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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 544 ..

agreed and it would be a capricious omission that anyone who argued for the liberalisation of abortion did so exclusively on the rights of the mothers. They said nothing about when life began or whether the unborn were human or, if not, what else they may have been.

One of the things that stood out in those debates was that the ALP and other parties allowed a conscience vote on this issue, and some members have always had the opportunity of availing themselves of conscience votes. This time this is not the case. You can have a conscience vote on a private members bill about abortion but when the question of the beginning of life comes along it doesn’t matter what members on the other side think, they may not exercise their conscience. They may not exercise their conscience in the debate about human rights. Judging from a range of previous statements, some members of the government don’t believe the proposition stated here, that people’s right to life begins at birth. Yet they are being pressured to vote for it and, I suppose, threatened with sanctions if they vote against it. This legislation is not about the substantive issue, and therefore government members have no conscience vote. The Stanhope view of human rights evidently doesn’t extend to his parliamentary colleagues. The ALP knows when life begins. It seems that the Democrats know when life begins, and they are all bound to this view even though their members may privately disagree.

We are offered no basis, no argument in support of this statement. We have had blandishments. All the time from the Chief Minister we have assertions. He says that it’s simply wrong or, previously, that it was simply ignorant, but there’s never a demonstration as to why his assertion is any better than anybody else’s except that his is usually more insulting than anybody else’s. Others around here can put forward an argument and his response to that is to say, you’re wrong or you’re ignorant. It doesn’t work like that. There is no scientific justification for this provision applying to a person only from the time of birth. There is no scientific justification for the claim that this genetically-distinct creature, this unborn homosapien, is something other than a human. This arbitrary qualification on the beginning of life, this most important right in this bill, or in existence, does not proceed from any scientific evidence.

The logic works like this. We’ve had a debate about abortion—women must have a right to abortion because they have a right to choose, and if the unborn child has rights that might interfere with the right to abortion, and therefore the unborn child has no rights. Therefore the unborn child is not human and has no human rights. Thus we are arguing from no scientific basis and from no profound theory of human rights. We are arguing backwards from a slogan. So, we have a position that no-one has argued in the debate when it was directly at issue, a position with no scientific or philosophical underpinning visible to the naked eye. It’s being imposed as an absolute view of the government, when individual members of the government disagree with it, and it will flow through to all other legislation.

Perhaps this isn’t the intent. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. After all, the legislation does not specifically say that life begins at birth. There is an alternative interpretation, and this is how it goes. Everyone has a right to life, that right is innate, coming from wherever we, the Labor government, thinks that rights come from. But for those of you who have not been born, we will simply not allow you to exercise those rights. Perhaps that’s an example of what this bill means when it says rights may be subject to reasonable limits. It raises the really interesting question of what are the reasonable limits? But I think it’s

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