Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I know people are keen to get home, so I will not speak to most of the documents, but I will speak to this one. There are a lot of documents here and many of them are reports that are required to be tabled in this chamber by virtue of amendments made by the Senate. This is one example of a report that has been required to be produced as a result of an amendment made to the Research Involving Human Embryos Act 2002 by this chamber in 2006. As I say, the least we can do, if we agree to amendments requiring reports to be tabled, is to actually note the reports when they do get produced, rather than create a lot of work for people that then gets ignored.

This report is derived from the debate in this chamber regarding the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Act 2006, known colloquially as the stem cell debate and the cloning debate. It was an interesting debate and it was one of the rare occasions when there was a conscience vote and people voted across party lines. It was legislation that passed through this chamber by one vote. As I was one of those votes that supported the legislation I am constantly conscious of the fact that if I had been slightly less persuaded than I ended up being of the merits of supporting the legislation it would not have passed. That is something I do think back on from time to time.

One of the things required of this report, which is only a few pages long, was that a report be produced on the establishment of a national stem cell centre and a national register of donated excess assisted reproductive technology embryos—embryos that were surplus to requirements from IVF processes. One of the arguments that was used as to why we needed to allow cloning for stem cell research was that there were not enough embryos available for research through surplus IVF or ART embryos. That was an argument that was made repeatedly as part of persuading people. I would say, in passing, that it was a debate I was actually a bit disappointed in, in the sense that it became so polarised. In a sense, a lot of the time you got the impression that, if you supported the legislation, you were accused of not caring about the sanctity of human life but, if you opposed the legislation, you were accused of being heartless and not caring about people with terrible diseases who were being denied a potential cure. There was a huge amount of emotional blackmail on both sides, which tended to cloud the substance of the issue on occasion, I might say, without suggesting that those views were not sincerely held.

One of the arguments used was that we have to allow cloning for research because, if we do not, there are just not enough embryos available; we have got to allow some to be created through cloning. So I was interested to read in this report that a survey commissioned by the NHMRC, through the National Perinatal Statistics Unit of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, showed that there is not an undersupply of excess ART embryos for research. There are currently 117,000 ART embryos in storage, of which nearly 6,000 had been declared excess and donated to research. Of those, the NHMRC Embryo Research Licensing Committee had issued 10 licences authorising the use of up to 2,015 excess ART embryos for research, and, of those, only 443 embryos had been used by researchers. So it indicated that only around one-third of available embryos are being sought for use by researchers.

It is worth noting and putting on the record that there are actually plenty of surplus embryos available from ART processes for stem cell research. I thought that was an interesting fact. That then led to the proposal here that we actually do not need to set up a national register, because there are plenty of spare embryos. I thought that information was useful and it would have been nice to have had that information at the time of that debate, but that is a separate matter. I would encourage people to continue to follow the progress of this issue, because it is something that will continue to come up in public debate and, I am sure, will come before this chamber again in one shape or another some years down the track. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.