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Queensland restricts surrogacy to heterosexual couples
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.
