Single people and same-sex couples will be
prevented from having children through surrogacy in the Australian 
state of
Queensland, it was announced last week.
The state’s governing Liberal National Party (LNP)
also said that it would be changing the state’s civil partnership bill to make
it less like marriage.
MPs from the Katter Australian Party, led by Bob
“The Hat” Katter (pictured) abstained from the vote on the basis that they
wanted the civil partnership law overturned completely.
Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie said that the
government would introduce in the future a bill to reshape the altruistic
surrogacy law.
Mr Bleijie said new law would would repeal the
provisions of the state’s surrogacy law dealing with single people, same-sex
couples, or any de facto couple that had been together for fewer than two
years.
“That was a clear commitment many years ago when
that debate originally took place,” Mr Bleijie said of the future surrogacy
changes.
Surrogacy is the process by which a woman carries
a baby for another person or couple, for no payment. The changes would restrict
access to heterosexual couples only.
State Prime Minister Campbell Newman said the new
provisions “should be no surprise”, citing comments LNP members made in the
original parliamentary debate when surrogacy was legalised in 2010.
The LNP’s changes to civil partnerships laws, will
rename the scheme as a relationships register and remove state-sanctioned
ceremonies.
Under the new bill, civil partnerships will not be
completely scrapped, but will be renamed as registered relationships and the
state-sanctioned ceremony option will be revoked.
Mr Newman pointed to Katter’s Australian Party’s
attempted amendments to the bill that would completely extinguish the hundreds
of civil unions already entered into by same-sex couples.
About 12.10am, during parliamentary discussion
over a Katter amendment, Mr Newman admonished the minor party, saying an
anti-gay-marriage ad it ran during the election campaign was homophobic.
“This is an amendment that would cause pain and
suffering; a lot of trauma to many innocent people,” Mr Newman said of the
Katter party attempt to strike out existing same-sex civil unions.
“Through no fault of their own they [couples]
fairly entered into an arrangement created by the previous government.”
MPs early this morning voted 69 to eight in
support of the civil union change, with the LNP’s overwhelming majority clearly
showing itself in the scale of the numbers backing the bill in the night’s final
vote.
The Australian Christian Lobby issued a statement
welcoming the civil union changes and also the surrogacy announcement.
“This [surrogacy reform] is the right thing and is
in the best interest of the child, something the state is bound to uphold under
the UN Convention on the rights of the child,” ACL state director Wendy Francis
said.
“There is a message to federal politicians
currently subject to a propaganda war from gay activists [regarding marriage]
that it is possible to resist the activists’ agenda.”
Mr Bleijie, who unveiled the bill on Wednesday
night, also flagged changes simplifying the way couples could later dissolve
their registered relationships, amid concerns the existing court process was too
similar to divorce.
Katter’s Australian Party MP Shane Knuth listed
the church groups that opposed civil unions and called on the LNP to go further
and repeal the law entirely.
Katter’s Australian Party, which opposes civil
unions even more strongly, planned to move amendments to the bill in an attempt
to highlight the LNP’s support for registration of same-sex relationships.
One amendment proposed by Katter’s Australian
Party would change the registration bill so that instead of allowing all
couples, whether same-sex or heterosexual, to sign up, the scheme would only be
available to a man and a woman.