Kedgley Sue: Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
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SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I have to say that I agree with every utterance of the previous speaker Bill English and I wish that he had been sitting on the Health Committee. Regrettably it was his colleagues sitting on our committee along with others who were so implacably opposed to any mechanism being introduced to make that unelected and unaccountable advisory committee have some accountability to Parliament. I would like to assure the Hon Bill English that the Green Party did try very hard to introduce some mechanism that would enable Parliament to have some scrutiny over the decisions—the so-called guidelines but in fact the policy decisions—of the advisory committee. We failed because of the opposition of his party and others but we will be bringing these amendments here and he will have an opportunity to vote for them. 
We will be putting up two amendments. The first amendment gives the guidelines the force of regulation so that at least they will be regulations and will have to go to the Regulations Review Committee whereas at the moment they are just “wiffly waffly” guidelines. I do not know where guidelines go—perhaps to the Minister? They certainly do not have parliamentary scrutiny. Secondly we have an amendment that would propose our doing what the Canadian system does which is to state that the guidelines—or the regulations as we hope they will become—will have the mechanism to be able to go before Parliament and to be debated and sent to the Health Committee. If the Minister chooses to ignore the recommendations of that committee the Minister would have to give very good reason for that. 
So I think that Mr English has made some extremely good points because the fact is that Parliament basically has no role in this extraordinarily important and controversial area once we have set up this bill. All this bill does is set up a very broad umbrella. It sets up some very fine purposes and principles but then does not even give them the force of regulation. It then essentially hands the entire thing lock stock and barrel to this unelected and unaccountable committee. It does not provide for any mechanism for Parliament to debate those bottom lines as Mr English put it and to look at those or to have scrutiny over some of the ground-breaking decisions that advisory committees will no doubt be making. As Mr English has pointed out it is extremely worrying that those committees are effectively a law unto themselves. So what we are doing in this bill is giving the ability to decide on the future of the human race with respect to New Zealand to that unelected unaccountable committee that will essentially be a law unto itself. 
The member from ACT was scornful about why we should be interfering in these things. Frankly most of society agrees that in this bill we are debating a very profound aspect of what it is to be human. I presume the member from ACT would be happy to have cloning and happy to have genetic engineering of humans which is what he seemed to be implying. Well I can assure the Committee— 
Stephen Franks 
: Absolutely! 
SUE KEDGLEY 
: The trouble is as the member from ACT may be aware there has been a tremendous failure in efforts to clone and genetically engineer animals. There have been hundreds and hundreds of attempts and hundreds of animals are born with severe abnormalities before scientists clone successfully. Is that the sort of thing he would advocate? I think that maybe he needs to do a bit more reading about genetic engineering and cloning in order to understand the huge risks there are in this area. 
I want to point out to Mr English and others who fortunately share my concerns about the total lack of accountability in this bill that there are some amendments on the Table they can support. Hopefully Mr English might be able to persuade his colleague Dr Hutchinson and others that in fact the incredibly lax system that we have introduced does as Simon Power said leave it up to the market—the market will decide. That is basically what this bill is doing and I hope that that member over the dinner break might prevail upon some of his colleagues to support the proposal by the Green Party to introduce accountability and regulations into the bill.