Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I always understand the sensitivities that I raise. It's actually a United Nations issue. They're trying to deal with this. Even at the United Nations level, they see this as a serious problem. The last report from the United Nations said that we're down 200 million girls. I thought that might have rung a bell somewhere. I can understand if that's not a concern for the honourable member opposite, but it is to the United Nations. The reason is the capacity for people to actually utilise this and for insurance to cover this, even in regards to how it works vis-a-vis Medicare.

It is incredibly pertinent as to what is happening in regards to genetic testing and testing for issues that sway away from the natural predisposition of the balance of traits. If you test and find that someone has a prevalence to cancer and therefore remove them as somebody you wish to cover, then you are not doing the appropriate thing in covering risk. If you find people who have a heart disease and remove them from the people you ensure, then the predisposition sways what the purpose of insurance is. Likewise, if you use genetic testing—and it is genetic testing—to determine the sex, especially in non-invasive prenatal testing, you're changing the natural dynamic which is completely at odds with what people are trying to do with the equality of the sexes. You're changing it in the most profound way.

This is something that should be part of the scope. If we want to comply with where the United Nations is heading with this, then we have to be brave enough to acknowledge this. We are seeing now, even in Australia that what they call the sex ratio for births, in some demographics in Australia, has gone to 1.39 when it should be around 1.05. If we concur with this, then we concur with the belief that girls are not as important as boys, and I hope that that wouldn't be the case. I put it to the honourable member opposite—if he disagrees with that, he's welcome to stand and say so.

This study by Edith Cowan University has brought once more to light the whole gamut of this new world we're in with genetic testing. Genetic testing has to have some ring-roads put around it. If it doesn't, it will become incredibly Orwellian in terms of the type of world that we want to create. Of course, the attributes being tested for don't stop with people's predisposition for wanting male children, because that's where it generally moves towards—male. It also comes to other attributes that people wish to select for, and they can do it by genetic testing. They can do it for eye colour. They can do it for height. They can do it for whether a person has the propensity to become obese. All these things become part of this rather dark and perverse new form of eugenics in trying to create a new form of humankind—one that fits our ideal model for what we believe to be the perfect human being. It's completely wrong. It's a very bad thing.

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