Thank you to all those who supported repealsection8. You had a hand – maybe only very small – in throwing out an ethically irresponsible ruling party, a party that:

• Permitted abortion by any method, at any gestation, without anaesthesia for the unborn child, for any reason – thus also permitting unrestricted eugenic selection of all that may be considered imperfect or undesirable
• Compelled doctors with a conscientious objection to any of the above to participate in the process and refer to a doctor who they know has no such objection
• Allowed MPs to have a conscience vote in the overruling of doctor’s conscience
• Ignored its own charter of rights in passing the overruling of doctor’s conscience
• Also ignored international covenants to which Australia is a signatory in the overruling of doctor’s conscience – covenants that were established to ensure that such abuses would never happen again after the lessons of Nazi Germany
• Failed to adequately inform the people of Victoria of the significance of what it was doing and then had done – the voices of protest were there but they were ignored in the determination to ram the legislation through

How could the issues have been made more clear? I don’t know. There were excellent campaigns by right-to-life groups and yet still the overall protest vote was way lower than it should have been. Do the people of faith in Victoria still not know? Are they in denial (this could not possibly be true)? Do they say this is not my responsibility and deny they had to vote for good or evil?

Possibly many good MPs who fought against these things suffered “battle fatigue” eventually giving up against the odds and fed up with fighting it.

The issue of battle fatigue is real. Our politicians and we, the Australian public, will be facing this again with euthanasia and physician assisted suicide – and also the re-definition of and abandonment of marriage and family as the bedrock of society. It becomes so easy when such moves are repeated year after year to just give in and agree so the clamouring voices will stop. We desperately need leaders who will say “enough” and put a block on repeated attempts at least for the life of that government’s term of office.

So pray for our leaders that they will be strong in the face of such a barrage.

And we still need to repeal Section 8.

Lachlan Dunjey. 8 Dec 2010.

Not since Federation has there been such a clear choice between right and wrong, good and evil, as in this election.

Remember:

• defining issues are evils that are legislated by government
• no issue is more clear than the compulsion of evil by government

Remember:

• the rights charter that excluded the unborn child
• abortion “reform” with abortion by any method for any reason without anaesthetic right up to birth
• compulsion of doctors to refer even when this would violate their conscience

The responses by candidates to whether they would support a repeal of the conscience clause gives a very distinctive choice between good and evil because no government should ever compel its citizens to act against conscience where this is in accord with a highly respected ethical code such as in medicine.

The list is incomplete. Email notification and response was the only method of contact apart from sitting MPs who were contacted by post. Many emails with political party addresses were undeliverable particularly those with “name”@alp.org.au.

Where the response is blank it can be assumed there was in fact “no response or undeliverable”.

To assist in this process and fill in the blanks it is helpful to refer to the excellent Christian Values Checklist that shows Labor to be a definite NO to restoring freedom of conscience in this issue (and also to repeal of the Victorian Charter). However there were exceptions in both Labor and Greens where candidates said YES.

For further information refer to the excellent sites

http://www.saltshakers.org.au/

http://www.christianvalues.org.au/

http://www.prolife.org.au/election/

A follow-up to http://www.chooselifeaustralia.org.au/life/a-new-dark-age/.  Excerpt:

Out of the horrors of Nazi Germany with its corrupt medical profession and re-defining of persons to exclude the unborn, the defective and disabled, and of course different races, came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 when intelligent minds of various countries got together to formulate something that would help ensure that the atrocities and views and beliefs that came out of Nazism would never be repeated…would never be repeated. Implicit in this are the rights of the unborn child and clarified by the preamble to the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child that spells out the rights of the child before and after birth.

The government of Victoria set us on this never to be repeated pathway in 2002 when it passed its own version of rights Victorian Charter of Rights and Responsibilities that includes the note that none of it will apply to abortion.

48. Savings provision

Nothing in this Charter affects any law applicable to abortion or child destruction,

How is it possible in this “country of the free” that a state government can set its own charter – based on the solemnly inspired and carefully crafted Universal Declaration – and then exclude a group of people? Jews and the defective were excluded in Germany; slaves and Negroes were excluded in the USA; North American Indians and Australian Aborigines have been marginalised and excluded – how dare we repeat history by excluding any rights of the unborn child at risk of abortion. To thumb our noses at the intelligent dedication of the people and nations that formulated the Universal Declaration is an astonishing action of ignorance and irresponsibility and – yes – selfish arrogance.

