CANBERRA, Australia, March 7 (UPI) -- The Australian Prime Minister is considering employing a little-used power over territories to ban homosexuals adopting children in the national capital.
The move would expose divisions within the Labor Party over the issue and appeal to conservative portions of the public, the newspaper The Australian reported Sunday.
The Cabinet is set to consider an Attorney-General's Department submission on a bill to override the ACT bill of rights. The ACT bill would legalize gay adoption in Canberra.
The Attorney General's submission sets out how a bill passed by parliament could ban gay adoption using the commonwealth constitution's control over law in the territories. Prime Minister John Howard used the same constitutional power to override the Northern Territory government's euthanasia legislation in 1997.
But the Australian Solicitor's chief general counsel, Henry Burmester, has advised in a carefully worded opinion that a federal bill banning gay adoption in the ACT would be unlikely to stop gay adoption.
According to Burmester, to be effective the federal bill would also have to ban adoption by all single parents for gay adoption to be stopped in Canberra, since so many gay people already use that route to adopt children.
