Pursuing the churches over human rights is contradictory
Peter Costello, The Age | WHAT happens when equal rights between men and women are so widely accepted that mainstream Australia hardly thinks about it? Surely it is time to acknowledge that anti-discrimination statutes have done their job?
Not according to the Victorian Government. It harbours the view that discrimination has got sophisticated - so hard to find under current law - that we must widen the law to catch more of it. One area in the State Government’s sights is religious bodies, and their schools.
Presentation to the National Human Rights Consultation Committee at the Great Hall, Parliament House, Canberra, July 1, 2009
Three points:
Australia must adhere to existing International Human Rights Law.
Existing International Law requires legal protection for the child before birth and precludes abortion.
Even though current Australian legislation condones abortion, any move towards a Bill of Human Rights must realign domestic abortion law with our international obligations to protect the right to life of the child at risk of abortion
The right to life is “the supreme right” and “basic to all human rights”.
At present, Australia is not meeting its obligation to uphold and protect in its legislation the right to life of children at risk of abortion. Abortion constitutes arbitrary deprivation of life in breach of international human rights law, as established via the Nuremberg principles and judgments and their codification in the International Bill of Rights.
UN Human Rights Committee General Comment 6, paras. 1 & 3. See also Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Jailton Neri Da Fonsecav. Brazil, (2004): “The human right to life is a fundamental human right, the basis for the exercise of the other human rights. …enjoyment of the right to life is essential for the exercise of all other human rights. If it is not respected, all rights lack meaning.”
PM stares down gay marriage push
28/07 The Australian | KEVIN Rudd has guaranteed he will resist any attempt at this week's Australian Labor Party conference to allow gay marriage or civil unions that mimic marriage.
After the party's Tasmanian branch narrowly backed a motion endorsing gay marriage at the weekend, the Prime Minister said through a spokesman yesterday that marriage was a commitment between a man and a woman.
"We support the removal of discrimination from same-sex couples and from de facto heterosexual couples when it comes to basic arrangements in terms of tax, superannuation and the rest, and also a nationally consistent relationships register," the spokesman said. "But when it comes to civil unions, as it is described, civil unions mean the effective amendment of the Marriage Act, and that is something we don't support."
Time to Make a Stand against euthanasia
Make A Stand| The deadline for Tasmanian supporters to get their submission into the euthanasia bill inquiry is quickly approaching. You have until July 31 to make your voice heard on this very important issue.
Please go to our ‘Care not Killing’ campaign at the Make a Stand website.
There you will find all the information and points of argument you need to make a submission to the inquiry. All submissions, no matter how short, will send the very strong message to the committee that protecting the lives of the vulnerable important.
It is also vitally important that as many people as possible engage with this campaign, as euthanasia campaigners have been trying for years to get a foot in the door of an Australian jurisdiction to legalise ‘voluntary’ physician-assisted suicide.
Not only would legal euthanasia in Tasmania put in jeopardy the welfare of elderly, sick and depressed people in that state, but would provide considerable leverage for campaigners to push on into other states.
Power in perspective
28/07 Herald Sun | "Every four months, from now until 2020, China will build new coal-fired power stations possessing the same capacity as (my, not Martin's emphasis) Australia's entire coal-fired power sector."
Just savour that for a while. Every four months - three times a year, every year for 10 years! - China will build one Australian coal-fired power industry. Not one power station, but the equivalent of all our power stations. Every four months, as far as the analytical eye can see.
... We can close down what is to all practical intents and purposes our entire power industry - give or take a few dams in Tasmania and thousands of all-but useless wind turbines - and the emissions 'saved' would be spent in China in four months.
Push to give 16-year-olds the vote in federal elections
27/07 News.com.au | SIXTEEN and 17-year-olds could be given a voluntary right to vote in federal elections, under changes to be canvassed by the Rudd Government later this year.
While the Liberal Party's newest recruit, Francesca Perrottet, 16, said the shift could inspire young people to get involved in politics and widen the pool of leadership talent, senior Liberals shunned the idea, The Australian reports.
