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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 03 Hansard (Wednesday, 10 March 2004) . . Page.. 964 ..

and, yes, that is comprehensive and pretty good stuff too, so I am sure part 5 will be pretty good stuff.

That is a puerile excuse. It is as if Mr Pratt were gazumping the Chief Minister on something. Oh dear, we can’t have that! You can’t gazump him. This has been on the table since 2002. I can remember assisting Mr Pratt with this in its early stages. It has been around for a long time. It is not something he has put down very recently. This has been here for well over 12 months, so people have had ample time to look at it. Indeed, the Chief Minister has probably had ample time to do something about it. But, oh no, he is going to do something in 2005.

Mr Pratt’s bill will at least offer some protection between now and when part 5 comes in. We have not seen part 5, so we do not know what is in it. It might well be that in certain areas Mr Pratt’s bill is far better than what might be coming in now. I think it is very worthy of support.

It is all very well for Ms Dundas to say that the court will naturally take these things into consideration. It does to an extent, but it can only do so to an extent. As an ex prosecutor, I can recall some—thankfully, very few—instances where the defendant deliberately aimed to hurt his pregnant wife or girlfriend. It was not so much strangers; more often they had a relationship. But he deliberately sought to hurt the unborn child, and all we had for dealing with those cases was the current law for assaults, malicious wounding and injuries, et cetera. That is all we had to deal with them.

Those offences are particularly nasty, and a law like this one that Mr Pratt is seeking to introduce gives further protection. It also gives further options to the court for punishing a wrongdoer for that most of heinous offences—assault on a defenceless, unborn child and a largely defenceless woman. There are thankfully very few of these offences in our community, but they nevertheless do occur—even in the ACT from time to time. I can probably count on one hand the number I saw in my 10 years of prosecuting, but they do occur and, sadly, they might continue to occur.

We need proper laws in force to ensure that perpetrators of these most heinous offences are brought to justice and are dealt with according to proper laws that relate to these individual cases. That is what Mr Pratt is seeking to do. He is not seeking to open an adjournment debate. As I said earlier, I offered him some assistance when we talked about this. He specifically put in 42A (1) to show to all of you that he is not talking about abortion; he is talking about particularly nasty offences and this legislation is worthy of support in this Assembly. It is a great shame that people are confusing the two and that he is not getting the support he deserves for this bill.

MRS BURKE (12.08): Mr Speaker, this debate is surely about the rights of the unborn child, and I applaud Mr Pratt for putting forth—very bravely, flying in the face of everything that we have debated in this place over the last few months—the rights of a mother and her unborn child. I will go into the rights of the mother in a moment.

The debate is a debate over the rights of a woman to be compensated for her loss. We are not talking about handbag snatchers; we are talking about human life. Whilst Mr Stefaniak and Ms Dundas have both said that there are laws to protect such actions of

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