Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

thank you—lived in times when what the church said went. It had an authority for what it said. To make the statement is no surprise: many of the churches have lost a degree of their moral authority. There are many reasons for that, too many to go into tonight—it could probably be the subject of a PhD for someone who has the time and interest to pursue it—but we can be sure of this: within the reasons for the diminution of the moral authority of churches there are some very painful lessons for the churches themselves.

So we are left to resolve this matter. I understand that there are different views on when life begins, and that is important because each of us will have different views. Not each and every one of us, because there will not be 70 or so different views, but amongst us there will be different views. Some will say that life begins at conception, others will say it begins at the second week of gestation and others will say it begins at the eighth week. Some will say that life begins at implantation. Some others say that perhaps we should do the reverse of saying, ‘When you’re dead, your brain activity ends,’ so you must be alive when it starts. And there would possibly be many other versions of when life begins. There was apparently a point, I was shocked to find in reading some of this material, when people believed that sperm carried the homunculus: a little human being. It was all in the boy’s court; women had nothing to do with it. There was a point at which our understanding of fertilisation was that ignorant.

We have changed our position; I do not think there is much disagreement. I would like to meet the man who would come out today and say that that theory is correct. In any event, I simply mention these things to indicate that amongst us there will be different views. We are all entitled to hold our view, and in my view we are obligated to respect the views of others. But that goes for the others as well: those who do not share my view have an obligation to respect the fact that it is my view and to allow me to hold it, without denigration.

My position is that no religion has the right to seek to have its view legislated. As Bishop Holloway says, ‘Nobody has an exclusive patent on the mind of God.’ There are all too many who would like to claim that. Let me correct myself: there are all too many who do. But I do not believe that anyone has that patent. I have said before in other debates in this place that any God someone believes in surely is after converts, not conscripts. Where is the belief if you are simply doing something because it is a legislative requirement that you do it? You can have any view you like and just do something because you have to do it. To me the value in the good things that are outlined in Christian, Muslim and Hindu theologies, and indeed in the theologies of many other religions of which I have no knowledge, is that you should do good things, not simply because you are told to but because you think they are good things to do.

Because we have these different religious views amongst us in this chamber and out in the community, and because there has been, over my lifetime, a decline in the moral authority of churches, I think we have to construct moral agreements ourselves, together. As Bishop Holloway says in his fantastic little book entitled Godless Morality, which I highly recommend, they have to have ‘the authority of reason and the discipline of consent’. But there will always be a breakaway. Get any group of good people and there will always be someone who is at the lowest common denominator, who does the wrong thing. I would like to think that is not the case, but history shows that that is a naive aspiration. We need ‘the authority of reason and the discipline of consent’, not believing that someone else other than us has a patent on the mind of God and can tell us what to think. So what I am arguing here, and it is argued very cogently in this book, is that the moral traditions we endorse—and we might think that sounds old-fashioned, but any God should help us if we ever get to the point where we do not have moral traditions that we endorse—should be endorsed because they are ethically appropriate, not because they have some divine warrant.

I hope it is clear, from what I have said, why I support this bill. I will run through very briefly and summarise it again. I support the legislation because I think science is what offers hope. We are charged with the responsibility of controlling the scientists. I do not say that we should let scientists do as they want, when they want and how they want, but I think it is incalculably cruel to cut hope into ribbons for those who are desperately in need of it.

I secondly support the legislation because Australian scientists are at the forefront, and that is when you get ahead. To hold our own back when they are at the forefront is not something this parliament should do. We should not hold Australia back from all the opportunities that might come from going down these alleys and looking at what is there. Sure, some of them would be blind; there would be a lot of the Toyota ad business but I am not allowed to say it. There would be wasted years of research where people in desperate frustration realise they took a wrong turn. That is the history of science. But there would also be the pathways that people went down that would be the right ones.

Having said the primary reasons, I then tried to explain my view that we will all have different religious commitments. We have to respect each other’s right to have those commitments but not ever expect that this place will legislate them for us. Between us we have to come to moral decisions on which we agree that have the authority of reason and the discipline of consent. We have to choose things because they are ethically appropriate and not because we seek to claim that they have some divine warrant.

I might make one more point: the research that has been done, and that we hope will be done, and that I think is limited to 14 days, is on human tissue not on a human. I draw the attention of my colleagues to a second book by Richard Holloway entitled Looking in the distance: the human search for meaning and in particular to his elucidation, on pages 165 and 166, of the folly of alleging that a single group of cells outside of a womb can be called human—in fact, I would recommend the whole book. A simpler way of putting it is that if we took those spare IVF eggs out of the fridge they would not become human. The truth is: when colleagues drop their eyes, drop their voice to sotto voce and say, ‘We let them succumb,’ it is a nice way of saying, ‘They are chucked in the bin.’ That is what it really means. So we should not kid ourselves in anything other than that. Not one of those gets up, runs down the street, goes to university and says, ‘I did it without any help.’ (Time expired)