Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Hansard source

Just four years after the Australian parliament passed legislation banning the cloning of human embryos, a new report has called for the cloning of human embryos for research, and that is the Lockhart paper. I find it fairly interesting that all of a sudden there seems to be this move to change a decision that was made only four years ago. The issue here is that nothing has changed since that decision was made four years ago. In fact, all the breakthroughs and successes have come from adult stem cells, not embryos. That is the real issue at hand here. Nor does research even support the idea of human cloning. A Swinburne University study revealed that 63 per cent of the Australian public do not feel comfortable with scientists cloning human embryos for research purposes. Quite clearly, there is not public support for it.

The Lockhart report was produced in the way that was expected. It was a committee set up to satisfy state governments with high hopes of securing millions of dollars of biotechnology research money for their states. All I will say is that nothing has changed. In fact, the breakthroughs have come from adult stem cell research, not from embryonic stem cell research. Family First believes that work should be done to support the use of adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells and certainly not human cloning. This is the slippery slope to human cloning. I strongly urge senators to fully think this through before making a decision, after looking at the Lockhart report.