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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (20 November) . . Page.. 4377 ..

MR STANHOPE (Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for Environment and Minister for Community Affairs) (10.36): I move:

That this bill be agreed to in principle.

Mr Deputy Speaker, the Parentage Bill 2003, along with the Sexuality Discrimination Legislation Amendment Bill 2003, has been developed as part of the government's commitment to reforming areas of ACT legislation that still discriminate on the grounds of sexual preference or gender identity. I announced the substance of these amendments at the same time as the government report to the ACT Legislative Assembly on discrimination and gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex people in the ACT was tabled in the Legislative Assembly on 8 May 2003.

The Parentage Bill will put all provisions relating to parentage presumption into a single piece of legislation. The bill incorporates the substance of the Birth (Equality of Status) Act 1988, the Artificial Conception Act 1985 and the Substitute Parent Agreements Act 1985 into one act.

The Parentage Bill 2003 contains amendments to the law in relation to the legal recognition of parenting relationships for the children of same-sex couples. The Parentage Bill will extend current parentage presumptions that arise when a woman conceives a child using assisted reproductive technology, so that the presumptions apply regardless of the gender of the woman's partner. Currently, when a woman who is married or is in a domestic partnership with a man uses assisted reproductive technology to have a baby, her husband or partner can be the legal father of her child. When the woman is not in a relationship with a man or is in a domestic partnership with another woman, the result is that her child has only one legally recognised parent.

The Parentage Bill will rectify that situation by allowing the mother's partner to become the child's second parent. This not only removes discrimination against the same-sex couples, it redresses the legal position of their children. Until now, children who were born into same-sex families were disadvantaged by having only one parent recognised by the law.

These changes will also mean that those children will get legally recognised connections to extended families that children of opposite-sex couples have, such as grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. While many of them already have those connections in a social sense, this bill allows them to be recognised by the law. That recognition can have important implications in relation to inheritance and other property issues.

The second thing that the bill does is amend the parentage orders provisions that are currently in part 3 of the Artificial Conception Act 1985, so that in the very limited circumstances where a parentage order can be sought, following a substitute-parent agreement, the applicants for the order do not have to be a man and a woman.

The third thing that the Parentage Bill does is amend the Adoption Act 1993 to remove the current discriminatory provisions that only allow the court to make an adoption order in favour of heterosexual couples. This will allow the court to consider a wider range of

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