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

I rise tonight to register my dissent to the Pregnancy Counselling (Truth in Advertising) Bill 2006 from Senators Stott Despoja, Troeth, Nettle and Carol Brown. Senator Webber said something that was quite apt tonight. She said that the best person to make a decision about how someone lives is the person that that decision affects. The person that abortion affects is the life that it terminates, the life that it kills—and that is the life of the unborn child. That is the person to whom we must refer when we refer to the person on whom the decision has the greatest effect. We also heard that we must separate our personal views from the issues at hand. I agree totally. The issue at hand is the termination of a human life, the destruction of a human life. That is the issue at hand. That must be dealt with.

I think we must first grasp the nettle on what we are talking about. We are talking about our ability to refer a person to a position where a human life will be terminated—that is, killed. We say that, because we believe that the person who is going to be killed has no right. What do we base this premise on? Do we base this premise on the fact that the person is not cognisant of their right? When we are asleep, we are not cognisant of our right. If a bill were brought into this House to refer people who are unconscious or asleep into a position where their life would be at threat, I would vote against that bill. A person is not cognisant of their right if they are intoxicated. If a bill were to be brought into this House to refer people who were intoxicated into a position where they may be killed, I would vote against that bill. A person is not cognisant of their right when they are young. Similarly, if a bill were to be brought into this House to refer people too young and too immature to be cognisant of their right into a position where they would be killed, I would vote against that bill.

No-one has the right to terminate my life now. They did not have the right a week ago. They did not have the right the day after I was born. The argument that we must always address is: why is it that the day before they were born they apparently have no rights? The argument becomes one of the crossover of possession to one of nurturing. Because we are in a position of nurture, because we are in a position of responsibility, we do not have the rights of possession. If someone is in our arms or inside our body, it is not a possession of ours; it is a responsibility. If a person is inside a bassinette, they are not the possession of the bassinette. Nor if a child hides in a cupboard are they the possession of the cupboard. This is the crux of the issue which people dance around but are scared to address.

I suppose in addressing this argument we must go to the extremities, because the extremities are where we are always taken. One of the extremities that is always brought in is the unfortunate and tragic circumstance of rape. In the issue of rape, all consciousness must be placed on the actions of a crime: who committed the crime? It certainly was not the victim, which is the woman or the mother. But is it the child? Why should the child be punished for the actions of someone else? When we believe in that we believe in inherited guilt. We believe in the transfer of wrongs through generations, and that leads us to a whole philosophical conjecture that people can inherit the injustices that have been brought about by their predecessors. This is something that I find philosophically intolerable.

There are a whole range of other things within this bill—technicalities—that I think need to be brought out into the open. GPs are not required to advertise whether they will or will not refer women for abortion, yet they receive government funding. A psychologist who receives government funding does not advertise whether he will or will not refer people to a whole range of treatments. He does not have to list whether he believes or does not believe in hypnotherapy, cognitive therapy or whatever other form of treatment. It is an absolute right for a person or a body that has a fundamental belief that they are referring a person—and that is how they see it—to a place of imminent danger to not do so. In summary, not all members of the medical profession who receive government funding agree or accept all forms of treatment.

This argument is one that I know will go on for as long as we are in the Senate. I believe, as I have said before, that it is the slavery debate of our time. I put great emphasis on the fact that we must separate the action from the person. I do not for one moment presuppose the guilt of the person as a continuum. Nor do I believe that a person who ever owned a slave was an abhorrent person. The act of slavery was abhorrent. I do not believe that the person who has an abortion is intrinsically a bad person. I argue against the action of abortion. I will continue to argue this because it puts into stark relief our concerns about other things—the environment, animals and all the other rights that get carted into here and fought for with such fervour and with such forthright compassion. Yet at the same moment we stand away from the most vulnerable—from those persons who cannot defend themselves. We believe over time that by proxy we can somehow relieve ourselves from the inherent wrong which is the destruction, the killing, of a human life that is not an imminent or comparable threat to us. That is the inherent injustice of abortion: the killing of a human being who is not an imminent or comparable threat to us. But we can get absolutely fervent about the destruction of a whale or the destruction of a tree. Are we not in this process deciding that by proxy we will find other avenues to try to set down our beliefs, our fervour, our wish to protect all but the most intrinsic of what we are—the humanity of what we are?

This is an issue which has to be talked about. We must talk about when the right of the individual descends on the person. If we cannot get to that position of when the right of the individual descends then we must accept that it was there from the start—ab ovo. We must ask the question: if I have an intrinsic right to live without harm now, when did that right come about? When was the point in all our lives when a person did not have the right to kill you, and why? Lay down the position, the discussion, the philosophy of  at what point the right for you to go unharmed in life was attached to you. That is the debate that must be had here and it must be had here because at this point we are ignoring the facts. We are ignoring the intrinsic issue of what this is about, and by so doing we only fool ourselves. We will be judged by history for doing that. I believe there will come a time in this debate when the argument will be so obvious that the conjecture will only lie as to how we could not have realised it right now. This is the debate that separates us from the animals.