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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Tuesday, 10 February 2004) . . Page.. 96 ..

fundamentally good thing, and I cannot understand the opposition to allowing families that currently exist in the ACT to have their rights and responsibilities enshrined in law, as are every other parent’s rights. This bill extends the rights of children and promotes their best interests.

A number of people have questioned the ability of a same-sex couple to care for children, but the available evidence is that there is little, if any, difference to the developmental outcomes of children reared by same-sex parents. This is the outcome of numerous studies that have appeared in reputable, peer-reviewed, mainstream scientific journals.

There are great lesbian and gay parents and not so great ones, just as there are great heterosexual parents and not so great ones. Children need love, commitment, security and attention from their parents. It is not important what the gender of those people are. It is the duty of governments and parliaments to encourage parents to keep up with the important and difficult work of raising a child and to assist those parents who struggle.

It is our job to ensure that a child’s relationship with their parents is protected and reinforced by the laws of parliament. Out in the community it is clear who the parents of the child are. It is those people who get up in the middle of the night to feed the hungry baby. It is those people who change the nappies and create a loving home for their children. It is those people who watch nervously as their kids perform in the first school play or walk onto the field in their first sporting competition. It is those people who proudly watch their kids graduate from high school or help them get their first job. Parents’ commitment and devotion to their children have nothing to do with their sexuality, just as a child’s love for their parents is not based on gender.

I would now like to address some of the issues raised with this legislation by the Scrutiny of Bills Committee. The first issue they raised was the lack of a mechanism whereby the child might obtain information about their genetic ancestors. By raising this, the committee raised the question of whether a child has a right to information about its genetic parents.

This is an important question for the Assembly, but is also a very involved and complicated debate, and it is important to note that this question goes far beyond the provisions of the Parentage Bill, which we are debating today. It is relevant to a whole range of parenting issues that have nothing to do with the same-sex status of those parents.

The scrutiny report presented the case of a British woman who was conceived by artificial insemination. The court found that she had certain rights to non-identifying genetic information about the donor. However, does this apply in situations where there was no artificial insemination? The scrutiny report points out that this legislation recognises the social parents of a child and not always the genetic parents.

However, people have been recognising the social parents of children for thousands of years in a whole range of different societies. For example, one of the presumptions in this bill is a very old presumption arising from marriage. If a married woman has a child, the government presumes that a husband is the father of that child. Of course, we all know that that is not always the case, as much as some people may not wish to admit it.

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