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

Partly in response to those comments, and also as a wider comment on the debate we are having—and it was probably my amendment that Senator Humphries was reacting to; I think it was being circulated in the chamber just as he was speaking—I can understand people’s desire to have as much time as possible to consider amendments. I was certainly trying to establish, as late as when the second reading vote actually happened, whether amendments would be coming from other senators. It is worth reinforcing the point that it was expected that the second reading debate on this legislation would go at least until dinner time if not right through to the end of tonight. It is also worth saying, speaking as someone who is somewhere in the middle on this legislation—I am not sure that there are many others, but I am someone in the middle—that I am quite happy to have as much time as possible to deal with this.

Frankly I would prefer to have more time to deal with this. If people are still genuinely inquiring about issues to do with this legislation then I would certainly support adjourning debate so we can get it right. However I would add that Senator Humphries said himself that he does not think the legislation can be fixed. He said that it is beyond redemption and that he is going to vote against it. That is fine. Of course he is entitled to that view. But in that context it probably does not matter terribly much how much notice he has of particular amendments because he is going to vote against the whole bill anyway. I am in a different position, and I certainly would appreciate lots of time to consider amendments—because it seems there are not going to be terribly many more other than those that we have already, as far as I am aware.

The concerns that have been raised go to what has been a bit of a wider problem with the parliamentary side of this process. For all the criticism that was laid on the Lockhart committee—only taking six months, only having all of those hearings all around the country, only reading half of the papers that have ever been published in the known universe instead of all of them—if you compare that to the process we have had, of three very rushed public hearings, an extremely short time frame for people to put in submissions, a very short time frame for putting together the committee report, and rushing straight into Senate debate, frankly I do not think we have much ground on which to criticise the Lockhart committee for the adequacy of their process. Ours has clearly been poorer. I would agree with any expression of view, coming from whichever perspective on the legislation itself, that that is less than ideal.

Again as someone who has not taken a fixed, black-and-white view of this legislation, I also found the way the Lockhart review and the legislation was dealt with through the Senate committee process very frustrating. As I have already mentioned, there was only a small number of hearings and a limited amount of time for each witness. I could not get along to some of the hearings, because I was already stuck in hearings for other legislation that this government is railroading through the parliament. If there is a genuine concern from anyone on the government benches about inadequate time to consider legislation, I would love them to support an amendment the next time we move one to allow proper time for consideration of a range of equally important pieces of legislation that are currently being railroaded through the parliament.

Because there are many other important inquiries under way into other legislation and other matters, I could not get to the cloning bill hearings. But, frankly, on the day that I could, I decided it really was not worth my time. There was a short time frame for each witness, often with three, four or five witnesses appearing at once. The time frame was divided precisely between those who were already totally in favour of the legislation and those who were already totally against it, with people in the for and the anti camps pretty much sitting on either side of the chair. That is fine as well, but it really demonstrates that, for those of us who were hoping the committee process might be a genuine process of inquiry into the issues rather than a mechanism to gather the evidence that suited your predetermined view, it fell short of what it could have delivered; I think that would be the best thing to say. It is not the only Senate inquiry in history that has done that, but with this particular legislation and the context surrounding it I think it was unfortunate that that was the case. If there had been much more time for genuine exploration of the issues, I think it would have been better for everybody.

One of the other problems that I see with the issue is that, understandably, a lot of the focus has been on the issue of cloning and whether that is desirable or not—creating embryos through cloning techniques for the purposes of research. But that is only one part of the Lockhart review. The Lockhart review contained I think 54 recommendations covering nine broad areas. There were only seven recommendations that actually went to the area of allowing so-called therapeutic cloning and other currently prohibited techniques. There are other recommendations that go to other matters.

I think it was unfortunate that the committee process was not able to be thorough enough. I am not blaming anybody in particular for that; I am just blaming the processes we force upon ourselves. That meant that some of the more specific issues and some of the technical issues about the legislation and about some of the findings of the review were not able to be properly examined. I think that is unfortunate. Rather than attend all of those three hearings, I read the Hansard of all three hearings. I am not sure whether that is more painful than attending or not—probably not. It is probably better to just read it when you can. I am not saying there was no useful information there—there certainly was, from a number of witnesses on both sides of the debate. But it was not a thorough examination of the detail of the legislation. It was really each side hammering away, trying to get evidence to back their case and to discredit the other side. I do not criticise people for doing that; that is a perfectly legitimate approach to take. But for those of us who were trying to examine the detail and the issues by taking a much broader—perhaps impartial or undecided—approach, it was inadequate, certainly from my perspective. I guess I can only speak personally. I wanted to make those broader comments in relation to the process we are going through now as well as in response to Senator Humphries’s comments.

Quite frankly, if anybody in this chamber does feel they need more time to examine an amendment, to examine the issues, then I certainly would support moving to adjourn the debate. We have a very long list of legislation, as every senator here knows, that can be brought on as a back-up and that has been set aside specifically in case we finish this debate earlier than expected or in case we need to adjourn the debate because of the need to work through some detail. So we do have that option. For anybody who wants to say in the future, ‘I do not have time to understand this; it is all too rushed; it is piecemeal,’ we have got that option and we should take it. We should adjourn the debate and get on with other legislation until we are clear on what we are doing.

The last thing we want to do, particularly if the numbers are as finely balanced as it might appear, is to have a shoddy process at the absolute pointy end of it all. I think we owe more than that to the many thousands of people who have participated in all the debates and processes to date through all of the submissions and through the hearings of the Lockhart inquiry as well as those of our own Senate committee process. Many people have been emailing us. Literally thousands of Australians have engaged with this process, have expressed a view and have shown interest. That is something we want to encourage. Whatever their individual view about the policy merits, we should not let them down at this point by people feeling that it is being railroaded. If they feel that they are, then let us put it off until we are all clear about what we are doing.