Ruth Webber (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

He was there for some of them, indeed, Senator Barnett. But some of us on this side are getting a little tired of Senator Fielding coming in and quoting committee reports as if he was an integral part of all inquiries when in fact we rarely see him at them. A year or so on it does get a little bit hard to bear.

I recall the Festival of Light in Adelaide getting very defensive about the services they offer, because they do provide some of the advice I was alluding to earlier. One of the things I do agree with Senator Fielding on is some of the evidence given by the Caroline Chisholm Centre. I would urge all service providers, including those from Pregnancy Help Line, to look at their recommendation that all counsellors should be trained professionals registered with their relevant professional body. That may be a way out of this. It may be a way of ensuring that we deliver a truly professional standard of counselling.

That was in evidence given by the Caroline Chisholm Centre, and it is something that I agree with. To do that, of course, those services would have to be government funded or they would have to charge for their services, because there are not many professionals of that calibre who are prepared to operate a 24 hours a day, seven days a week phone line free of charge. Having said that, when the Caroline Chisholm Centre raised that as an issue, the Festival of Light—in Adelaide in particular—did not like that idea. They did not like the idea that they may actually be compelled to use professional counsellors who are registered with their relevant professional body—counsellors who have recognised tertiary qualifications in how to provide non-judgmental, non-directive counselling, as would be implied by an ad that says:

Are you pregnant? Alone? Need someone to talk to?

People like the Festival of Light do not like that idea at all. Why would you not want to use professional counsellors? Why would you not want to use professionals? Why would you not agree, if you refuse to discuss one of the three options and refer to one of the three options, to advertise accordingly? People like me are left to draw one particular conclusion—because you do want to mislead and because you do want to manipulate vulnerable women, particularly young women, into phoning your service to then try to guide or coerce them into a decision that you as someone who has never met them before in your life judge to be in their best interest. It is not my job to judge what is in their best interest and it is certainly not the job of some of these people volunteering on some of those counselling lines. It is our job in this place to ensure that people do not mislead or deceive and that we do have an open and transparent process.

The only protection these services have at the moment is that no-one pays, and because no-one pays they can get away with an awful lot of bad behaviour. If it were a commercial transaction they would find themselves in court very quickly. Imagine if these people were offering to sell you something and then they said, ‘We only want to sell you two-thirds of it but not the other third.’ It is deceptive, it is misleading, and it is exploiting some vulnerable women at a very vulnerable stage in their lives. It is our role as legislators to separate our personal views on termination from the issue at hand, as it was our role when we discussed the RU486 bill to separate our views on termination and unplanned pregnancies from the way drugs are treated in an administrative process of access and who is best able to determine safety. It is inconceivable to me that anyone could object to such a simple notion as transparent advertising for counselling services.

Debate interrupted.