Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you very much Madam Chair. I'll just briefly make a couple of comments in response to two earlier speeches. The question is not whether we like abortion. The question is not when life begins. The question is not are we particularly disturbed by the idea of abortion to select sex or to even discriminate against people with disability. Those aren't the questions. The question in this House is what the law should be. It's incumbent on those who want the law to be State intervention in abortion to show that the intervention will achieve the outcomes they seek—that it will reduce abortion and that it will reduce discriminatory abortion—and in fact there is no evidence anywhere in the world that it does. There is great evidence that it stigmatises criminalises and inconveniences women in discriminatory ways. That's what the evidence is. So let's stop getting up peacocking parading and saying how righteous we are and how terrible it is—we know that. Everyone knows that. The question is what the law should be and how effective the law is. I just say in support of Jan Logie that she claimed that a quarter of women have had an abortion and she was pilloried for that. Well actually for someone that has an engineering degree and knows a bit about maths it's not difficult to work out. There's 13000 abortions a year. There's 30000 females born in each cohort. So if you do the maths that's actually 40 percent but some people have more than one which takes you to 25 percent. So there you go—you do the maths. That's actually not what I'm here to talk about. I took a call to talk about Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 464. I briefly outlined the amendment and the case for it earlier and I'd like to make that case again and respond to some of the criticisms that have been levelled at it. The cause of free speech makes you some unexpected bedfellows. In the course of standing up for this cause I have dealt with and stood up for some of the most odious ogres that cannot claim a part of humanity. I have stuck up for the rights of people with odious views about race even. At one point I was defending Nicky Hager and you may have seen on the news: David Seymour to host radical feminist conference at Parliament". I gave sanctuary to people who were having their right to freedom of speech challenged in that instance unexpected as the headline was. So the question when it comes to safe areas and the interaction between freedom of speech and having the safe areas is not whether we think the people that do it are odious—I think they are personally. It's not whether they cause harm. I have no doubt that they will harm and distress women attempting to access abortion. The question again is what the laws should be. That's why this committee exists. That's why this Parliament exists. I want to make the case to the committee that a law that attempts to criminalise or even just make it an infringement to protest and talk to people outside clinics and tell them that abortion is bad—a law that does that first of all is redundant. For the worst of the harm that people have talked about people need only look at section 4 of the Summary Offences Act—something that in my view already goes far too far—which says that to offend intimidate insult or threaten somebody or to make someone feel uncomfortable almost is already a crime under the Summary Offences Act. It's an offence so we have laws to stop that. The Law Commission found that those laws are currently effective and that they do restrain people from causing the kinds of harm that we're worried about. I think we've spent too much time importing a foreign narrative but too many members of this Parliament or at least the ones that have told me that they won't vote for this amendment have said that they are worried because of the abuse they personally have received being members of Parliament in this debate and they don't want that visited on other people. Well that's very compassionate. But what I'd finally say to people is that if we pass this law as it stands without the amendments on SOP 464 and we continue on our path of banning people from expressing themselves in an arbitrary area the protests will be right on the 150-metre barrier the resentment will be all the greater and actually this Parliament will be creating exactly the division that those members are opposed to. I'm hoping Madam Chair you'll give me another minute because I just want to finish this—[Bell rung]"