Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In talking to this amendment moved by Senator O'Neill before the chamber, I want to make something clear. I am the spokesperson for the Greens in the health space and I will making contributions on this legislation, but, as a party, we too have decided on a conscience vote. So the contributions that I make in relation to this amendment are reflective of my personal position and won't necessarily reflect the views of my colleagues, and my vote won't necessarily be in the same direction, as it is a conscience vote.

I will come to the amendment directly in a moment, but I just want to offer a couple of really quite authentic observations in relation to the conscience debate that we have been having on this legislation to this point. First of all, last night we had a couple of contributions, some which were directly referencing so-called traditional ways of coming into the world, traditional forms of reproduction. Other contributions alluded to there being a traditional way in which a human being comes into the world. As a disabled person, I feel an obligation to draw the chamber's attention to the fact that my sitting here today, alive and an MP for WA, is a testament to the reality that the definition of what it is to be a traditional human being and to live evolves over time. Had I been born a couple of hundred years ago, I would have been left to the wolves. Had I been born 50 years ago, and less in some places, it would have been the traditional course of life for me to be institutionalised and never see the light of day. What are the traditional ways of going about life and the traditional supports that we provide to people? These are definitions that evolve over time, not only in that social space and that historical context but medically.

I, like so many other people in the world, am the product of a caesarean birth procedure. There was a time when such a procedure did not exist, and the traditional way of medicine—the traditional way forward—would have been for me and my mum to have died. Luckily, over the course of time and with the advancement of science, we have improved medical practices, and those improved medical practices enable us to offer better life chances to babies, kids and parents to live good, happy, healthy lives. There is no such thing as a fixed point in time whereby the traditional state of things can be defined.

On the amendment specifically, it is my view that this would have the effect of blurring the lines in relation to the regulation and oversight of this procedure and slowing down the trial and implementation stage. One of the challenges we have here is that this could well create confusion as to the responsible regulatory body. In my view, requiring the Gene Technology Regulator to become involved in the regulation of mitochondrial donation could well have a duplicative effect. That's before you even lift the lid, go beneath and ask yourself where the expertise lies. Currently, within the NHMRC, we have the Embryo Research Licensing Committee, which, it is proposed, will have regulatory oversight of this process. With the change proposed by the amendment, the Gene Technology Regulator would also have oversight and regulatory responsibility—hence, potentially, the confusion that I talked about before.

But I also think we have another question to consider with the amendment, and that is simply that the regulator is currently responsible for—and I'll quote directly—'agriculture and genetically modified material'. I would never want to see a baby born due to these procedures being, at any point in their existence, identified or designated, by a government regulator or any other body, as 'genetically modified material'. That's not appropriate, and it is totally unnecessary given the fact that within the NHMRC's IVF division there is a team of folks who have been doing work on facilitated reproductive procedures since the early 2000s. This is a team of the nation's experts, who are more than capable, in my view, of carrying out this oversight role as proposed in the legislation before the chamber today. For those reasons, I personally will not be supporting the amendment.