Marriage under attack at ALP national conference
Australian Christian Lobby | Labor's support for marriage between a man and a woman is under threat with gay activists agitating to have the party's platform changed at the up-coming national conference in Sydney.
... Whilst minority rights are important, it is also important that this basic building block of society is not undermined to suit the agenda of an activist component of two per cent of the population.
PM Kevin Rudd rejects unions' 'Buy Australian' push
26/07 The Australian | PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has rejected the union movement's 'buy Australian' campaign, saying such protectionism led to the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Unions are putting pressure on the Rudd government to adopt the NSW Labor government's policy to give local producers a 20 per cent price advantage, ahead of next weekend's ALP National Conference.
Mr Rudd said much of Australia's national wealth depended on its access to export markets.
“We need to avoid any form of protectionist measure, which invites retaliatory protectionist measures from economies around the world, and that's what would happen,” he told reporters on Sunday.
Labor braces for tough recovery
26/07 AAP | The Federal Government is bracing for interest rates to rise ahead of the next election and has sent out its economic lieutenants to warn voters about a painful recovery ahead. Economists have said interest rates are likely to rise in the second half of 2010 as the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) returns to fighting inflation.
With an election due by early 2011, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has pointed out that everyday items like food and petrol are also likely to become more expensive as the economy gathers strength.
VIDEO: Dr Mark Durie explains the Threats to Religious Freedom in Australia in
Read also: Exemptions to Equal Opportunity Laws
The issues relating to religious freedom and human rights are complex and poorly understood in Australian society. There is also a rising sense of anxiety about religious freedom at the grassroots level among many (but not all) Australian Christians. At the same time among secularists there is a good deal of hostility to church's claims for exemptions from human rights legislation.
QUEENSLAND: Nuttall gets seven years
17/07 SMH.com.au | Former Queensland cabinet minister Gordon Nuttall has been jailed for seven years for official corruption.
He will be eligible for parole in 2½ years - on January 2, 2012.
The one-time Sandgate MP, 56, was found guilty on Wednesday of corruptly receiving $360,000 in secret commissions from two wealthy Queensland businessmen between 2002 and 2005.
PM's first blog on his new website
PM Media Release | The Prime Minister's blog provides an opportunity for the community to comment and engage with each other in relation to the policy initiatives under discussion; the first blog has a focus on climate change.
Kevin Rudd’s Chinese puzzle
17/07 Tony Abbott's blog |"It’s almost inconceivable that Mr Hu could be guilty of stealing state secrets; at least, of stealing what a Western government would regard as state secrets. He is, after all. a well-respected senior manager in one of the world’s most reputable businesses His “crime”, almost certainly, amounts to no more than trying to find out as much as he could about his commercial partners and engaging in tough negotiations with them. The difference between most commercial negotiations and those in China is that Chinese ones usually involve an enterprise that it sometimes suits the government to regard as an extension of itself. Only in a communist autocracy could trying to get from a government-owned business the best possible price for your product and for your shareholders be regarded as a crime against the state....."
Minister sentencing over bribes reserved
16/07 SMH.com.au | Former Queensland Government minister Gordon Nuttall's receipt of $360,000 in secret commissions was "as serious as you can imagine", a court has been told.
Nuttall, 56, was found guilty yesterday after a trial on 36 counts of receiving secret commissions from mining executives Harold Shand and Ken Talbot between 2002 and 2005. Prosecutor Ross Martin, SC, told the Brisbane District Court today that Nuttall's offending fell at the top of the sentencing range, which carries a maximum penalty of seven years' jail for each charge.
Nations prosper with God on their side
The Australian | EVER since the Enlightenment in the 18th century, there has been a schism in Western thought over the relationship between religion and modernity. Europeans, on the whole, have assumed that modernity would marginalise religion; Americans, in the main, have assumed that the two things can thrive together.
This schism goes back to the modern world's two founding revolutions. The French and American revolutions were both the offspring of the Enlightenment, but with very different views of the role that religion should play in reason's glorious republic. In France the revolutionnaires despised religion as a tool of the ancien regime. By contrast, America's founding fathers took a more benign view of religion. They divided church from state, not least to protect the former from the latter.
