Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to discuss what will be one of the major issues of my parliamentary career. It is an issue that is coming forward once again, and that is the issue of the dignity of life and the point at which a person attains their unencumbered and unfettered right to life. We are having a debate at the moment that is getting caught up in semantics and technical details and avoiding the ultimate, fundamental, underlying issue that we are about to approve the process of a drug that finishes human life. It is definitely human life. It is not tree life or horse life; it is human life.

The debate on RU486 is going to be a defining moment for this chamber between honour and convenience. It is hard to win a battle that defines such an important issue as the dignity of human life because so much is on the table. There is so much that is at the forefront of people’s minds when they deal with the issue of an action that takes away human life and what implications there might be in their life for actions they may have taken in the past. What I hope we do is separate the action from the person. No person is a bad person; all people are generally good people. But certain things inherently take us to a lower place.

A bad habit the human race has is of sanitising truth, of covering over things that are too hard to deal with and are too hard to face up to. In this debate we have been talking about foetuses, about human tissue and about blood clots but we fail to acknowledge the fundamental truth that we are dealing with human life. Whatever we destroy is a process of human life that we have been through. Every time we enter the discussion we bring up aspects of the health considerations of the mother, and they are vital considerations that we must take on board, but we refuse to acknowledge the life and health considerations of that human life we have destroyed.

It is a peculiar thing that if we are duplicitous in taking life then we lose that content of collective moral calibre that an ethical and just nation should have. Once we decide that we can legislate and brush over the worth of human life then obviously there is going to be a lack of sincerity and a high level of scepticism on any other issue in this parliament—when senators in certain corners of the chamber put their hands on their hearts and say that something is an important, moral and just issue to them but at a previous time were completely willing to take away the right of a human being to an incumbered and unfettered existence or an unfettered path.

There are questions you must always pose to yourself. When did you attain the right to life? Was it yesterday? Was it last week? Was it the day after you were born? Was it the day before you were born? What is so peculiar about the whole process of birth that if, at one stage, you take a person’s life it is murder but if you take the life the day before it may be legal and just? At what time do the rights of a person descend and so the taking of their life becomes murder? How do we arrive at that process? The philosophical debate that we should have had in this house is: at what stage of a human’s life—and that starts at conception and goes to death—does a person attain an unfettered right to live without the threat of a third party killing them?

We will have an interesting debate. It will be tangled up in the difference between whether the Therapeutic Goods Administration should administer and be party to the control of the taking of a person’s life or whether another body should. The debate will deal with the actual technicalities of the words ‘Therapeutic Goods Administration’ and the administration of the act, because dealing with the real issue is too hard. Dealing with the real issue is too disturbing—to actually come to the position where you have to ask yourself these questions. When did I attain my rights and why? When did this person attain their rights and why? What rights do I have over another person’s life? What is the justification for me having those rights?

It is interesting that it will be acknowledged that the process of this drug—the RU486, the mifepristone, which is the progesterone antagonist, followed by the misoprostol, which is the prostaglandin—is inherently more dangerous than surgical abortion for the period of time it is used. Without a shadow of a doubt there will be women who will die because they take this drug but who would have survived had they had a surgical abortion—without a shadow of a doubt.

Apparently that is just acceptable collateral damage. That is part of the process. We have had the argument thrown up about the fatality rate from types of antihistamine drugs or Viagra. But it is a ridiculous comparison. In promoting and proffering this debate, we not only take away the right of the child to live but we are also quite willing to let a few mothers die as well. I put on record that when the first mother dies by reason of using RU486—and there will be one—it will be the responsibility of this chamber and the people in it, absolutely. We must be willing to accept responsibility and not shirk it. We must accept as a nation that we passed a law and the process that gave a mercenary approach not only to the life of the child but to the life of the mother. We also have to acknowledge, if we decide to pass this law, the psychological impact of the use of this drug on someone who expels a foetus, which is a small child, who then tries to deal with the issue of disposing at home of something that has arms and legs and eyes and a skull. That is a peculiar thing for us to be dealing with. We are going to look in the mirror and feel a little bit disenchanted about the honour of this place when we go on to other pieces of legislation.

I am disappointed that the legislation is going through so quickly. You cannot legislate people’s lives back, so it is an issue of absolute and fundamental importance. All the legislation here at the moment, if people so choose, can be changed. In the next term of government we can change back any aspect of the IR legislation or Telstra and things can be changed around and legislated back. But the first mother who dies cannot have her life legislated back. It is gone. And certainly every child that will lose their life by this process—whether you call it human tissue or human life, it is a human life—will not have their life legislated back either. You will also be imposing on people the whole concept of going home with the knowledge that they have what was their child dead inside them before the prostaglandin, which they take a couple of days later, works and they expel the remnants of the human life in whatever convenient manner they can find to deal with it.

It is a most important debate. It deals with human life, and anybody would say that what is primarily important in their life is their unencumbered right to freely go through life without another person taking it away for no other reason than their belief in how they see their own life going. This is an argument of honour versus convenience. I think that it is going to be very hard for us to win, but it is fundamentally important, if anyone is listening to this debate, that they think about the vote they are about to take.