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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2776 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

I think that those members of this place who have taken an interest in this matter and do accept it as a serious area of law do need to be assured and to assure themselves that the ACT Law Reform Commission is going to deal with all of the issues that they think are relevant to this debate.

The purpose of this amendment is to require that the laws which we are debating today remain in force and apply only to those children conceived between the implementation of the laws and July 2002. I might just indicate that in the amendments I prepared initially I had proposed that the laws apply only to children born in the territory before July 2002 but, in discussions with the Chief Minister and at the Chief Minister's suggestion, we resolved on children conceived before that date. I accept the sense of that. It is quite possible, conceivable even, that a child will have been conceived before that date but not born and it really would be anachronistic for this law not to apply to that child.

This amendment is, in effect, a sunset clause which allows time for the Law Reform Commission to undertake a full review of all aspects of assisted reproductive technology. It allows the government of the day and the Assembly fully to review the work of the commission, to respond to it and, I would hope as a result of that process, to develop an appropriate response, to the extent that the response is that this territory would continue to support surrogacy arrangements and that there would be a full and thorough review of the adequacy of the laws under which surrogacies are arranged in the ACT.

This amendment is a sunset clause which sends the signal that we have in our development of laws in this area approached the task perhaps not as rigorously as we might have, but there is a need for the very difficult and detailed social, moral, ethical and legal issues that confront a community dealing with surrogacy to be dealt with in that rigorous way, as well as all the other issues that are covered.

For instance, the desirability of a national approach to this issue is one of the terms of reference that the Attorney has charged the Law Reform Commission with approaching. I have to say that my inclination is that this is one of those areas of the law where there truly should be a national and a nationally consistent approach. This is an issue where state and territory boundaries really should not be all that relevant to the state of the law. One of the terms of reference that the commission has is that it should look to issues such as whether there is some potential for a national approach, which from the outset was the view of state and territory jurisdictions that initially discussed and considered these issues.

In short, this amendment is a signal to the Assembly and to the community that we anticipate that these arrangements will persist only for another two years and a bit, that in that time we will have a thorough review of all aspects of assisted reproductive technology, and that this Assembly, the government, and the government through this Assembly will respond to that review. If that is not all completed before the conception of children before July 2002, then this law will cease.

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