John Hogg (Queensland, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

I was not going to participate in this debate on the report on the review of the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 and the Research Involving Human Embryos Act 2002, but it is appropriate now. I am not going to go into the merits of the issue. I think that is something that needs to be left for another time. I just want to make a few comments of my own. I obviously have a different perspective from a number of people in this place, and there are a number who share my views. I think this is a very emotional issue. It is one that tends to focus people in one camp or the other very quickly without there ever being anyone in between. There is no real in-between status in this debate.

One of the difficulties is that science, scientists and those with very strong interests in this area play a significant role and a significant part in the debate. They are responsible in many instances for informing those who do not necessarily have the expertise and the specialisation of the arguments, of the merits, that prevail in the debate. In that respect, I can understand some of the comments made by you, Senator Ian Macdonald. I think they are valid indeed. My criticism of the debate that took place in the first instance when this was considered by this parliament was that it was a very uninformed debate, a very emotional debate and one that did not necessarily weigh up very closely the scientific facts that were involved. That is not arguing the rights or the wrongs of the decisions that we have taken. I think that, in many ways, the media tend to trivialise the debate rather than understand the difficulties that exist in both the perspectives that one might come from in this debate. As I said, I think there are only two perspectives.

I hope that if this debate is to proceed it will proceed in a way in which there is informed debate. I hope that it does not look superficially at the issues. Whilst one might be attracted necessarily to the emotional aspects of the debate on one side or the other, I hope that they are put to one side. I hope that we can be informed in a very reasonable, understandable way, not using complex scientific language, which can be put before us to bamboozle us from time to time either way in the debate.

I support what my colleague Senator Webber said about the need for people to address their own moral concerns in debates such as this. It really comes down to a values debate. I think that that is terribly important. Also important are the simple things, such as the fact that when people talk about stem cells there are two distinct types of stem cells. One gets caught up in using the generic term ‘stem cells’, whereas there are embryonic stem cells and there are adult stem cells. Of course, they are quite different in the way that they are derived, but potentially they have the same outcome.

I am pleading: if we do have a debate, let us have an informed debate. Let us not have a superficial debate. Let us not have a debate that is simply based on very emotive circumstances that may be put before us as individual members of this parliament or as people participating in the debate within our own political parties. I think that it is an important issue indeed and one that needs grave consideration by every member of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, given our responsibility to address this issue on behalf of the constituents that we represent. It might be easy in some instances to take straw polls as to whether they favour this or do not favour that or favour something else. Whether we will get a true representation of community interests is yet to be seen.