CHRIS TREMAIN (Senior Whip—National) Link to this
I seek leave for the Committee stage of the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology (Storage) Amendment Bill to be taken as one debatable question with multiple calls.
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) Link to this
Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is no objection.
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) Link to this
It gives me great pleasure to speak in support of the progress of the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology (Storage) Amendment Bill. Getting through the name of the bill we are currently considering reminds me that the speakers on the previous legislation, had they been confronted with debating a bill called the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology (Storage) Amendment Bill, would not have got away with their 20-second calls, because it takes longer than that just to say the name of the bill.
This is one of those unusual situations where the original legislation, which was the cause of a lot of debate and a lot of serious consideration in this Chamber, was, to my recollection, supported unanimously. This bill just amends that legislation. We have had the same degree of consideration for this bill. It has not been a party political issue, at all, and I was really pleased at the proper consideration that the Health Committee gave it. I pay tribute to the chair of the select committee, Dr Paul Hutchison, and the other members. I think we all took this issue seriously. I found it quite frustrating on some occasions. Some really interesting debates were raised during the submission process that were clearly out of scope, but we all wanted to debate them anyway because they were interesting. We restrained ourselves, and I think we should get gold stars and probably a week’s leave—
A gold star and a chocolate fish for our restraint in not getting into the other issues!
From a serious point of view, it was really important that we did not open the debate up broadly, because this is a contentious issue. We did not want people to have expectations of changes in the overall regime of this legislation, rather than just the specific technical amendment it seeks to achieve.
I have a serious question for the Minister in the chair, Dr Jonathan Coleman, who is an Associate Minister of Health. He has a lot of experience—not necessarily in this specific area, but certainly in the health area—rather than the Minister who is in charge of the bill, the Hon Simon Power. He may not immediately be able to answer this question, but I tell him that it is a serious one. Before I put it, I ask him to flick through the bill as amended by the select committee and reported back to the House. As I said, this is unanimous. This is not a point-scoring exercise; I want to hear the answer to this question from the Minister’s perspective. Did we get it right at the select committee? From the Minister’s perspective, have we now clarified the one single point that this amendment bill sought to clarify?
The reason I am concerned about it is that there was no politicking in it and no argument about it—we all wanted to get it right—but we have nearly rewritten the whole amendment bill. The bill seeks to clarify beyond doubt the situation, making clear the storage period—it has other amendments as well, but this is the most important one—of sperm, eggs, and embryos. That is important in terms of the requirements for fertility clinics to use them or dispose of them. I ask the Minister to reflect on my first question: have we got it right and does this now make it really clear what the storage period is in terms of when it starts and, therefore, when it will finish?
If it does, the second question is how we got it so wrong when the Minister introduced the amendment bill in the first place. What caused such a significant change of opinion between the bill as introduced and the bill that is now being reported back to the House? I have no doubt at all about not only the sincerity but also the competence of the officials. I think they worked really diligently with a committee that was genuinely interested in the goings-on, and with submitters who had no ulterior motive, actually, but to get it right. Some of the submitters had different views about what might have been the outcome, but interestingly enough, of the submissions we received not a single one opposed the intent of the bill to clarify the 10-year period. All of the submissions we received either supported, or did not oppose, the intent of the bill with regard to the clarification of the 10-year storage period.
Doubt was also removed about the roles of the relevant committees in extending the storage limit. That was another quite difficult area for us to work through. We sought to clarify the specific role of advisory committees and what their mandate was, and also the role of the ethics committees.
This area, as members would understand, has a lot of human emotion attached to it. A large number of couples are unable to conceive other than through in vitro fertilisation treatment. It is important that the law is clear so that we never ever put a couple in the situation where their expectations about the significant procedure they are about to undertake are interfered with because of something that is not clear in the law. Having that sort of tension laid on a couple in this situation would be totally unacceptable.
