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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Thursday, 1 April 2004) . . Page.. 1588 ..

effectiveness of new culture media in ART. It also ensures that we are part of a centralised, publicly available database of information about all licences, the number of research projects involving excess ART embryos, the nature of those projects and the number of excess embryos that have been used. An important feature of this legislation is that it seeks to treat all users of excess ART embryos even-handedly—for example, whether it is for the testing of new culture media or for the derivation of embryonic stem cells.

The legislation is controversial—as evidenced by the Assembly debate—because it covers the issue of the destruction of embryos. I want to make it quite clear that the Australian Democrats recognise and respect the wide range of sincerely held and, in some cases, irreconcilable beliefs. We do not believe that any particular group, be they scientists, politicians, ethicists or church leaders—and the list goes on—has special, privileged access to wisdom in such matters. Thus it is essential that the community engage in informed debate on this issue. Indeed, the Democrats see that as an essential feature of a pluralist democracy.

There are many ethical questions that confront us. The central ethical question posed by this legislation is whether people believe that destructive research on excess ART embryos that have been donated with consent—an important part of this legislation is that they are donated by choice; they are donated with consent—and which would otherwise be allowed to succumb is acceptable or not. That is at the heart of the ethical dilemmas with which we are confronted. We believe that for any one person the answer to that question ultimately relies, obviously, on their own personal commitments. The extent to which people will choose to weigh the various ethical dimensions to this debate is a personal choice. Potential donors of embryos, for instance, face a rather different set of ethical issues than those of non-donors, and these include considerations of autonomy and of choice.

As a community, we do not currently accept an absolutist determination on the moral status of an embryo or hold to the “uniform protection of all human life”. This does not mean, though, that the embryo is of no account. I am concerned, therefore, that, in considering the ethical debate, it should not be constructed as a choice between the high moral ground that rejects destructive research on embryos or a morally bankrupt utilitarianism that permits it. It is neither fair nor helpful to caricature the debate in simplistic terms of science versus religion.

I think it is clear that there is no prospect of consensus or the acceptability of an absolute position in a pluralistic society on the key ethical question posed by the legislation before us this evening. The fact that we are debating this issue, I think, is a very healthy aspect of our democracy. For my own part, I do not move away from believing that there are good ethical grounds to encourage research that may alleviate disease; that there is intrinsic value to understanding biological processes such as cell differentiation, independently of whether that yields applications; and that a sound, nationally consistent regulatory framework is necessary to provide publicly accountable oversight of prudent research on genuinely excess ART embryos that have been donated with full and informed consent.

Stem cell science is a fast-moving field with new insights and research results appearing in scientific literature with great rapidity. It is also a scientific field very much in its

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