough about that, so I will not go on about it. The use of the word "may" was to me a demonstration of the independence of this panel that we have put together. I remind members that the panel was originally to consist of seven members and I moved an amendment to make sure that there would be women on it. I would have preferred to have had a majority of women on it; but, as it stands, I was happy to cop three. I believed that we needed to have them having a significant influence on it.

I also wanted one of the people there to be one of the nurses in community health who often have to pick up the pieces after somebody has elected to have an abortion or not elected to have an abortion. I do not wish to denigrate any of the hospital nurses in making this comment, but often our community nurses are the people best placed. They are the people who come in contact with it in real time. I would suggest that hospitals often are not real time places for these people.

I was really keen to have a person with psychology skills on it, but we put someone on it with psychiatric skills or qualifications. I was more concerned with looking after the people - they are probably in predominance - who go into psychological trauma. They are not nutters; they do not go into a psychiatric condition. They go into things such as depression, supreme sadness and supreme trauma. We need to be able to provide some sort of way of helping them out of that. I have to tell you that I would be really scared about being labelled a nutter if I had to go and see a psychiatrist, but I might be tempted to go and see a psychologist. I have been invited to do so often enough by the other side of the chamber.

If you look at the constitution of this panel you will see that it has specialists in obstetrics and neonatal medicine from both hospitals. That means that both the Catholic view and the non-Catholic view are represented there. Women's health issues are represented there and women are represented there; so we have covered religion, medical expertise, gender equity and balanced psychological aspects. Why is there a need for us to say what information should be in it? It seems to me to be a complete and utter waste of time and money.

I come down now to the question of the independence of the panel. I will be supporting this disallowance motion on the simple basis of the independence of this expert panel. I will do that because these people are better placed than I am to determine what goes in that publication. I have had just as much time to think about it in the depths of my soul, probably more, than lots of other people, but I am not well placed and I do not think that there is anybody in this chamber who is well placed to say what should and should not be in there. That is why we created the independent panel in the first place.

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