Kay Patterson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I had hoped to say in my second reading speech, although I did not have time, that Senator Nettle, Senator Stott Despoja and Senator Webber very clearly flagged the intent of the amendments in the additional comments they made in the committee report. If people had addressed that, they would have seen that there were amendments that were going to come. I do not think the amendments are very different from what they flagged. As Senator Stott Despoja said, we often deal with amendments from people presenting bills and people opposing bills, or from people wanting to modify bills that they are supporting, with amendments that come in late—although these were not late, because they were foreshadowed. I think that is the important factor in this.

With regard to the stem cell bank, I very much support Senator Nettle’s concept of a stem cell bank. The Prime Minister indicated on 23 June 2006:

The Government also supports further exploring the establishment of a national register of donated excess embryos created originally for ART—

assisted reproductive technology—

purposes and a national stem cell bank.

So it is on the radar of the Prime Minister. One of the problems I have about supporting the amendment as it stands is that currently adult stem cells are not required to be in a stem cell bank. We do have two different sorts of processes in the creation of embryonic and adult stem cells. Some are undertaken in the public sector and some of those stem cell lines are publicly available on a register for that purpose. Others, including adult stem cells, are produced in commercial enterprises. You have two situations: one is where a company is producing adult stem cells and there is no requirement for them to go into a stem cell bank because it is not covered in this legislation, and the other where a company is producing embryonic stem cells and there is a requirement which would disadvantage that and would mean that people would be less likely to do embryonic stem cell research. As I have argued before, we need all the aspects of stem cell research together.

Looking at what the Prime Minister has said, and if this bill were to go through, I think there would be a good case to argue that if we have a stem cell bank we need to look at how we incorporate adult stem cells into that process. I cannot see that if a stem cell, adult or embryo, is produced in an institution which is publicly funded they should be treated differently in terms of what happens to them.

The other thing is that, if you were able to derive a stem cell line from SCNT, that is somebody’s actual DNA. Under the amendment as it is, you are requiring that stem cell line to go into a bank. The person who has donated that, who may have donated it for one purpose only—to develop a stem cell line that has a particular disease profile—may not want to give consent for it to be used in any other way. I do not know—that is just my thought. What we need to do is to have a much more thorough look at a stem cell bank, which I support, but I do not know that this is the way to do it. For those reasons I will not be supporting the amendment. But I would be advocating very strongly, if the bill goes through, that we follow up the statement of the Prime Minister:

The Government also supports further exploring the establishment of a national register ... and a national stem cell bank.