Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The debate before us is a complex one that brings out a range of emotions, passions and beliefs. I have read what I can on the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Bill 2006 and the issues surrounding the subject. As best I have been able today, whilst regrettably having been involved in a Senate committee hearing which required my attendance, I have listened to the debate and have appreciated the views of those in favour as well as those against it.

I have also carefully read and listened to all of the many submissions that have been made to me by Australians for and against the bill. I want to thank those people who have taken the time and effort to make me aware of their views. I certainly respect their sincerity and their deep beliefs. I have also attended at least one of the seminars that have been conducted in relation to the bill, and I have read some of the reports of the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs inquiry into the bill and some of the transcripts of evidence given to the committee. In spite of all that, I still claim no expertise and a very limited understanding.

The government decided to set up an expert committee to review the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 and the Research Involving Human Embryos Act 2002 in accordance with the requirement in both acts that they be reviewed by an independent committee by December 2005. The review committee was selected by the government. I am aware that the Prime Minister would have had a view on the appointment of the late John Lockhart AO, QC, a former justice of the Federal Court of Australia, to head the panel. The other members of the panel were clearly chosen by the government for their expertise and understanding of science and ethics. As an aside, I would like to say what everyone in this chamber well knows—that is, the government would not have appointed people to that panel if they thought them to have extreme or radical views on this or any other issue.

Regrettably, I do not have the same mental capacity or time to fully research the issue as the members of the panel of review have and have had. I have enormous confidence in the credibility, sincerity and ability of those leading Australian scientists, medical specialists and clinical ethicists who, as part of the Lockhart review panel, devoted considerable time and thought to their conclusions.

While I do not think the debate is one inordinately influenced by one’s religious convictions or lack of them, I do make reference to a quote from the Hansard report of the evidence given by Professor Skene to the standing committee on community affairs, which reviewed this bill. Professor Skene said in part:

John Lockhart used to describe himself as an agnostic Anglican and he used to like singing in the church choir. Pam McCombe and Barry Marshall are both Roman Catholics. I am a church-going Anglican and Peter Schofield is an evangelical Christian ... We took all this very seriously and it was not easy for us. I want you to know that in the long process of consultation we examined our own thinking and we did not reveal until the end what we were thinking about it.

To suggest that one’s decision depends on one’s religious conviction I think is wrong, and to a degree demeaning. I class myself as a Christian—although not, I regret to say, one who attends church as regularly as I would like.

The issues and arguments both for and against the bill have been widely canvassed by my colleagues in this debate, and I thank them for their input. I am not going to prolong this debate by repeating a lot of the arguments that have been made or refuting some of the arguments made with which I do not agree. As I say, this has already been done by others.

It is difficult for me to adequately summarise the contents of the bill, the recommendations of the Lockhart committee and the arguments for and against it. I want to simply include a couple of paragraphs again from the Hansard record of Professor Skene’s evidence to the standing committee which highlight in relatively simple layman’s terms the recommendations of the Lockhart committee. I quote from Professor Skene’s evidence:

We believe that there should be prohibitions on certain types of conduct that everybody seems to regard as being morally wrong. We think that there should be a clear division between embryos being created for research and used for research, which must never be implanted in a woman, and the fertility processes in fertility programs where, of course, the goal of the program is to help people have children, or to test before an embryo is implanted ...

Professor Skene goes on:

So our first and most basic recommendation was that the current legislation should stay in place and that most of the current prohibitions should also remain, in order to reassure the community that things that they object to will not be allowed to be done and, if those things are done, there are very heavy penalties—15 years imprisonment for the most serious of them.

The professor continued:

The second recommendation was that the current research on embryos that is allowed to be done at the moment should be permitted to continue.

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One of our recommendations was that it should be possible to do research on impaired embryos. We also recommended that the time during which it is possible to do research on an egg in the process of fertilisation should be extended to the time when the egg is fully fertilised.

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we recommended that scientists should be permitted to create an embryo of this kind for research, we thought in taking this line we were adopting a middle-line approach. The reason for this is that we recommended that it should not be permitted to create what we call the sperm-egg embryo, which combines the gametes, the sperm and egg, of the couple. We took the view that a somatic cell nuclear transfer embryo is different, that it is more like growing bodily tissue to treat a person with some sort of medical disorder.

I have to say that in coming to a conclusion on this issue and other similar issues, for reasons that will be fairly obvious, I have been very heavily influenced by the commitment and views of my colleagues Senator Jeannie Ferris and Dr Mal Washer MP.

I want to make it clear, and I think most other thinking Australians would be of the same view, that I do not anticipate that the mere passage of this bill will allow research that will provide miraculous cures overnight—or even in the short- or medium-term future. I am one of those who looks around at my fellow human beings and realises that, in spite of my inadequacies and deficiencies, I am luckier than most. I have reasonably good health, but I see many others in our society who are afflicted by the most appalling and debilitative of diseases. I have friends who have been traumatised by accidents and other events which have severely impaired their health and lifestyle.

I was myself the beneficiary of scientific research into heart disease which just 10 years ago allowed a mechanical aortic valve to be inserted in my heart. That prolonged my life expectancy considerably. In fact if research had not unlocked the science and mysteries of cardiac surgery, I would not be speaking to you tonight. I often wonder if stem cell research may at some time in the future cure the diseased aortic valve which I was born with. It does not really matter to me now as the mechanical valve which I have in my heart has been guaranteed by my surgeon to last for 1,000 years, but it would be nice for others in the future if there were a way of repairing a diseased aortic valve so that those people would not have to be on ‘rat poison’, or warfarin, daily. I take that to ensure that my blood remains thin enough to keep flowing through the mechanical valve. That is all supposition, but one day hopefully there will be cures for the type of damaged aortic valve that I had.

I am one of those who believes that anything that can possibly be done to give a better quality of life and possible cures in the future to some of the diseases and disabilities that afflict my fellow Australians deserves to be given a chance. This bill and the original act, in my view, provide all of the safeguards—and very substantial penalties against the breach of those safeguards—that I believe would ensure that the practices that we all consider repugnant would not occur in Australia.

In the end result, I look at the bill in this way: I have faith and confidence in the ethics and honesty of our scientists and in the regulations governing research. Accordingly, I do not accept some of the dire predictions that have been made as to where passage of this bill might lead. I dismiss the ‘thin end of the wedge’ prediction; I have more faith in humankind. If there is even the remotest possibility that passage of this bill will allow controlled research which might cure one ailment in just one person I think it is worthwhile, and I would be very surprised if the God that I worship thought otherwise. I support the passage of the bill.

Before I conclude, I just want to make some comments on the voting on this bill. I have clearly indicated, after a lot of thought, my support for the bill. I originally believed that I would not be in parliament on Friday, when it was anticipated that the vote on this bill might take place. I had accepted an invitation from the Minister for the Environment and Heritage to represent him at the launch of a vessel for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority up at Airlie Beach. I had, accordingly, arranged to be paired on Friday for the taking of the vote. The event that I was intending to attend on Friday has now, subsequently, been postponed, but the arrangements that had been made to pair my vote were required to stand, and I am, of course, quite willing to continue in that process.

I am informed and I believe that my Queensland Senate colleague Senator George Brandis, who is currently representing the government in the United Kingdom, would have voted against the bill had he been in parliament when the vote was taken. Accordingly, I re-emphasise my support for the bill but agree not to take part in the vote so that I can unofficially pair the vote of Senator Brandis, who would have been opposed to the bill. I have written to Senator Ferris, as the whip unofficially assisting with pairs here in that fashion, and I seek leave to table a copy of my letter to Senator Ferris concerning my position on the voting.

Leave granted.