Tuesday August 27th, 2024
Victorian Legislative Council
Rachel Payne MP made a contribution to the Health Legislation Amendment (Regulatory Reform) Bill 2024 on behalf of Legalise Cannabis Victoria. As someone who was donor-conceived, Rachel expressed her concerns around the proposed dissolution of the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority.
RACHEL PAYNE (Member for South-Eastern Metropolitan): I rise to make a contribution to the Health Legislation Amendment (Regulatory Reform) Bill 2024 on behalf of Legalise Cannabis Victoria.
As Members of Parliament, we are often required to vote on and contribute to pieces of legislation that are relative to our own personal experiences. How much of our own stories we share is a personal choice, but I think it is important that those we represent can also understand that we too are impacted by the laws made in this place.
As someone who is donor conceived it has been difficult for me to review this legislation. It has been something I have found challenging to reconcile. An experience that many donor-conceived people share.
In fact, in consultation with numerous stakeholders who have reached out in objection to parts of this legislation, I have found there are many shared experiences.
The common theme coming out of conversations with donor-conceived people, donors, families and advocates has been that VARTA has been a life-changing support service, offering specialist advice and provisions.
Many of these people have taken the brave step to share their personal stories publicly, to tell us how VARTA supported them.
For Michelle Galea VARTA was essential to enabling her to get in touch with her donor conceived child Charlie’s half-siblings. Charlie was able to get in contact with his sister, Amber, who was dying of a terminal illness and later passed away. VARTA again played an invaluable role, offering a free counselling service that helped both Michelle and Charlie work through their grief.
Personally, if a service provider like VARTA had been available to me and my family, I believe my experience would have been very different. Their specialist advice and support provide families with the tools to navigate the difficult conversations, and complex emotions that come along with donor conception.
That is why I was so disheartened to see that this bill proposes to dissolve VARTA. But I was also perplexed, this is a world leading service. Why was the first option to dissolve it? If there are issues, extra funding and minor legislative changes could go a long way.
VARTA has been awarded the Best Fertility Service for ‘outstanding patient service in reproductive health’ by the European Fertility Society. It has also been the subject of study by researchers from Britain and Canada wanting to establish their own service.
We have heard from many about how VARTA’s community outreach work, group workshops and education seminars have been invaluable.
VARTA also developed the Time to Tell series that helps parents and potential parents feel more confident about their story. This helped undo the hurt of decades of advice to families to ‘just not tell’ donor conceived children about their status.
Victoria has always been a world leader when it comes to assisted reproductive technology. We were the first jurisdiction in the world to introduce comprehensive laws regulating ART through the Infertility (Medical Procedures) Act (1984). We should be proud of this history as a world leader and build upon it, rather than dismantle it.
The Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand last month published their Draft Findings, Recommendations and Framework for FSANZ 10 Year National Fertility Roadmap. In this roadmap not only did they show that the use of assisted reproductive technology will grow significantly over the coming decade – but they also put forward a number of recommendations to ensure we are prepared to deal with a future surge in demand.
The first recommendation of this roadmap was that ‘Australian States and Territories work with the Commonwealth, patients, clinicians and the sector to develop a Uniform National Fertility Law for IVF which would be passed by a lead jurisdiction and adopt by others’. That is what makes the timing of these reforms so perplexing, the Department and the Minister have taken a piecemeal approach to these reforms and implementing the recommendations of the Gorton Review.
My other concern coming out of this bill and the roadmap is the overlap when it comes to a single National Register and other similar measures. If these are implemented federally, they would very likely require another raft of changes to legislation here in Victoria. This means that we are putting in place changes that potentially will just be undone – which in my mind is simply a waste of time and resources.
We are reassured that through non-legislative measures the many incredible educational resources that VARTA has available will be preserved. These resources not only help donor conceived people and their families in Victoria but are available to those in other states and countries who may have nowhere else to access that information from.
We do hope this preservation of materials extends to the creation of new education materials as needed – but unfortunately, we cannot say that we have received this assurance from the Government. It is concerning that there is no legislation binding this commitment – to protect independence and excellence in ART research and education.
The Gorton Review into assisted reproductive treatment in Victoria did not recommend a major overhaul of the system – which is what we see this bill to be.
In fact, they suggested this Government could consider additional funding for VARTA to support their work – whether they did or not will be a question for the committee stage – but I suspect the existence of this bill gives me the answer.
We have concerns that dissolving VARTA is a trojan horse for cost cutting. We can think of little other explanation when it comes to things like the change from mandatory to optional counselling in some instances and the decision to remove functions from the legislation relating to education, community consultation and research proposal.
Employees of the counselling arm of VARTA are set to be stuck in limbo – transferred to the Department of Health but with the commitment that the counselling services will eventually be set up in an external private body. They don’t know who that private body will be, if they have guaranteed employment with them and when all these changes will happen.
I will be raising a number of questions in the Committee of the Whole stage on these matters and others that I believe have remained unresolved. I look forward to putting these questions to the government and offering donor conceived people and their families some kind of reassurance and clarity.
In this same vein, we will be supporting the amendment to be moved by the Greens that an expert panel comprised of representatives from the legal sector, specialist counsellors, people with lived experience of donor conception and assisted reproductive technology, and people with other relevant expertise, examine the implications of the dissolution of the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority.
We have heard from stakeholders that there is a genuine appetite to reopen consultation and a belief that the initial process was inadequate.
Until this Government can evidence the need to dissolve the world leading service that is VARTA, Legalise Cannabis Victoria will not be supporting this bill.
Thank you.
[Ends]
Related Resources
> Assisted Reproductive Treatment – Surrogacy legislation – Rachel Payne
> Inclusive and accessible assisted reproductive treatment – Rachel Payne
> Modernising Surrogacy Laws – Rachel Payne