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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Tuesday, 10 February 2004) . . Page.. 104 ..

Four have a history of acute depression, three have seriously contemplated suicide, and two have attempted suicide. Eight have a history of sexually transmitted diseases, eight currently carry infectious pathogens, and three currently suffer from digestive or urinary ailments caused by these pathogens. At least three are HIV infected, and one has AIDS.

These are not nice things and are very difficult to say. But this is not the sort of environment that an objective psychologist or social worker assessing someone for their suitability to adopt children would willingly accept as being suitable for adopting parents to live in—and this is what we have to do here. The minister and others will say that we will assess this on a case-by-case basis, but that will be exceedingly difficult. We are going to put demands upon social workers and people who assess people—

Mrs Cross: Are you suggesting that these conditions only occur in homosexual couples?

MRS DUNNE: They make these assessments for heterosexual couples: do they have a propensity to suicide; do they have a propensity for mental illness; do they have a range of diseases that will make it difficult for them to provide long-term care; do they have a stable relationship? We do not willingly put children who are already in a difficult situation into unstable relationships and make their situation worse. These are all things that we have to do as a community and now, by this legislation, we are proposing to put onto social workers another layer of things.

Suddenly they are being told that if someone from another class of people comes forward, they must not discriminate against them. We have done it in such a way, we have made such a brouhaha about the whole thing, that they will feel pressured to look more favourably upon one group than the other, and soon we will find that people will feel they are in a situation where they are forced to accept people onto the list that otherwise they would not. This is not a position in which you put social workers whose first call is to look after the welfare of children. This is not what we should be doing. In this whole debate you see this over and over again. We are putting responsibilities and pressures on people that normally should not be there.

I conclude by using the common man test—the classic man on the omnibus. Somebody who was not at the rally on Sunday spoke to me after the rally about what I thought should happen with the legislation and what it meant. This was a youngish person and by no means a bigot, who was saying to me, “Why do people want to go down this path?” I was explaining why I thought people wanted to go down this path. He said something that was probably insightful because he is young, only in his early 20s, and not far away from school. He said, “What would that do to a kid if he went to school and his schoolmates discovered that he had two mums or two dads?” Kids at school are put under enough pressure. That may be wrong, but this is what we are doing. If you have the wrong sort of spread on your sandwiches at school you get a hard time. If you do not have the right Barbie doll accoutrements you get a hard time, and suddenly some poor little six-year-old is going to say, “I do not have a mummy and a daddy, I have two daddies” or “I have two mummies”.

Think of what that does in the playground. We may not be able to control it but, Chief Minister, you do not legislate against six-year-olds giving their classmates a hard time, and this is what will happen. This legislation is a complete abolition of common sense.

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