Collins Judith: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — First Reading 
Collins Judith: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — First Reading 
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JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 One of the points I want to talk about tonight on the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill is the Supplementary Order Paper that my colleague Dr Paul Hutchison has very kindly put together for the benefit of the House and for the benefit of people who are born as a result of the technology that this bill seeks to regulate. 
One of the issues that Paul Hutchison has correctly noted is that the bill does not have a retrospective action in relation to children who were born before this bill. He wants to set up a voluntary register for the donors of sperm for instance so that their biological children can find out their whakapapa. 
Before I came to this House one of the things that I was involved with at one stage was in relation to adoption and particularly those adoptions that did not go so well. What this brought home to me was the absolute need that most people have to know where they come from. They want to know enough about their biological start in life so that they can look at something in themselves or at some part of their personalities or features and say: “Well I know where that came from.” Certainly for those of us who were brought up by our biological parents it is a great privilege that we do pretty much know our whakapapa and that is very important to us. 
A continuing theme that I constantly go on about is fatherless children and the fact that children need to know where they come from and they also need to know this as adults. They need to know it whether they are 40 or whether they are 50 because all of us are our parents’ children and in that sense we all need to know where we come from. 
I commend the Supplementary Order Paper to the House. I am hopeful that there will be sufficient support from the Government and other parties to be able to allow this very very good amendment to be part of the bill and to form part of the legislation. 
Certainly I have been contacted by people who have been born as a result of the donor sperm procedures that have happened over the years in a very unregulated environment who say they desperately wanted to have something so that should the donors or biological fathers wish to be made known to them they could contact their biological fathers. When the first donor sperm systems were set up it was all very very secretive and the approach was: “We don’t need to know anything about you because you are not the father.” Those donors were not the father in terms of bringing up the children but they were certainly the biological fathers. 
Certainly with the technology that we have today we understand just how genetics play such an important part in people’s health issues and it is extremely important that wherever possible people have the ability to know their genetic make-up. For those people it is very very important not only in terms of whom their own spouse should be but also in terms of what diseases they may have or assistance they need for their own health care in taking steps to minimise any genetic issues they might have or could have inherited. 
But apart from the health side people do need to know. It is for their own well-being. It is for their mental health issues as well as their physical health issues that I commend Dr Paul Hutchison’s Supplementary Order Paper to the House. I hope that the Supplementary Order Paper can get the support of all of the House because it is a generous and kind move that is brought about by the very real needs experienced by people born under the programme. It takes into account not only the needs of those people but also the needs of the donors. If the donors wish to remain private they can but it allows a system of knowing where their sperm ended up which is something that as they grow older—as we all do—they probably would like to know. It is something I would like the House to support and I hope the Minister can see her way free to doing so. 
The Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill was greatly enhanced by the fact that Dr Paul Hutchison was able to be on the select committee at various stages and was able to assist given his background in this area. It was also one of those bills where there was broad cross-party support for its mechanisms although with a couple of exclusions. 
There was general acceptance of the need for these procedures to have some form of regulation. Over the years they have grown up willy-nilly one could say without any great regulation and often as a result of patients’ needs. Certainly with the advent of cloning and such procedures we need to have some mechanism to deal with those issues. I think that most people would find the concept of cloning humans to be somewhat bizarre. We are told of instances of this happening in the world today and it has certainly happened with sheep. 
I have looked at the minority reports and I see that not all parties agree. The ACT party thinks that some of these provisions do not need to be regulated for but I think that overall we do occasionally have to not only embrace new technology but also be aware that it does set up whole new systems within our society and we need to address some of the issues those new technologies set up. 
I commend the bill to the House. I was able to be on the Health Committee for a little part of its deliberations and I was very impressed by the degree of technical expertise brought to bear and the assistance given to the committee. As a result of the very good work of the committee and its chairperson we were able to work on the bill in a very positive manner for the benefit of the people of New Zealand and those yet to come particularly under these provisions. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.