Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial responsibility for approval of RU486) Bill 2005. In doing so, and in the brief time I have, I would like to make just three points. The first relates to this being a conscience vote, the second is about governance and the bill and the third is about the integrity of the conscience vote process itself. Contained within this framework is the reasoning by which I have made my decision on this legislation. I also want to make it clear from the outset that I believe that this debate is not about abortion but more clearly about the power over the process of a particular drug which happens to be an abortifacient.

No matter what anybody says about this debate, no-one should claim it is about abortion. We are not debating the legality or otherwise of abortion; nor are we debating the future or the morality of abortion itself. While I do accept the relationship between the approval at any level of the drug RU486 and the abortion question in broader terms, I do not accept that they are one and the same thing or part of this debate. Therefore I will be focusing on the matters at hand and what this bill attempts to change.

First, I go to the issue of a conscience vote. In my more than seven years as a member of the House of Representatives, this is only the second occasion on which I have had to vote on a bill as a matter of conscience. This at least demonstrates the seriousness by which this parliament upholds the right of members to a conscience vote on certain matters by agreement. This is a good thing that should be supported and respected and, I believe, forms an important part of our representative democratic system in consultation with the community. I take this very seriously indeed.

Therefore, as I prepare to cast my vote on the bill before the House, I would like to quote the words of Edmund Burke in his celebrated address to the electors of Bristol in 1774:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

With those words in mind, today I back my own judgement and vote accordingly. Today, as the representative of the people of Oxley and as a member of a free democratic system of representative government, I vote according to what I believe to be in the best interests of the nation and of women. I support the amendment and the bill, which seeks to:

... remove the responsibility for approval of RU486 from the Minister—

for health—

and to provide responsibility for approval of RU486 to the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

I do so not only because I believe in the Labor Party national platform, which asserts ‘the rights of women to determine their own reproductive lives, particularly the right to choose appropriate fertility control and abortion,’ but also because I believe this bill is not about abortion. It is about the process in relation to the administration of a drug and it is about good governance.

This issue has received an enormous amount of media attention and public debate—let alone the volumes of correspondence from people all over Australia. Since debate on this issue began some months ago, I have received a great variety of correspondence from people all over the country expressing their views, and I appreciate their efforts, although I will say that receiving so many different views does little to help in the decision making processes of any member of parliament.

To make matters worse on an already divisive issue, government members have now moved a number of different amendments to the original bill, which will at best further complicate the issue at hand and potentially lead to confusion as to their effect. At worst, in the event that they are carried, they will make literally every application for the use of the drug RU486 a decision of parliament, so that we will need to go through this process again on each occasion.

In my view the decision is clear: either we approve the TGA authority to make the decision on use or we leave the legislation as it stands. There is no halfway house. We do not know what the decision of the TGA might be. All we know is that, if they assume the power of the minister, the TGA will need to follow due process and regulation to make their decision, unlike any minister when making a decision. It could well be that the TGA would not approve the lifting of the ban.

The question must be asked whether, if the Minister for Health and Ageing was advocating the introduction of this drug, this would be the same debate at all. The explanatory memorandum succinctly sums up the argument as I see it:

The TGA is specifically charged with identifying, assessing and evaluating the risks posed by therapeutic goods that come into Australia, applying any measures necessary for treating the risks posed, and monitoring and reviewing the risks over time.

The TGA is regarded by the government as being qualified to manage the risks associated with any therapeutic good that is used (or proposed for use) in Australia. It is therefore reasonable to assume that it is also qualified to manage the risks associated with medications such as RU486.

The minister for health has also argued that a vote for this bill is a vote to subcontract our duties to unelected officials or somehow a vote of no confidence in him. While he may be right on half that count, I believe the minister is wrong and is misrepresenting the facts.

The government’s willingness to divorce itself from responsibility and misrepresent the facts appears all too often—dare I mention the Australian Wheat Board, ‘children overboard’ or immigration matters? The government should not be allowed to cherry pick its responsibilities—between those matters it chooses and those it hands over to agencies, departments, delegates, authorities, expert panels, judiciaries and an endless list of other areas where the parliament sets regulations but hands over its authority—and then denigrate those who do not agree as somehow outsourcing our duties and responsibilities. The minister is simply wrong.

The Minister for Health and Ageing also spoke about freedom of choice for women, but he makes it clear that it is freedom of choice within the parameters of the values of the minister himself. There are also many other contradictory comments coming from the government over this issue, which I would like to draw to the attention of the House.

It is obvious from my comments that I will be supporting the passage of this bill, unamended, as it stands. In the little time that we have to speak on this, I want to comment on the principles adopted by the two major parties on the process in this debate. Firstly, I want to comment on the fact that the Labor Party respects the process of a conscience vote for the capacity it gives individual members of parliament to deal with matters deemed important enough to warrant such a process. I want to comment on the support for this principle there has been from my own party and I want to comment on the manner in which my own party has carried itself and respected the views of individuals on this matter. Secondly, I want to draw the attention of the House to the conduct of and deliberate confusion sown by some—and, I stress, only some—members of the government.

The government has argued for the retention of the powers of the health minister on this drug. But just days ago the Prime Minister did a backflip and also argued that the health minister cannot decide the fate of RU486—that the decision should be taken by all 17 members of the federal cabinet. The Prime Minister has inadvertently admitted that he personally does not trust the health minister to make decisions on this matter. At least on this point, I agree with the Prime Minister. Taking this to the obvious conclusion, though: if you cannot trust one minister, why should we trust the 17 others? Couch this argument against the words of the health minister himself in the republican debate, in which he said that politicians cannot be trusted. If any of us are to believe anything this minister or government says, we should believe the minister when he said not to trust him at all. They are his own words.

But this obviously should not be the exclusive basis on which any of us makes a decision on this matter. The fact that the minister does not have the expertise or objectivity to make such a judgment means that it should be carried out instead by a properly appointed expert authority regulated by the parliament. This is not so-called outsourcing of responsibility but proper process and sensible judgment.

Many arguments will be made in this place about this issue. I cannot say I agree with all of them, or even with their logic, but I will respect them. And I would respect them even more in the knowledge that members’ decisions came about with no undue influence or pressure brought to bear by other members of this House or by ministers themselves to affect the outcome of a conscience vote. I find that absolutely repugnant. What this whole debate proves and this process demonstrates, if nothing else, is that the Howard government cannot be trusted. I commend this bill to the House.

See this speech in context