George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Hanson-Young, you could not possibly be more wrong than you are. It would be almost impossible for you to have fallen further into error than you have fallen in your contribution. First of all, your assertion that this amendment would have implication for existing heterosexual couples who have used artificial reproduction technology to conceive is absolutely wrong. It has none whatsoever, and only somebody who is profoundly ignorant of the law could suggest otherwise. Secondly, Senator Hanson-Young, you must have, if I may say so with respect, a very strange notion of family if you think that a child needs the reassurance of the Family Law Act to know who its parents are. Do you think that a child is going to be unsettled in its certainty about who its parents are because section 60H(1A) of the Family Law Act does not use the word ‘parent’? I cannot imagine any circumstance whatsoever in which it would occur to anyone to imagine that a child would be consulting the Family Law Act to be better informed about who its parents are. Children know who their parents are. We all know that.

Thirdly and finally—and it is a point I should have made in response to the minister before—if the use of the word ‘parent’ in section 60H(1) is such a big deal, why isn’t the word used in the existing section 60H(1)? This debate has proceeded merrily along a false premise that the opposition is proposing that we displace from section 60H(1) of the Family Law Act a usage—that is, the word ‘parent’. But we are not. Section 60H(1) does not contain the word now. So what the opposition is proposing is, in terms of the terminology and the adoption of the word ‘parent’ in the terminology, no different. It is different in other respects, but in terms of the use of terminology it is no different at all from the statutory provision which our amendment would repeal and replace.