Page 926 - Week 03 - Thursday, 3 April 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
replaces it with something else. That is what is honourable. That would tell the community that this is what we are going to do.
What is happening today is movement by stealth. The lack of knowledge in the community that this matter is being debated in the Legislative Assembly today is quite interesting. Conversations that I have had indicate that as recently as Monday Labor members—some Labor members—did not realise it was being debated today. And members of the community who are concerned about these things were largely unaware that this was being debated this week. The matter came in late last year just before Christmas. I do not think that people in the ACT community have had very much time to concentrate on what the ACT legislation does.
The fact is that we have to actually reverse what the long title says. We are going from prohibiting the creation of a clone in any circumstances to prohibiting it for the case of reproduction. We have gone from a position where, when we were debating this in 2004, the Minister for Health was saying, “We are not interested in cloning” to a situation where the Minister for Health is saying, “Let’s get on with cloning.” This is one of the many reasons why I will be opposing the bill. It is not intellectually honest to come in here today and introduce amendments which in a way reverse the entire premise of the original legislation.
Mrs Burke has gone through an extensive list of things that point out that somatic cell nuclear transfer is old technology. The legislation which we are implementing today is essentially a reproduction of what was passed by the commonwealth in 2006. It has been put to me by eminent scientists, people who work in this field every day, that that legislation was out of date before the ink dried on it. By the time the Lockhart committee had reported, most of what they were advocating was old technology. People who spent a lot of time in the early years using these techniques have come to the conclusion that it is not necessary to do so. Professor Wilmut, the creator of Dolly the sheep, says that, in professional terms, it is not in his interest to go down that path because he realises that the people who are doing other work in relation to adult skin cells and things like that will be outstripping what he can do. It is expensive; it is time consuming; the success rate is appallingly low.
Mrs Burke referred to research which was written about in an article in Nature called “Producing primate embryonic stem cells by somatic cell nuclear transfer”. It was published in Nature in 2007. It says:
Overall, 304 oocytes collected from 14 rhesus macaque females were used to generate two—
two, Mr Speaker: two out of 304—
ES cell lines, a 0.7% derivation efficiency …
There is a whole lot of research, a whole lot of work we do in all sorts of places. The Chief Minister often comes in here and talks about evidence-based decisions on things. Look at the evidence base for this. This is not cost-effective research. In addition to not being cost-effective—it is expensive—it has an extraordinarily low success rate. Dolly the sheep was attempt 273. On 272 occasions they had attempted to clone a
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .