Santo Santoro (Queensland, Liberal Party, Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

I am sure that colleagues both in the Senate and in the other place will appreciate that my position as a commentator on this bill is somewhat delicate. As the Minister for Ageing, I potentially have carriage of the activities which could be carried out under the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Bill 2006 if it receives parliamentary approval. At the same time, as a senator for Queensland, I must deliberate on this bill by considering the merits of the various arguments even if my personal sympathies are ultimately at odds with my responsibilities as a minister. Such, I suppose, is the nature of so-called conscience votes and such, of course, is the nature of being a minister. Each of us is required to implement equally without prejudice or bias both those laws we are naturally inclined to celebrate and those laws we privately find unpalatable.

Since I became the Minister for Ageing early this year, I have had a strong interest in the response of the government to the Lockhart inquiry, as well as in the efficient implementation of the licensing regime for embryo research created by this parliament in 2002. I have, as is appropriate within a pluralist democracy, taken a professional rather than a personal approach to these tasks. Today, however, I believe it is in many ways more appropriate to make a personal statement. My personal views on issues of live embryo experimentation, cloning, hybrids, chimeras and other variants of destructed embryo research are well known to senators both beside and opposite me. Nonetheless, this issue calls for clear and plain speaking and I am happy to restate my position.

I believe that, at the most basic level, the decision to suspend the recognition of a life or to redefine life as being at a certain point which suits a particular branch of scientific research offers a threat to our most fundamental concept of our own humanity. Many colleagues will be aware of the notion of Pascal’s wager, which is the proposition that one should accept Christianity because, if it is wrong, the cost of participation is low but, if it is true, the cost of exclusion is high. While I do not dispute the logic of that, I have always found it to be a somewhat disreputable proposition. It asks us to choose faith as a risk management tool rather than as a source of illumination.

In this bill, we are being asked to make a similar though somewhat more challenging wager. We are being asked to stake the many potential lives of embryonic humans on the prospect that there may be some benefit, either incremental or miraculous, for those whose lives have already passed from the potential to the actual. I have several problems with that wager, not the least of which is that it sets a precedent for exchange and values one life more highly than another. I know that many people console themselves that this is not a real exchange, that we can delineate a critical point where life begins, but I suggest that this is an argument of convenience and not a contention of fact. Again, I suggest that what is at stake here is our humanity. It is a question of justice, which should not be answered in terms of convenience.

I would also alert colleagues that what is being presented here as a simple extension of the decision supported in 2002 is in fact a radical reinterpretation of the principles of that decision. In 2002 the parliament accepted that surplus embryos—in effect, unfortunate by-products of the IVF process—might provide a public good by being used for experimentation rather than being allowed to naturally expire. The argument relies on two pillars: first, that IVF is a positive act towards creating life—and I am certainly not going to contest that—and, second, that there is an extended good in deriving scientific information from embryos created as surplus in this process.

The latter point remains highly controversial. It is a judgement with which I personally retain some discomfort. More importantly, I note that the proposal that we are here to deal with today throws those two pillars out the window. We are now told, contrary to the 2002 assertion that the creation of embryos which might find their way to the research laboratory should only be a consequence of the creation of life, that at least two new categories of embryos—clones and hybrids—should be created subject to the condition that they may never be allowed to advance life. This is a remarkable reversal in four short years. It limits any confidence we might have that the new and final ethical boundaries being offered in this debate are more than transient positions.

Other colleagues in the last 24 hours have spoken most eloquently on the issue of studied incrementalism and the proximity this proposal gives us to reproductive cloning, and I commend them on that. But what bothers me even more than such abhorrent prospects is that this Senate and this parliament are being asked to make the wager, the exchange of life and to reverse the tortuously agreed upon position of 2002 on little more than rhetoric.

In coming to my position on this bill, I have, as have undoubtedly many other colleagues on both sides of the argument, sought the advice of the most learned ethicists and scientists available. After each discussion, I have found the argument to be less and less clear. The proposition being put is that the exchange of life between the potential and the actual is justified by possible breakthroughs to end current suffering. I am confident that all 76 members of this chamber are naturally sympathetic to the goals of that argument. We recognise that many fellow human beings suffer greatly on a day-to-day basis and that, where there is an opportunity to alleviate that suffering, whether today or in 20 years, there is a moral drive to do so. But we draw lines on that. We no longer allow involuntary experimentation on prisoners and we no longer view any branch of society as having diminished rights against threats to their privacy, dignity or life where science is concerned.