These two versions of modernity have marched in different directions ever since. In Europe established churches sided with the old regime against the new world of democracy and liberty. In America, where there was no national established church, faiths embraced both democracy and the market: the only way they could survive was to attract customers.
In Europe, religion meant war or oppression, Edmund Burke once observed; in America, it turned out to be a source of freedom. For most of the past 200 years the European view of modernity has been in the ascendant. Europe gave birth to a succession of sages who explained, in compelling detail, why God was doomed. Karl Marx denounced religion as the "opium of the masses". Emile Durkheim and Max Weber argued that an iron law of history was leading to secularisation (or "the disenchantment of the world", in Weber's rather more poetic phrase). Friedrich Nietzsche remarked, "I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people." Sigmund Freud dismissed religion as a neurosis that was designed to divert attention from man's real interest, sex.
A few intellectuals deplored God's disappearance, worrying that a godless world would also be a barbaric one. "When people stop believing in God," GK Chesterton argued, "they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." "If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God)," TS Eliot warned, "you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin."
The right to have a mother and father serves a child's best interests
09/07 Rev the Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes AC MLC |Dr Moyes, a family advocate and former recipient of The Father of the Year award, stated: “The paramount interest of the child is best served by a mother and father. This is intrinsic to our human condition. From time immemorial, family relationships have centred on a mother, a father and their children. This form of social unit is innate and embedded in different cultural contexts.”
According to Dr Moyes, the recommendations in the report, if implemented, would deny some children the right to be raised by a mother and father. Dr Moyes added: “For the New South Wales Government to impose such legislation on a child is contradictory not just to Australia’s international legal obligations but most importantly, we have denied children of their basic rights to be loved, cared for and raised by a mother and father.”
John Micklethwait discusses global faith revival
LATELINE, ABC | TONY JONES, PRESENTER: In 2006 an ambitious opposition frontbencher surprised many with a call for churches to be more involved in politics. His name was Kevin Rudd and he called for Labor to fight for Australia's religious voters who he said had been co-opted by the conservative Christians in the Howard government. Mr Rudd evoked what he called the Christian socialist tradition in the gospels, with a strong emphasis on the impoverished, the poor, the dispossessed, the outcast and the oppressed.
Iran claims a long way from truth about protecting kids online
Australian Christian Lobby | The chance to better protect kids will be lost if a misleading campaign comparing the Rudd Government’s cyber safety policy with Iranian-style political repression sinks Internet Service Provider-level filtering.
Australian Christian Lobby Chief of Staff Lyle Shelton said if the claims made in an online advertisement aimed at getting the Rudd Government to drop its clean feed for kids election promise were true, ACL would also withdraw its support. “No one wants Government censoring of political discussion but the clean feed debate has never been about this.
Women Selling Their Eggs .......
09/07 Saltshakers | Yes, that's the latest proposal from the advocates of embryo stem cell research.
Last month New York became the first US state to allow scientists to pay women for their eggs. Women will be paid between $US5,000 and $US10,000 ($A6,200 and $A12,600) for each egg harvested.
Now Professor Loane Skene, from the University of Melbourne, who was the the deputy chair of the 2005 Lockhart Committee on Human Cloning and Embryo Research, is recommending that Australian women should be paid for their eggs.
Why? To obtain MORE eggs for embryonic stem cell research. She says women have to be given drugs and have invasive surgery for the eggs to be harvested - so should be paid!
Not Enough Eggs in the Cloning Basket
From the Archives: Katrina George, Nov 2006 | Politicians and scientists have been promising cures for patients and biotech bucks for the economy.
But cloning depends on a continuous supply of fresh human eggs and without eggs cloning is impossible.
Senators Natasha Stott Despoja and Kay Patterson are promoting research cloning. Don't they care it is women who are most at risk from the biotech juggernaut? Egg extraction requires large doses of powerful hormones to hyper-stimulate the ovaries.
