Doug PollardDo No Harm
Andrea Coote MLC
To the Liberal Members of the Victorian Legislative Council
I was under the impression that so-called Australian values and Liberal values were pretty much in alignment: give everyone a fair chance, an equal opportunity, and level the playing field so that no-one gets an unfair advantage or special treatment. If that is true, then your government stands on the brink of making yet another mistake ; one with longlasting consequences for lots of people in the state.
However, you can save the government from itself, by abstaining in the vote on special religious exemptions to the equal opportunity law on June 14.
This is an honourable course, if you believe it to be the right thing to do, and unlike your Labor colleagues across the floor, you have the right to decline to follow the party line if your conscience so dictates. I hope to persuade you that it does.
It would be a bad thing, would it not, to have the law apply differently to different people on the basis of inherent characteristics, like race, ability or sexuality? But it is surely worse to allow a self-selected group to claim special rights and privileges over others merely by proclaiming a particular belief?
It may look like a small thing ; just allow a few religious organisations to have some special rights and privileges so that the current leaders of those organisations can enforce the current orthodoxies of their faiths on people who work for them.
I say 'current', because orthodoxies can change. Religions have changed their rules on slavery and divorce, so what was once acceptable is now anathema, and vice versa.
I say 'current' leaders, because every religion, like every political party, has it's factions, and the ones now ascendant will not be on top for ever.
Current orthodoxies and leaders may be benign. Future ones may not.
And therein lies the danger. Once you open the door to exempting extremists from one law on the grounds of belief, what else will they feel entitled to demand exemption from? By not tightly restricting exemptions to equal opportunity law, to, say, the purely religious functions of these organisations, you open the door, for example, to sharia law. Only a crack, but what will start to force it's way through? Already there are calls for sharia law to be allowed to operate alongside common law, by special exemption.
Under the circumstances, would it not be wiser to narrow religious exemptions still further, rather than widen them? So that organisations doing the business on the governments behalf and with taxpayers money - such as hospitals, schools, aged-care facilities and services, adoption agencies and so forth, were obliged to conduct their tax-free businesses on exactly the same terms as anyone else?
Otherwise we get situations like the one that recently arose in NSW, where the proprietors of a Catholic run hospital insisted on enforcing ‎"Religion-based rules . .[which] prohibit doctors recommending contraception to patients taking a drug derived from thalidomide, which can cause severe birth defects."
Really Long Link
This, frankly, sick attitude is not confined to NSW. "Bernadette Tobin, director of the Plunkett centre for ethics at St Vincent's Hospital, said. . . . society benefited from having ''different concepts of what is ethical in competition with each other''.
I'm all in favour of free competition, but "competitive ethics" ?????
Please, I implore you, look past the self-serving nonsense of 'balancing' competing rights and competing ethics. It is for the government and the law to set ONE set of standards that apply to all without fear or favour and regardless of belief. Not to 'outsource' ethics to people whose twisted thinking makes it right to possibly force a woman to bear a deformed child.
What you are being asked to vote for on June 14 may seem like a small thing, but it could lead to so much worse. I beg of you, do not give in to the pressure to widen the already overwide crack in equal opportunity law, but act instead to close it up further.
If you cannot find it in you to do that much, then at least, as doctors say, 'do no harm'. Do not vote at all. Please - abstain.
