Human Research Ethics Guidelines in Australia

This chapter describes the human research ethics guidelines that have been issued by national government agencies in Australia between 1966 and the present time, the identity, authority and composition of the issuing agencies, the processes that they adopted in guideline development and promulgation together with some reflections on those processes.

In the section "Human research ethics guidelines in Australia" we present a chronological history of guidelines that address all or part of human research and identify the national agencies that issued them. In the second section, we describe those agencies, their establishment, their authority and their membership and reflect on these. In the third section, we discuss some of the processes that those agencies used in developing, issuing and promulgating guidelines and in the fourth section we reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of those processes.

We have only briefly noted the issue of ethical guidelines for special areas of research. Most important of these are the guidelines in regard to health research involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The history of their development is important and complex and deserves to be told in detail and from an indigenous perspective.