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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2730 ..

MS TUCKER: I seek leave to make a personal explanation arising from Assembly business.

MR SPEAKER: Proceed.

MS TUCKER: I just want to clarify something. In the debate about the disability services inquiry, Mr Moore suggested that I was in some way criticising the health complaints commissioner. I would just like to clarify that that was not what I was doing. I said that there was an inquiry for particular issues that the committee could not deal with when the Standing Committee on Social Policy inquired into the Commonwealth/territory disability agreement. A number of people in the community came to our committee with allegations which clearly it was not within the brief of our committee or appropriate for our committee to look at, and these were referred to the health complaints commissioner.

I just want to make it clear, too, that there are privilege issues there. I am not saying that we actually referred evidence that was given to the committee to the health complaints commissioner because clearly that would not have been appropriate either. What we did was: when some people came to us with particular issues, we suggested they go to the health complaints commissioner.

He produced two reports: a general report on systemic issues and a confidential report on the allegations. What I was saying was that, while that work was done, I still have not seen an adequate response from government to the issues that were raised. So I was not criticising the health complaints commissioner; I was talking about inaction by government since then.

MR STANHOPE (Leader of the Opposition) (12.12): Mr Speaker, the Labor Party will be supporting the Artificial Conception Amendment Bill, despite our misgivings about some of the surrounding issues and processes. One of those misgivings is that the ACT is going it alone with a bill which is similar to the one that was presented in the Assembly and rejected in 1996.

Mr Connolly's 1994 act outlawed commercial surrogacy and discouraged non-commercial surrogacy to the point that it was not possible. This was done by making it an offence for medical professionals to facilitate pregnancy in surrogacy cases.

Mr Humphries: Should it be the other way around-discouraged commercial surrogacy and allowed non-commercial surrogacy?

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