Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The raft of amendments that we are debating involve quite substantial issues with regard to the stem cell bank. If they are successful then we are starting to change the fundamental facts of the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Bill 2006. In many instances people have torn themselves apart over whether they will support it. I do not think that letting people make a decision on one issue and then start changing some of the fundamental legs that it stands on results in a fair outcome. When you do that, you move the debate from one of fact to one of ethos. I do not support a debate on ethos because it creates a human life that apparently is stateless and has no value, and that of course is a very dangerous premise for any civilised nation to act on. Seeing that this is an issue of such moral weight and to now be using the period to put amendments before the chamber—which, on a true consideration, need to be looked at over a longer period—if one of these amendments was to be allowed then everybody should be allowed the chance to go back and reassess the whole bill, and they might come up with a different suggestion.

What we are about to decide here today is probably the most important decision that this parliament will make: that we in Australia have now delivered a status of human being that is without right, and that the only thing that precludes it from developing further are the words ‘14 days’. That will be the next thing that people will try to change in here, because they do not want 14 days. They want further development so that in the end what we will be having is the development of a baby, a foetus—whatever you like to call it—to three months because that will produce a completely compatible liver, pancreas or heart and that is where this debate is heading. The only thing that is now stopping it are the words ‘14 days’. It took only four years to go from a unanimous vote against this legislation to now supporting it. I would put my house on it: before my Senate term expires, there will be a very good reason why we have to go beyond 14 days. Then we will have this crazy argument, where we will sit down—and it will be calibrated—and they will say, ‘We just need to go to 28 days.’ We will have to have an ethical debate about the difference between 14 days and 28 days. And, on this premise, that will be a very hard debate not to agree to. Then of course it will go from 28 days, because 28 days is a month, and, ‘There will be greater advances we could get if we went to two months or possibly three months.’ We have defined that this person has no rights. This person who lives in Australia—and they are alive—has no rights. It is not a case of no rights at work; they have no rights at all in any way, shape or form.

Where do you draw the line? The only way you can possibly draw the line is in so defining that those inalienable rights, which we all have, have somehow descended on that person. So they have gone from a product—because we are now creating people who are products; human life that is a product—to apparently a life that is endowed with all those rights that manifest in what we try to protect here every day. This is what we are now delivering to the Australian people: the words ‘14 days’. Those two digits are the only protection mechanism we have from it becoming 28 days, two months or three months.

You always wonder how people can get their minds around to delivering something. We look back in history and think, ‘That was manifestly wrong, that was evil’—all those terms we roll out. But it did not just happen overnight. It did not just develop immediately into something that is judged by history to be grossly evil. It got there by calibration and by evolvement. It got there by crossing out a principle—a principle gets rubbed out—and that is the principle that a person has rights.

If you believe in the strength of this place—that it will be endowed almost into the structure of this place that you will keep them to 14 days—then you must prove it to us by showing one piece of legislation or of circumstances where that will not change, where the embryo does not become amorphous, nebulous and move and change. That is the issue. You have to take yourself down the progression. Of course, this ‘thing’ that is 14 days old has no rights. The great value that can be obtained from that same product—because we are now calling human beings ‘products’—if you allowed it to develop to three months would be far greater. It would stand to be a logical argument that what is delivered by a baby that is three months old is far in excess of something that is 14 days old.

And there will be great cures. There will be new retinas, new hearts, new livers, new pancreases—anything you want. We will have a factory of human parts. Even if it is not happening in this nation, we start putting our imprmatur onto it in other places. We give by default, by proxy, our blessing to that process happening elsewhere because we have made the statement that human life is now property, and even the words ‘stem cell bank’ start to define it as a property, like a chattel, something you can put away to be drawn on at a later stage, to be traded or bartered.

That is where this debate has descended to. You can walk away from here tonight, but just look at the terminology that we are talking about right now, within hours of a vote. Within hours of the vote, already the terminology of this callous assessment of human life is coming into place. We will be responsible for where this ends up. You cannot sit back idly in your retirement and say, ‘I never envisaged that that would happen,’ when it develops into what people say it is going to—when we have the development of spare parts from someone who is three months old. You cannot disassociate yourself from that result. You cannot, because you are absolutely ultimately responsible for it. So in voting for this legislation you must acknowledge that you are bringing that about.