Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the minority report on the Transparent Advertising and Notification of Pregnancy Counselling Services Bill 2005, which recommends that the bill passes the Senate. The intent of the bill is clear. The bill is straightforward and balanced. The overriding purpose of the bill is to ‘prohibit misleading and deceptive advertising and notification of pregnancy counselling services’. The bill aims to ensure that all advertising is truthful. The legislation is not about the services that a pregnancy counselling service can or cannot provide. It does not force any counselling service to provide services over and above those they currently offer.

What it does is to say that all advertising of pregnancy counselling services must be truthful. It does not force, as was claimed by some organisations and individuals, a pregnancy counsellor to participate in an illegal act. It does not force pregnancy counselling services to provide referrals for abortion. It will not force pregnancy counselling services to close or restrict their business. What this legislation will do is to force all pregnancy counselling services to ensure that all advertising material is truthful. The bill is not trying to tell volunteers at pregnancy counselling services to change anything that they currently are doing.

The bill simply requires that any organisation that advertises itself as a pregnancy counselling service does so truthfully, and that is, after all, what this bill hinges upon: the issue of truthfulness. This is a bill that states that any pregnancy counselling service’s advertising be truthful as to the type of service it provides. This is a simple bill that says that you must be truthful. If your organisation does not want to provide counselling that includes advice about termination of pregnancy as an option, then so be it. However, the bill says that you must ensure that your advertising makes it transparently clear that you do not provide that service.

There seems to me to be a fundamental principle at the heart of this bill. If you wish to offer pregnancy counselling services and do not wish to provide information about one of the three options, then there is nothing in this bill that will force you do so. By the same token, if you do not wish to provide information about an option, then you surely must be prepared to let potential clients know that. I have no doubt that all the people working in the area of pregnancy counselling are people of conviction. Based on their own values and knowledge, they provide counselling services to other people in our community without being paid for it. If people of conviction can provide these services, then surely the organisations that they work for should be organisations of conviction and ensure that all advertising of the services that they offer is truthful—nothing more, nothing less.