But here we are asked to create a new dividing line which diminishes further the rights of embryonic humans in exchange for our common desire to help those who are suffering. Others, both publicly and in this place, have noted that honourable senators, including proponents of the current bill, are making proposals which they explicitly rejected and abhorred in 2002. This is a chamber of debate and reflection, and colleagues are both allowed and encouraged to change their minds when evidence changes. I must say that I am troubled that one can not only change one’s mind but also contest the very validity or appropriateness of a claim one was willing to endorse so strongly in relatively recent times, but that is a matter for individual conscience—and that, I suppose, is what the debate today is all about.

The real problem I have is that, after the best part of a year of public and parliamentary discussion on this matter, the evidence for this dramatic ethical realignment has failed to emerge. I really do appreciate that there is a list of diseases for which we currently have no cure. I appreciate that there are theories by which, after 15 years of research and a few more years of commercialisation, cloned and hybrid embryos might—might—provide a pathway to relieve suffering. I appreciate that those senators committed to supporting this bill will do so in the belief that this is a sufficiently complete equation. But for me it is not complete. Such a bold reversal in our communal ethical judgement should require compelling evidence to support it, and even the most dogmatic supporters of this legislation have, during this debate and before it, failed to provide any such evidence. There is no proof either that therapies will be derived from this vein of research or that the research itself is safe for human experimentation. The latter, of course, explains the drive to create embryo experimentation. If we accept the new regime, then we have the opportunity to experiment on humans without worrying about the consequences. Amongst other things, embryos lack the wherewithal for a class action.

I find it remarkable that this bill has been put with such force and such haste and in such an absolute vacuum of evidence. As senators would know, embryo cloning is legal in some countries, and has been for some years, yet it does not appear to have been the irresistible magnet for top scientists that proponents of today’s bill would have us believe. One cannot help but get the feeling that at the roots of the desire to remove the prohibition on cloning and hybrid embryos is a lack of faith in the democratic process—that parliament is unfit to draw a line between what is right and what is possible.

It is a peculiar feature of recent times, and of this Senate in particular, that science is now our ‘new sacred’. It was once a given that our values and actions had reference points in what was right and good and what most of us believe about this world and the next. We are now told that there is no place for such petty abstractions where they stand in the way of research. We are asked to baptise what is possible rather than what is good. I would contest this change in approach, because I believe it is both unsustainable and dangerous. The presumption behind this proposed reallocation of our trust and faith is that science is purely an altruistic endeavour. For those of us involved in politics, or for anyone who has their eyes open, this requires a fairly broad suspension of disbelief.

Without denying the desire for good which drives many researchers, I would suggest to senators that science, from the time of the ancients, through Newton and through to today, has been accompanied by a range of perhaps less admirable drivers. At heart, science is driven by curiosity, which is a necessity for a good researcher but does not in any way translate to justice. Accompanying this are the traditional structures of universities, research institutes and peer environments in which scientists operate, where prestige and promotion are common goals and where ‘publish or perish’ remains a powerful dictum. Again, one struggles to find elements of justice here.

Finally, we have the more contemporary challenge to the natural altruist: the lure of biotechnology commercialisation. I do not think that anyone in this place would think that someone of my philosophical colour would find it difficult to reconcile the prospect of justice and economic return, but it concerns me that in this case an imbalance between the two is eroding the quality of the argument. This problem is also present in contemporary ethics, where the commercial sources of many ethicists’ incomes are insufficiently distant from the objects of their contemplation. In short, science, as the Lockhart report so clearly reminds us, is a business, and I think that it is the business of science we are being asked to approve here today rather than its more noble goals.

