Page 1079 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 8 April 2008
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the minister’s office that the ACT government sees a sunset clause as inconsistent with the intergovernmental agreement and, as such, would need to be considered by the Australian Health Ministers Conference or COAG prior to being tabled in the Assembly.
It would seem then that this legislation, no matter its impact, ought simply to be passed by the members of this Assembly as part of an intergovernmental agreement. That, of course, is ludicrous and irresponsible. Does that mean that every single time there is an intergovernmental agreement the ACT Assembly has no capacity to take responsibility for the legislation it passes, or does it mean that this government, as a majority government, does not believe that it needs to give Assembly members, including its own members, any responsibility for decisions that are made if its ministers have made the ACT a party to an intergovernmental agreement?
In this case, whatever the advice of the department, there would be nothing stopping this project continuing if the ACT Assembly did include a sunset clause and then ran it past the other Australian governments. This sunset clause would give us five years before the legislation expired so there would be time enough to revisit the legislation—even after three or four years—once the operation of the regime has been reviewed by the commonwealth, and then we could go through this debate again. Indeed, it might be tiresome for some to hear the same fairly fundamental positions on both sides of the debate being repeated. But I would have thought that was a small price to pay for legislation which seeks to reflect current science and community perspectives.
In relation to this I want to refer to an article in today’s Canberra Times. We understand that newspapers just pick here and there from the scientific journals those little bits of news that they think are sensational and will sell papers. This one refers to a scientist’s claim of producing artificial mice sperm. It states:
Artificial human sperm could come to the aid of infertile men, according to a team of German scientists who have used lab-grown sperm to inseminate female mice.
Of course, it goes on:
… could also make males totally redundant—
newspapers like that one—
permitting women to give birth without a biological male mate.
That, I think, is a fairly irrelevant comment, but what it shows is that this research is constantly on the move. This is the description of the research:
We started out with 65 embryos from egg cells which had been inseminated by the sperm-like cells created in our lab. Of those, 12 reached full term and were born. But seven of the newborn animals died within a period ranging from three days to five months after birth of causes which we have not been able to determine …
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