Page 940 - Week 03 - Thursday, 3 April 2008
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other than to achieve pregnancy in a particular woman, implanting into the womb of women embryos created by any means other than by fertilisation of a human egg by human sperm and creating a chimeric embryo that is an organism containing two or more genetically distinct cell or tissue types. This bill provides large penalties for attempting any of these acts.
This bill broadens search powers to ensure that no facility is embarking on any prohibited practice and enables inspectors to enter premises that are not licensed when there is concern that prohibited research is going on. The maximum penalty for undertaking prohibited practices is 15 years imprisonment—the 15 days, 15 years law. If you let the embryo develop for a 15th day you may face 15 years in prison. The main issue is to ensure that is monitored.
I turn now to nationally consistent legislation. This legislation has already passed through the federal parliament as well as Victorian, Queensland and Tasmanian parliaments. It is worth noting that research is already happening in those states. Indeed, the CSIRO, the ANU and the John Curtin School of Medical Research are already able to do this research because they are commonwealth institutions. It is happening in the ACT already. The passage of this legislation today will allow the University of Canberra, the Canberra Hospital and the John James hospital to also do this research. As the University of Canberra and the John Curtin school do joint research, this is of particular interest.
The Greens federally and in New South Wales have already debated this issue, grappled with the complexities and ended up supporting it. Senator Kerry Nettle did write some additional comments to the Lockhart review committee report, and I will go into those in a moment.
Let us look at the issue of ethics. The issues generally were about the position society takes on the embryos that are not implanted, the very basic nature of the process and women’s role in that, what we as a society think is a limit to what women can be subjected to in having this invasive process occur in their bodies, how to regulate that and how to be sure that, in removing eggs from their bodies, exploitation of women does not occur. And that is really, really enormously important.
The Greens value life in all its forms. We also value quality of life and we want to alleviate suffering and disease. We hold medical science in high regard because it has proved effective in reducing human suffering.
The bill raises serious ethical issues. Where should we draw the line when manipulating genetic material? What are the ethics of doing so? Some members will oppose the bill on religious grounds. Others who hold strong religious views will not oppose the bill, either because they see their role as being to represent the different views of the community rather than their own personal beliefs or because they do not accept that the spokespeople from the church are always right.
The ethical issues surrounding this bill are complex because the potential benefits of such research are obvious but so, too, are the potential dangers. The then federal Minister for Health and Ageing, Tony Abbott, in a similar debate in the federal parliament, observed that the unborn cannot lobby politicians—a self-evident truth—and that embryonic collections of cells are human. That is the debatable view.
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