As I said, I would like the Minister to consider that genuine question. I am delighted that the Hon Simon Power is now in the position where he has relieved himself of the public duties that he was attending to, to the point where he will be able to take a call in this debate. For his benefit, because the battery may have been a little flat on his transistor radio as he walked into the Chamber, I will repeat what is a genuine question for the Minister responsible for this legislation. I want a response to this question from his perspective: did the Health Committee get it right? We made substantial omissions, amendments, and insertions to this legislation during a very rigorous process at the select committee. We had highly competent and attentive officials. Members of the select committee paid a lot of attention to the submissions and worked really hard to get it right, and we want it to be right. So I would like the Minister to say whether he is satisfied, having read every amendment that we have made, that the select committee is reporting back the bill in a way that makes him confident that the lack of clarity in the original legislation is now made crystal clear.
The second part of that question is why, if we got it right, the bill that the Minister introduced got it so wrong. On every page of this bill—
Not from the Minister’s point of view. I want to know what happened in the process. It is a technical bill, and it seems odd that significant amendments have been made to every single part of the bill. The parts were amended, withdrawn, or replaced. I ask what happened in that process. Was it because some submitters who came before the select committee read the legislation entirely differently from the way that the Minister and his officials had read it? Did they have completely different views about what was meant? We did hear that; National list MP Michael Woodhouse will testify to that in his contribution, I am sure. Some submitters read the legislation and had quite a different view about it than the view that we had. Human understanding and perception could be a big part of that.
I am keen, in the remaining few minutes of our opportunity to further amend this legislation in the Committee stage, to make sure that if any further amendments are needed, we make them now. I have not seen the Minister presenting any Supplementary Order Papers to the Committee, and I am encouraged by that. I assume that means he is satisfied, in which case he has only one question to answer. That question is what happened, from his perspective, between the introduction of the bill, the submission process, the consideration, and the outcome, which is so different from the legislation we had in the past.
The final point I make is one that is disappointing. In a bill like this—particularly where there is no political debate; there is no party political difference on this legislation—it would be very helpful if—
Hon SIMON POWERWell, that is up to the member. I thank the member for her contribution. I heard only the last part of it, but given the number of times that she went over the same point, I assume that the minutes leading up to that point had been spent covering the same points, as well.
I assure her that I am satisfied with the amendments to the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology (Storage) Amendment Bill that came from the Health Committee. The reason that those changes were made is that that is exactly the way the parliamentary process is designed to work. As I said in the second reading debate—I think the member was here for that debate, as well—
—that is right—the clarification of the grace period and various other matters that were seen by the committee to require sharper clarification than perhaps in the first draft was carried out in a diligent and pragmatic way, and for that I am grateful to the committee for its work. I believe that the parliamentary process has worked in the way it should, in that we now have a bill that satisfies those concerns. There are no further amendments from the Government, nor am I aware of any further amendments from any other political parties.
To that end, I suggest that we get on with passing this legislation to return some certainty to the lives of those couples who are waiting for this legislation to bed in and do what it is supposed to do.
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) Link to this
I am very happy to take a call on the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology (Storage) Amendment Bill. I am a little disappointed to have to withdraw the chocolate fish offer; at this stage it is being held in suspension. I am sure that the member Ms Dyson, who said she would take another call, is open to redemption, and I will tell her why the chocolate fish was withdrawn. But if it is replaced, I think the gold star would be more appropriately attached to a chocolate egg, given the subject of the bill that we are considering in Committee. The reason the chocolate fish offer has been withdrawn is that in the member’s efforts to criticise the Minister for what she said was on the face of it a complete rewrite of the bill after it came to the Health Committee, she cast a criticism on the officials who were supporting the select committee through the consideration of the bill. I think that is grossly unfair.
I will start by commending the officials, who I think did an outstanding job of articulating and answering the questions of the select committee and the submitters about what the bill meant, and about what was intended from a policy perspective. Yes, on the face of it, it looks as though it is a pretty substantial rewrite, but it is a technical deletion of one clause, and a replacement of another clause, which in substance does not have a lot of changes to it. I commend the officials. I think they did a really good job.
There was bipartisan support across the committee for the bill. In short answer, I can add to the Minister’s answer to the question of whether we have got the bill right in terms of the policy intent by saying yes, we have. I am not a Minister, so we can call that my pitch for ministerial office, but I am quite confident that we have got that right also.
