Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I also intend to support the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Bill 2006. I came to that decision last night. I slept on it, and I woke up feeling the same way this morning. It is not an easy decision, but it is an obligation upon us in this Senate—and it will be in the other place—to wrestle with difficult decisions like this and come to such conclusions. I want to thank all those people who have helped me make that decision, both in this place—because I have listened to the debate carefully—and outside, including Senator Patterson and, indeed, Senator Stott Despoja, Senator Webber and my colleague Senator Nettle, who has always been available to explain the almost inexplicable intricacies of the legislation.

Senator Wong just said that in many ways the decision with the last legislation two years ago was more difficult than this time. I think there is some merit in what she said. Senator Vanstone gave a salient speech last night, at the heart of which was that, in a democracy like ours, it is proper that we make decisions in the parliaments on complex ethical matters as our society progresses—that we can no longer seek ecclesiastical judgement on such matters. This is an age of enormous growth of understanding of everything from ourselves to the whole of the cosmos.

It is on those wider matters that I want to deliberate for a little while in a moment. But let me say at the outset: there are strong safeguards built into this legislation to stop it being used maliciously or against what our society in general would find acceptable. Senator Nettle, on behalf of the Greens, has brought forward three amendments which I hope the Senate may adopt, because one of the concerns I share with her is about biotechnical companies looking at the profit line rather than at the human advantages that we can get from breakthroughs in medicine which will help people who have drawn the short straw, so to speak, in our society, who are suffering illnesses which may be alleviated further down the line, from studies made available through this sort of legislation. We need to make sure that profit never becomes the motive for such advancement in science. The amendments the Greens have brought forward are aimed very squarely at ensuring that it is the public good, not the private purse, that is at all times the motivator in such experimentation.

I am satisfied that, in the whole complexity of this matter, the public good is better served by passing the legislation than by opposing it and therefore inhibiting the potential discoveries which may come out of it. Last time around, I felt convinced that the adult stem cell option was one that covered the field generally. But, in matters such as specific stem cell investigation into specific organs from the human body, which may have the potential for better study using the embryonic stem cell option that is being canvassed by this legislation, there is also the potential through this option for studying diseased cells from specific illnesses which trouble our society, which may not be available through the adult stem cell option. So those things have been important in making this decision.

I have spoken at great length over the years with my colleague Christine Milne. We talk a lot about the way human society is evolving. I would recommend to those who want to see a contrary point of view from somebody who I think does not think very differently from me—she will allow me to say that—that they read her speech. There are, of course, great ethical issues involved here, but I think we should look to those not by opposing this legislation but by building in greater safeguards. One of those ought to be a government look at how we can have an overview of where science is taking us in this country and around the world. It would be a good thing if we had a national technological watch from an ethical point of view on the combination of sciences which some of the greatest thinkers on the planet warn us may come together to change human existence on this planet irrevocably.

This morning I had pointed out to me an article from Arena magazine by a man who has spent a lot of time thinking in this field, Guy Rundle. I will quote from his contemporary article:

Yet the limited degree to which the public has taken these arguments on board—

these are arguments under the title of ‘The crisis in embryo’—

largely in the wake of animal cloning—should be cause for guarded optimism, if one remains cognizant of the long-time frame within which such battles may be fought. As human life becomes increasingly abstracted, commodified, manipulable and dehumanised, a wider sense of foreboding spreads. It remains a minority opinion, but it is a level of awareness far beyond any that could have been hoped for at the beginning of IVF or multiple organ transplants—the first practices to make visible the cultural and moral dilemmas that occur when ‘life’ can be isolated from ‘being’.

I share that sense of dread; yet we must not inhibit ourselves from the potential for medical breakthroughs.

I have had medical training; I was a young doctor when I went to Tasmania many years ago, and I loved that profession. Of course we all learnt about Edward Jenner. He found the antidote to the scourge of smallpox, which killed millions of people around the planet in an awesomely bad death and left many others maimed and disfigured and their lives ruined. He noted, back in 1796, that after an epidemic of smallpox the people involved in the dairy industry had escaped unscathed. And when Sarah Nelmes came to see him on 14 May 1796 with pustules on her hands, he realised she had cowpox and he took some of that material. With the permission of another man in the village, Mr Phipps, he put that into some cuts he made on the arm of young James Phipps, son of Mr Phipps. A bit later he then gave the same son the smallpox virus, and nothing happened.

As a result of that process 220 years ago, literally hundreds of millions of people’s lives have been saved. If we had that debate in the Senate today, about taking cowpox virus from a milkmaid and injecting it into the son of somebody next door, we would not allow it to proceed. That is part of the dilemma. These days we in parliaments have to make decisions and laws that add restrictions but allow some things to proceed.

There has been very great alarm and concern about the misuse of this science. This is not the last time we will debate this issue. It is going to become part of the business of parliaments around the world to be discussing the use of a range of technologies, including nanotechnology, robots, artificial intelligence and, indeed, genetics, right through the rest of human existence. If we do not keep a sobriety about it—if we do not keep a reasonable lid on what potentially could become out-of-control science—then humanity as we know it will not go on into the future.

I am not just speculating wildly there. Stephen Hawking, one of the finer brains on the planet and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, recently put up on his website the question, ‘How do you think humanity will get through the next hundred years?’ And he got 35,000 bloggers responding.