But there’s more – Victoria has spectacularly failed to uphold even the good parts of its own charter that should have ruled out Section 8 of the Abortion Law Reform Act 2008. The Charter reads:

(1) Every person has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, including—

(a) the freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his or her choice; and

(b) the freedom to demonstrate his or her religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching, either individually or as part of a community, in public or in private.

(2) A person must not be coerced or restrained in a way that limits his or her freedom to have or adopt a religion or belief in worship, observance, practice or teaching.

Senator Julian McGauran in his debate speech Victoria: Abortion Law Reform Act by Wednesday, 19 August 2009 highlighted this failure  http://www.openaustralia.org/senate/?id=2009-08-19.28.1

Purportedly, the various human rights agreements Australia engages in are established to protect individual rights such as freedoms of thought, conscience, religion and belief. Therefore, it is appropriate to measure section 8 of the act against various domestic and international principles. Firstly, given the high principles which the Victorian parliament espoused when introducing the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, you would expect section 8 of that act to be in breach of the charter. And it is. But the Victorian parliament failed to uphold their own charter. While section 48 of that charter expressly excludes any law concerning the unborn from its coverage, it does not abrogate the protection of any conscientious objection to abortion. To the contrary, section 14(2) of the Victorian charter spells out the principle of protection of the conscience. It reads:

A person must not be coerced or restrained in a way that limits his or her freedom to have or adopt a religion or belief in worship, observance, practice or teaching.

Secondly, section 8 falls well short of recognised international covenants and declarations. The International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights—which, I add, the Victorian Charter was based on—clearly spells out the breach of human rights, which states in article 18(1) ‘everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.’ Article 18(2) reaffirms this.

Moreover article 4(2) of the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights sets up the rights laid out in article 18 as non-derogable rights. It concedes that other rights in the charter can be waived in national emergencies but not article 18(1)—even in national emergencies. Additionally, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflects the exact same beliefs in regard to conscience as the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights.

There is something very chilling about a parliament that has legislated not only such violence upon the unborn baby but also an assault upon the preciousness of the conscience of doctors and nurses who want no part of that violence.  (Emphasis mine.)

Frank Brennan similarly writes in The Place of the Religious Viewpoint in Shaping Law and Policy in a Pluralistic Democratic Society: a case study on rights and conscience
Centre for Public Policy, University of Melbourne, 26 February 2009. Excerpt:
http://127.0.0.1:4664/cache?event_id=76369&schema_id=6&q=victorian+charter+section+8&s=FZONzSvELZj0ucwwCYip4nDAl_w

In my opinion, this was the first real test of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities and it failed spectacularly to protect a core non-derogable ICCPR human right which fell hostage to a broader social and political agenda for abortion law reform and a prevailing fad in bioethics which asserts that doctors should leave their consciences at the door.

Lachlan Dunjey www.repealsection8.net.au 25 Nov 2010.

Will you, if elected (or re-elected), vote to support a motion to repeal Section 8 if such a motion is introduced?

The answers give a very clear indication as to whether a candidate supports the compulsion of doctors to violate their conscience and be complicit in what they believe to be wrong.

It is one thing to pass a law that permits evil but it is something more to pass a law that compels evil.  We have not been here before in a civilised society.

Christians and other people of faith in Victoria, please understand what your government has done.

Not only has it permitted a great evil but it has compelled a noble profession sworn to do no harm to participate. This is what is known as a defining issue – when wrongs are actually brought into being by government introduced legislation as opposed to matters occurring or happening in our world.

Even if you personally do not believe that the legalisation of abortion by any method, for any reason, through to term is not an evil law, you must at least consider that the compulsion of doctors to be complicit in this when they believe it to be wrong is in itself evil.

I beg you not to vote for people who will ensure this evil continues. Further, I ask you to seriously consider whether support for such people then becomes an evil action in its own right.

Dr Lachlan Dunjey.

Medicine With Morality: defending human life; defending liberty of conscience.

Re State Election Nov 27

www.repealsection8.net.au has been set up to log responses to a single question for all candidates for election and re-election. The question relates to Section 8 of the 2008 Abortion Reform Bill that overrides doctor’s liberty of conscience:

Will you, if elected (or re-elected), vote to support a motion to repeal Section 8 if such a motion is introduced?

YES / NO / undecided

Signature:  ____________________________________

The actual mechanism to achieve this may be something different than repeal but the spirit of the question is clear in asking for support to remove this provision. Please note we are not asking you to move such a motion – just asking for your support. Nor are we seeking your view on abortion or the Abortion Reform Bill – just the conscience provision.

Your response will be recorded on the website as an aid to voting.