Page 927 - Week 03 - Thursday, 3 April 2008
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sheep before they got to Dolly the sheep. And the people who did that are now saying—not for any particular moral reason—that it is just not good science. As a result of that, I do not see why this Legislative Assembly should be hitching its wagon to commonwealth legislation which is outmoded.
As Mrs Burke foreshadowed, if the bill succeeds and passes the in-principle phase I will be moving amendments in relation to this. I have circulated those amendments. My office circulated those to members this morning. I do apologise: I had intended to circulate them yesterday afternoon but there was a communication breakdown between my office and the parliamentary counsel’s office. I hope that the descriptions and the explanations are enough to explain to people what these amendments do. I will be happy to speak about them at length if we get to the detail stage.
I foreshadow here that the amendments that I propose do three things. There are three separate phases of amendments. The first of those phases of amendments is to outlaw in all circumstances the creation of a human embryo that has more than two sets of genetic material—to make it impossible to create an embryo with three or more parents.
The second set of amendments would make it unlawful to in any circumstance create or develop a hybrid embryo. As a highly qualified geneticist said to me only last night, when we are talking about hybrid embryos, we are talking about the most extreme thing that a geneticist can do. It requires taking half the genome from a human embryo and half the genome from another animal embryo—primate, pig, monkey, rabbit—and putting them together. It is highly risky. It is the sort of thing that Aldous Huxley spoke about as some far-off future world. If the minister has her way, it seems that that far-off future that Aldous Huxley predicted will be with us here today.
The third set of amendments—the third tranche of amendments—are about openness. They require that people who seek from the National Health and Medical Research Council licences to undertake what are otherwise prohibited activities are up front about their peculiar interests and any association they may have with pharmaceutical companies or biomedical companies that would stand to profit from this research. None of this research is essentially pure research. It is all research which is associated with people who have large chequebooks. People are writing large cheques for this in the hope that one day they will make some money out of it.
In Australia, a lot of work in this area is done in IVF clinics. As I said to someone this morning, IVF clinics are not run as philanthropic organisations that help people who otherwise cannot have children to have children. They are big businesses that make a lot of money out of vulnerable people, and they stand to make a lot more money out of the by-products of those vulnerable people—that is, their eggs. The financial connections that these people have should be at least known to the National Health and Medical Research Council and should be part of their consideration about whether or not to issue a licence.
Those are the amendments that I propose if we get to that stage, but I hope that we will see our way clear to oppose this legislation. I hope that we never get to the detail stage, because this legislation is (a) unnecessary and (b) wrong.
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