Prof Bob Williamson told federal MPs that egg extraction involved an element of discomfort and a small element of risk. An element of discomfort to say the least. In one study of egg donors, nearly 30 per cent reported a week or more of discomfort so significant that it kept them in bed, prevented them from working, or interfered with their ability to care for their children.
Religious freedom threatened by Vic Parliamentary inquiry
Australian Christian Lobby | Well intentioned but misguided ‘rights-based’ laws have already brought unwelcome notoriety to Victoria and new moves to clamp down on religious freedom should be rejected to avoid repeats of the ‘Catch the Fire’ religious vilification fiasco.
Australian Christian Lobby Victorian State Director Rob Ward today lodged ACL’s submission to the Scrutiny of Act and Regulations Committee Inquiry into the Exceptions and Exemptions to the Equal Opportunity Act 1995.
Mr Ward warned that faith-based charities, schools and organisations could have their activities severely constrained by the inquiry’s suggestions that religious bodies lose the right to employ staff who share their values.
Pay attention, or be bamboozled by bread and circuses
08/07 Ross Gittens, SMH.com.au | After being paid to study the performance of politicians for the past 35 years it finally occurs to me that the problem with democracy is the same problem we have with competition in markets: for it to work well requires more effort and attention on the part of voters (or customers) than they're prepared to devote to it.
The similarity between democracy and markets is hardly surprising because they're both forms of competition. Businesses compete for our custom, political parties compete for our vote.
... Unless enough of us pay close attention to what the pollies are doing and saying, they'll find ways to compete that are easier for them and less beneficial for us.
... Because we take so little interest in the details of problems and their solutions, because we rarely follow up yesterday's concerns, because our emotions are so easily swayed by vested interests or the media, the pollies learnt a long time ago that appearances matter more to voters than the reality of the situation. So they concentrate their efforts on creating the appearance of effective action to "address" problems, on applying those solutions the public imagines will work rather than the less emotionally satisfying measures that really do work
Black and white and Rudd all over
07/07 Gerard Henderson, SMH.com.au | As prime minister, Rudd has had a dream run in the Australian media, almost equalling that experienced by Barack Obama in the United States over the past five months. It is no secret that the Western media prefers social democrats to conservatives. In addition, Rudd and Obama have had the political advantage of leading a nation at a time of global financial crisis. Rudd looks like a near certain victor in the next election, which is due in late 2010.
Even so, Rudd is concerned about the coverage of his Government by News Limited. For all his many strengths, Rudd has one significant weakness. He genuinely wants to be loved and he does not hold the view that critics can have sound judgment along with good intentions. I noticed this when Rudd addressed The Sydney Institute in July 2007.
EXTENSION FOR NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS CONSULTATION
06/07 Excerpt from Attorney General Media Release | Attorney General, Robert McClelland, today agreed to a request by Father Frank Brennan, Chair of the National Human Rights Consultation Committee, for a further one month extension to the reporting date of the National Human Rights Consultation.
The Committee will now report to Government by 30 September 2009.
The Committee has requested a short extension to ensure that it has sufficient time to consider all of the views expressed by the community during the consultation. ....
14,527 Signatures and Counting
We the undersigned are opposed to a Charter of Rights which would allow judges to determine if laws are incompatible with human rights. We support the protection of human rights, especially those of the most vulnerable in our society, but we wish to see elected representatives of the people, not unelected judges, remain responsible for the protection of human rights. We note that this system has already made Australia one of the freest countries in the world with a human rights record the envy of people all over the world. We call upon the Australian Parliament to:
a. reject a Charter of Rights orb. not enact a Charter without a referendum.
To Sign this Petition on the Make A Stand website
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Pursuing the churches over human rights is contradictory
PM stares down gay marriage push
Time to Make a Stand against euthanasia
17/07 SMH.com.au 
Kevin Rudd’s Chinese puzzle 
09/07 Rev the Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes AC MLC 
Women Selling Their Eggs .......
Not Enough Eggs in the Cloning Basket