However, some quite tricky questions were asked of the submitters, particularly the Ethics Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology and the Advisory Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology, that I think were outside the scope of the bill. That was largely where the debate was centred. We have solved the initial policy problem, which was to give clarity to when the clock starts and when it should stop. I will touch on probably the more material change that the select committee recommended, and that was in respect of whether the 10-year time frame should be a hard stop, and therefore someone would be in breach of the Act on day one, after 10 years had expired. We had a discussion that was more about the science behind that than about the time period, and we certainly had the advantage of not only the officials’ counsel, but the chairman’s counsel. The chairman has a great deal of experience in this area from his professional background.
I was particularly interested in some of the recent legal changes in the United Kingdom. Changes to the equivalent legislation there have seen an extension to the regulations to allow, in certain circumstances, for the storage of embryos, gametes, and eggs for up to 55 years. That caused quite some consternation in the House of Lords. Lord Howe criticised the revised regulations that allowed embryos, gametes, and eggs to be stored for up to 55 years—not because of any particular problem with the science, but because of the very dodgy ethical dilemmas that this produced. Incidentally, the United Kingdom regulations were called the Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Statutory Storage Period for Embryos and Gametes) Regulations, a name that is twice as long as that of our legislation. The United Kingdom also had the benefit of somebody with a great deal of experience in that area. Lord Robert Winston, who is a lifetime peer and also one of the world’s leading fertility scientists, stressed that longer freezing times are not likely to produce a health risk.
We can also enable extensions by allowing for the 10-year limit not to be a hard close. There are plenty of reasons why it might not be appropriate to dispose of embryos and gametes after that period, so I think that was a very sensible change. I commend that change. I look forward to hearing from the member Ruth Dyson, to see whether she can earn her chocolate egg with the gold star. I commend the bill to the Committee.
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) Link to this
First of all, I acknowledge the very clear response of the Minister of Justice; it was given in a less pleasant way than I would have expected, but it is Thursday night and I guess it has been a busy week for the Minister. It is unusual for him to revert to that kind of response, but it was a genuine stating of his position, which is that he is confident that the Health Committee in its amendments to the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology (Storage) Amendment Bill has got it right. That is important to the Health Committee.
I was interested to know which part of the process he considered we had not got right the first time. I am asking a process question, but it does not matter; we can ask a student to write a thesis on it at some stage in the future. It is not often that a technical bill that, at the time it is introduced, everyone thinks will fix an issue comes back to Parliament quite substantially altered. That may have been a direct result of the submissions. That, in itself, would be worthy of some comment, in my view, because many people ask what difference it would make if they put in a submission on a bill. This bill would be a great example: everyone was trying to fix it, and the submitters themselves made a difference.
I am more keen on chocolate fish than on chocolate eggs, I say to the member David Bennett, but if he wants to alter the offer to something more appropriate to the subject of this debate, that is fine. However, if the member was implying at any stage that I was criticising the officials, then he was not listening to my speech. I made it very clear that the officials not only were competent but were engaged in open and exemplary behaviour. I was seriously impressed with the competence they showed in dealing with a group of members of Parliament who had not dealt with this issue in any detailed way before. We had not been on the select committee in the past that dealt with the original legislation. The officials were starting at kindergarten level with us, and I think they did an extraordinarily good job. I was merely interested in the process question.
The final point I wanted to make, before the Minister leapt to his feet to take the call, is that with a bill of this nature, particularly when technological advances are moving at such a rapid pace—we do not know what will happen overseas, let alone in New Zealand, in this space—in my view and in Labour’s view it would be very helpful to have an automatic review mechanism included in it. We were quite surprised that the original legislation did not have that mechanism. It has become more common. I regret it was not supported by National, but it was certainly supported by Labour and the Greens at the select committee. I strongly recommend that in future, in the next amendment bill—because it is outside the scope of this bill—a review mechanism is included in the Act. I think it would be advantageous. It would ensure that we did not get ourselves into difficulty in the future. I commend that to the Minister’s thinking.