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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (11 May) . . Page.. 1510 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

this whole approach. It is important for a scheme to provide protection for the child and the other parties. In interviews early this morning with the surrogate mother of Hamish, we have seen that the approach that exists now can be seriously detrimental to all parties and particularly is not in the best interests of the child. That surely should be our major concern here.

This scheme ensures the prohibition of commercial surrogacy. It makes it quite clear that the biological parents are the legal parents of the child, with parental control over the child, if they meet the requirements of this legislation and if the Supreme Court believes that it is in the best interests of the child. The scheme ensures that the birth parents can decide to keep the child at any time before the parentage order is made, and it requires independent counselling and assessment of both the genetic and the birth parents. These restrictions and the other strict demands of the proposed legislation-which are very thorough, very rigorous and quite onerous-provide protection for both the child and the other people involved.

Finally, I would emphasise that there is nothing in this bill, or in any other legislation, which compels the birth mother to give up the child she has borne as a result of a surrogacy arrangement. That is not a matter for the law. As I have said all along, a surrogacy agreement cannot be enforced, and should not be able to be enforced. Rather, the success of surrogacy arrangements depends on the quality of the relationships between the people involved and their commitment to each other but, above all, to the child involved. Both couples are involved because they openly and freely choose to be involved. This is why I refer to it as altruistic surrogacy.

The bill is straightforward. It simply clears the way for a child of such an arrangement to belong to his or her genetic parents. That is vitally important for the wellbeing of the child. I therefore ask members to think about this bill seriously. Over the next few weeks I would urge you to speak to the couples involved in these sorts of births, particularly the people involved in the births of the two high-profile children Jessica and Hamish. Let them tell their story. Do not make this a political issue, because it is not.

The reason I present this bill today as a private members bill rather than as a Liberal Party bill is not because there is not support for it on my side of the house-there is-but because I feel very strongly that this bill should not be seen as a Liberal versus Labor issue or a political issue; it is simply not so. It is a piece of legislation that will significantly improve the lives of a few people. When this legislation was debated last time, there was a lot of concern that there would be a flood of these arrangement, thousands of them. That has not happened, nor will it happen.

The sort of commitment we heard this morning from the birth mother of Hamish, the sort of commitment that a birth mother-somebody who is choosing to enter into a surrogacy arrangement and become a birth mother-is certainly the sort of commitment and sort of decision that most people would make. We should not, though, disadvantage those special people who choose to become involved in a relationship like this. From what I have seen personally, they turn out to be extraordinarily good parents and have extraordinarily good families. This bill is about the welfare of Hamish and Jessica and the other children involved in these sorts of relationships. It is a bill that is primarily about the welfare of the child but also about the welfare of the families involved.

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