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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 9 Hansard (2 September) . . Page.. 2834 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

We have heard about a legal challenge to this legislation. Mr Speaker, if I had a dollar for every time someone threatened a legal challenge, I would be extremely wealthy by today. I note, incidentally, that there was a claim when we passed the original legislation last November that the passage of the legislation would cause the end of abortions in the ACT. That claim was made on the day that the legislation was being passed. Of course, that has not happened and we should separate hysteria from reality in this debate.

Mr Stanhope makes issue of the fact that the Executive made a regulation and the Minister for Health did not formally take part in the making of that regulation. Mr Stanhope demonstrates a most extraordinary lack of imagination as to the way in which the processes of government work and fails to realise that the conventions of executive government are there to assist the executive government to make decisions, not to satisfy the prerequisites of some author who has written a text on the subject decades before and believes certain rules should be observed. In particular, he fails to acknowledge the need to accommodate matters of conscience within the processes of government decision-making.

Our Government was in the situation where some members of the Executive were not in a position to support the concept of the regulations which have been made. I believe that it is an appropriate reflection of a flexible approach to the processes of government that we allow there to be a chance for members not to be part of the making of a regulation if they so choose. Members opposite - particularly Mr Berry and Mr Wood, who have sat in Cabinet before - know perfectly well that governments do not make every decision unanimously, although they might come out afterwards and purport a decision to be unanimous. They know full well that on many occasions governments make decisions on the basis of majorities. On this occasion, we freely admit, we discussed the matter in Cabinet and Mr Moore took a different view. The majority in Cabinet respected Mr Moore's right to exercise the prerogatives of his conscience and not be part of a regulation and therefore, as such, the regulation was made in the way that it was.

I turn to issues raised by Ms Tucker in the course of her comments. I am sorry that she has left the chamber. She said that there was a move to review the presence of pictures in the New Zealand pamphlet. That simply is not true. I note that on 14 July, Dr Christine Forster, the chairman of the New Zealand Abortion Supervisory Committee, a government committee, was questioned about this very issue by Cathy van Extel and she specifically denied that there had been any move to review the current New Zealand booklet or to remove the pictures. I quote:

That is simply nonsense on the part of Ms Tucker. (Extension of time granted) Ms Tucker and Mr Kaine also raised an issue concerning the difference in some views about what the appropriate weight and length of a foetus would be at particular ages. I can explain to Ms Tucker and to Mr Kaine that the reason for the difference between some other publications and the regulations that have been tabled by the

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