We all know what I mean. Most of us here are old enough to remember the tobacco researchers who told us that there was no link to cancer. So when I hear colleagues saying, ‘I don’t fully understand this but I trust the scientists,’ I think a note of caution and a healthier dose of scepticism might be in order. As I say, science is the ‘new sacred’. It offers a liturgy of delivery from suffering and the mystery of a better life. Peculiarly, we are told that it must replace what is now apparently the ‘old sacred’.

I had an odd experience a couple of months back when I was maligned in a national newspaper for my attitude to cloning and misrepresented as to my role in the debate. During that process, a journalist who deserves no mention in this lofty place put it to my media adviser that my personal faith provides a conflict of interest for me both as a senator and as a minister. I have never been quite sure what it means to ‘boggle’, but I think that this is one of those cases where the mind unquestionably boggles. We are asked to believe that the universities, individual scientists, biotechnology vehicles and drug companies who would patent this research have no conflict of interest and that economic returns are but a happy consequence and a market mechanism for good, yet belief in the goodness of God and man, and the presence of objective truth is a conflict of interest. The boggling is overwhelming.

In July this year, I had the honour to address a large gathering of Jewish Australians in Melbourne on the issue of the Australian media. In that speech, I asserted that we have a duty to:

... rescue the concept of moral truth from the dustbin of history into which post-modern moral relativism seeks to discard it. If we want to protect basic and fundamental universal human rights, and in so doing inoculate our democracy from the possibility of repeating the horrors of the Holocaust, or the Gulags, or Pol Pot’s Year Zero, we must remember that human rights rest on the foundation of moral absolutes.

We seem to be losing that memory and replacing it in so many areas of our society with a rhetoric of transactional good: the kind of ethical transaction which allows us to exchange one life for another and which we are asked to accept today.

Let me make it perfectly clear. I am certainly not going to draw comparisons between this proposal and those most hideous events of the 20th century, but it concerns me that when we substitute our desire for objective truth, even when that desire is to relieve suffering, we are straying from the underpinnings of our humanity. I am further concerned that the progress of this debate has seen not simply a departure from our core beliefs and values but also an open contempt for the traditions which delivered them to us.

In my address on the proposal earlier this year to legalise chemical abortifacients, which was an infinitely simpler proposition than this bill, I said that there was a dangerous implication from one group that only one side of the conscience debate was good conscience. The implication was that Christianity has become somehow incompatible with good conscience and that sympathy and opportunity are higher values. I called on the Senate at that time to never again accept denigration of Christian values as biased, baseless or ill informed. It will not surprise fellow senators to hear that I am consequently disappointed by aspects of this debate and the contempt shown for the Christian tradition both publicly and privately.

I would say this to you today. I understand that not everyone in this Senate is a Christian. Likewise, I recognise that the absence of personal faith does not preclude senators from voting honestly and without prejudice. And I accept that my faith will never be accepted by the acolytes of scientific curiosity as an appropriate barrier to their interests. But let me make this clear: our society is built on the foundations of Christianity, which have been handed down over the past 2,000 years, and the bedrock of Judaism, which fathered it. Whether or not one believes in the message of Christ, one should be willing to acknowledge and respect the guidance which Christianity has offered, and continues to offer, to our society. It is our strongest and most reliable guide as to what is good and just, it is our greatest historical reference point and it is our final protection against the excesses of either anarchy or excessive government.

For me, it is simply truth. But you do not need to accept that to recognise that there is a powerful correlation between faith and justice. In 412 AD, St Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, wrote a response to an inquiry from his friend the Christian Roman official Marcellinus on the subject of the compatibility of Christianity and politics. He wrote this:

... hearts of mortals nevertheless think that human affairs are prosperous when the splendour of buildings is attended to and the collapse of souls is not, when massive theatres are built up and the foundations of the virtues are undermined, when the insanity of extravagance is glorified and the works of mercy ridiculed ...

I think that that 1,600-year-old paragraph is instructive for us all, whether Liberal or Labor, Christian or not. It reminds us not simply that this world is temporary or that virtue and justice are most worthy goals but also that we should guard against making priorities of what is attractive rather than what is right. I will vote against this bill because I believe it is hasty, ill supported by evidence and offers a fundamentally unjust exchange of one life for another. I would commend all other senators to this perspective.