Roy Heather: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — First Reading 
Roy Heather: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:619;Page:15065] 
HEATHER ROY (ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of ACT New Zealand to speak to the second reading of the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill. The proposer of this bill Dianne Yates must be very pleased to see this day here at last after the very long and sometimes tortuous route this bill has taken to get back to the House. It does in fact cover many moral and ethical issues and the submissions reflected this. For this very reason ACT is considering this as a conscience issue and we will be voting accordingly. 
The submissions were very passionate interesting and informative. We saw at select committee the full spectrum of issues arising from that whereby some submitters felt that absolutely no legislation was necessary particularly in relation to the reproductive technology component of the bill right through to the very strict control in legislation that some people wanted to see imposed. Some wanted heavy regulation and the bill to be extremely prescriptive. 
The bill does cover both reproductive technology and research and that in itself presents some problems. Many of the issues are in common with both parts of the bill but there are some that I think are very specific to the individual areas. For this reason I think there would have been some merit in perhaps dividing the bill into two separate pieces of legislation—one to cover the reproductive technology and the other to cover the research. However that is not how the legislation has come before the House so we have what we see in front of us. Most of the publicity concerning the bill has been around the area of infertility. Again coming back to the reasoning I have just proposed perhaps it would have been wise to separate the reproductive technology from the research component. 
One particular part of the bill that ACT took issue with was the outrageous suggestion that parents of children born with the assistance of reproductive technology will be legally obliged to tell their children how they were conceived. This was well documented in newspapers around the country when the bill was reported back to the House. I will quote from one newspaper clipping where a man whose wife had had two children conceived thanks to a sperm donor said that this new clause in the bill would unfairly discriminate against infertile people. He said: “There’s so many naturally conceived children who don’t know about their dad because their mum can’t or won’t tell them but the Government isn’t saying it wants to look at that”. This is something that ACT is very concerned about and we will be putting forward an amendment to rectify it. 
It is also very instructive to look at what the experts in the field have to say. Richard Fisher the director of New Zealand’s biggest fertility clinic Fertility Associates said that the bill “generally struck a good balance”. I would agree with him there. But he went on to say that he was also concerned at the unfair targeting of infertile couples. He said: “Aside from being totally unenforceable I get agitated at a law that says one thing for infertile couples and another for fertile couples.” Again I agree with him there. 
 Good law should be enforceable and routinely enforced and I think that this component of the bill is totally unenforceable. I will explain why. Firstly it is true that for many children in this country the father they have grown up with to know as their biological father is not their biological father at all. It has been unethical to research that fact so we do not know how many children grow up in those circumstances. The reading I have done suggests that the lowest figure is perhaps around 4 percent of children who grow up in that situation but it may be that there are as many as 10 percent. In practical terms that is not of any importance; what is important is that children have parents who love and care for them. 
But this legislation is saying that those people who have children with the assistance of reproductive technology are legally obliged to tell them so when the onus to do that is not on parents who have children naturally but who know that the biological father is not their children’s known father. This law is not enforceable at all so what will the punishment be and how will it be enforced? Do we anticipate people turning up at somebody’s home expecting a DNA test to be done? Will somebody go around and police whether a child has been told at the age of 18 that he or she was conceived by artificial means? That of course would be totally impossible to do and for that reason we take exception. 
Another issue arises too and it is a social welfare issue. Around 33000 children in this country do not have a father named on their birth certificate but before us we have legislation saying that sperm donors must be named. The anomaly that exists in this case must be recognised. 
I want to move just briefly to the research component of the bill. Many speakers before me have gone into this in a good deal of detail and I do not have a great deal more to offer. But as somebody who has been involved in research in a previous life I have come to know ethics committees well. In fact there are about 13 or 14—I cannot remember the exact number—such committees in the country and if one wants to conduct a nationwide trial at the moment one must apply to each ethics committee individually for permission to do the research. That really puts terrible time constraints on the research and it is a terribly time-consuming and cumbersome process. That is what we have in place at the moment. But in relation to this reproductive technology and research we will now have one ethics committee—which is a vast improvement on what exists currently. It is hoped that the process will be very timely and certainly a great deal less cumbersome—and less costly I should say—to all those wanting to make new advances in reproductive technology and undertake new research. 
We will also see a ministerial advisory committee put in place in order obviously to advise the Minister. This committee will have a balance of experts and laypeople. Personally I would like to have seen the balance tilted slightly towards having more experts but what we will have is a vast improvement on what we have now. I agree with Dr Paul Hutchison from the National Party who said he felt that both the ethics committee and the ministerial advisory committee are probably too big and therefore will be slightly cumbersome. I agree with him; I think that smaller committees usually achieve a lot more in a more timely fashion and in a more efficient manner. I too would like to see those committees not quite as big as they will be but again they will be a vast improvement on what we have at the present time. 
The thing I am most pleased with is that guidelines will be determined by the ministerial advisory committee for the ethics committee to work with. There was a good deal of talk during the select committee process about regulation and I have to say that I personally as well as several others in the medical field who are on the Health Committee were adamant that we should have guidelines as opposed to regulations. 
Flexibility is the key to the success of this legislation. We have a very fast-changing area and there are so many advances in science and technology that it is difficult to keep up with them. What we do not want is prescriptive legislation made for today that does not take account of the future. The flexibility that can be maintained under guidelines is very very important for both components of the bill. 
As someone who has worked in the area of research as I said previously I am very pleased with most of the provisions of this bill. I felt that the select committee worked very constructively and very hard to get to this point and I am satisfied that we have reached a flexible framework with which we can move forward into the future. Because of the moral and ethical issues arising from this legislation ACT members will vote on the bill according to their own consciences.