Mr PALLAS (Tarneit) — I too rise to speak in support of the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Further Amendment Bill 2013. From the outset it is important to indicate that the Labor Party supports as a fundamental principle a child’s right to access information about where they came from. Not only have recent events and scientific advances made that increasingly and compellingly important, but I think our sense of self and ultimately the need for the law to catch up with our changing values and priorities in the community are critical.

The Law Reform Committee examined this issue over two parliaments. An interim report was tabled in 2010 and the final report was tabled in Parliament in March 2012. The key recommendations that were dealt with go to donor-conceived people accessing and identifying information about their donors.

We believe the current three-tiered system of access to information under the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act 2008 is unfair.

The right to access donor information should be consistent and is important, and it should not be based on when somebody was conceived. Historically there are a series of competing views about the rights and entitlements of donors. However, we are talking about the wellbeing of individuals who had absolutely no say in the commitments given to donors but who now confront critically important issues in their lives. Government has to be not only cognisant of the wellbeing of these individuals but should also make the paramount interest of the child an unimpeachable principle. This should ring loud and clear.

We believe the recommendations of the Law Reform Committee report entitled Inquiry into Access by Donor-Conceived People to Information about Donors — unanimously endorsed by its members when it was released in March 2012 — should be implemented.

The idea that you can have tiers of entitlement and rights under Victorian law has major flaws not only in terms of equity and propriety but also by not putting first and foremost the interests and wellbeing of those who had no choice in the timing of their birth. Their interests should be paramount.

The interests of a person conceived from gametes before 1 July 1988 should be paramount. Currently they have no information about their donor as there was no legislation in operation at the time and donors were promised anonymity by medical staff. Up until now the legislation has not changed this. Under the second tier a person conceived from gametes donated between 1 July 1988 and 31 December 1997 can access identifying information about his or her donor if the donor consents. If the donor refuses to give consent or cannot be located, the donor-conceived person could only obtain non-identifying information. Under the third tier a person conceived from gametes donated since 1 January 1998 has unconditional access to information about their donor once they turn 18. From that time donors were required to consent to make identifying information available.

The idea that the entitlements of some individuals are subsumed by the entitlements and rights of other individual donors, as if it were an issue of contract law, is dangerous and could be damaging in the long term to the wellbeing of those who had no say in it. In many cases they are now adults with rights and entitlements that should be respected and properly managed and which should not be seen as subservient to or subsumed by others. The Law Reform Committee examined this issue over two terms of government. The committee made a range of recommendations in its March 2012 report, and the key one related to giving all donor-conceived people access to identifying information about their donors. The member for Williamstown has referred to the foreword of the report written by the chair of the committee, the member for Prahran, in which the member proposed the following questions.

Should a donor-conceived person have the right to access information about his or her donor? Should a donor-conceived person have this right even if the donor was assured that he would remain anonymous? What role, if any, should the state of Victoria have in facilitating access to information about the identity of parties to donor-conception?

The committee was of the chair’s view that providing all donor-conceived people with the opportunity to access identifying information regardless of the date of conception is consistent with the first guiding principle found in Victorian legislation regulating donor conception and that that should be the unifying and unqualified principle by which law is dealt with and legislation goes forward. The Labor Party agrees with that. We believe that the member for Prahran was right as chair of the committee in asserting that the three-tiered donor-conceived strategy is flawed, will ultimately lead to injustice and in many cases deals with individuals as if they fall into separate categories of rights and entitlements when they themselves were never party to any such arrangements. The state should recognise donor-conceived people as a homogenous group with comparable rights in its dealings with them. To subsume their rights by any quasi contractual or even pre-existing legislative scheme of entitlements is not only unjust, it is inequitable and ultimately could lead to human tragedy on a profound scale.

The bill that we are debating brings the pre-1988 category into line with the 1988-89 categories. To the extent to which it makes improvements in the tiered arrangements, it is to be welcomed.

However, the Law Reform Committee recommended legislation more aligned with the post-1998 model, with some important caveats. The contact veto provisions of the bill are similar to provisions in the Adoption Amendment Bill 2013, which as a party we strongly criticised for being one-sided. In effect those provisions said that the child could have a veto but the parents could not, and in the case of that bill, the level of penalty for breaching was too high. In the bill before the house what we now see is that there is an increasing recognition — in fact a predominance — by a donor and/or a donor-conceived person of the entitlements and the rights of donor-conceived individuals. There is a need for consistency.

The view is that there are important differences in the two landscapes.

I continue to struggle with the idea that through a legislative scheme we can create such a disparity in classes of entitlement when the paramount consideration must be the rights and entitlements of the children who are the product of donor conception. I understand that that may cause some difficulty to those donors who entered into arrangements which are different from those that the legislative scheme now produces, but the rights and entitlements of the donor-conceived individuals are more important and should be accorded that weight in legislation. With those concerns, I nonetheless wish the bill a speedy passage.