Religion & Ethics Australia Daily

A twice-weekly public affairs review from the Centre for Christian Ethics, Morling College

No. 005, 29 Oct – 1 Nov 2004  ² compiled by Rod Benson

News reports

Aboriginal issues

Noel Pearson, director of the Cape York Institute of Management, has advocated sending indigenous high school students out of their communities to attend boarding schools in the cities to address chronic academic underachievement. Weekend Aust 30-31 Oct 04

Abortion

Senior moderate Liberals are warning religious conservative Coalition colleagues against pushing for a harder line on abortion. “It’s not a debate about morality, it’s a debate about women’s health,” Human Services Minister Joe Hockey said. Weekend Aust 30-31 Oct 04

Animal rights

Tim Flannery, Director of the South Australian Museum, believes that Australians who slaughter their own meat are acting more morally than those who don’t. Commenting on watching a farmer shoot and then slit the throat of a steer to get some steaks, Flannery said “Its end was, I suspect, significantly less painful and traumatic than the slaughterhouse-bound majority, for the creature went from calm grazing to the stillness of death in a few seconds, avoiding the round-up, transportation by road and queuing before the slaughterer at the abattoir.”

SMH 30-31 Oct 04

In the ultimate form of extreme holiday “fun,” a holiday package from NorSafari allows tourists to fly to Norway and shoot baby seals. SMH 30-31 Oct 04

Atheism

John Gray observes that a revival of atheism is a curious by-product of the September 11 terrorist attacks, noting that “for unbelievers they were acts of self-destructive terrorism that no secular mind could commit.” He also notes that “atheism has always been a mirror image of western monotheism and shares many of its worst features. It is a commonplace that atheists are often extremely dogmatic in their unbelief – more so than many Christians.” AFR 29 Oct 04

Bioethics – stem cells

Incurable illnesses such as cancer and multiple sclerosis may be attacked through using embryonic stem cells made from patients with the conditions, says Australia’s leading reproductive biologist Alan Trounson. “At present this would involve the use of large numbers (more than 250) of human eggs in which the nucleus is removed and replaced with a cell from an ill patient.” Aust 29 Oct 04

Research has found that people tend to trust public institutions conducting stem cell research, and that religion has a very minor role in determining public perception of the ethics of stem cell research in Australia. Legislation approved in 2002 allows scientists to work with existing embryonic stem-cell lines and to create new lines using embryos created for IVF before 5 April 2002. The federal government will review the legislation next year. Aust 1 Nov 04

Criminal justice

Instead of a magistrate, victims are sitting in judgment on many young offenders in NSW. “Research shows that the better young offenders are cared for and the more links they have to family, school and community, the less likely they are to reoffend, says the director of youth justice conferencing at the NSW Department of Juvenile Justice, Jenny Bargen. SMH 29 Oct 04

Ethics – business – general

The prevailing public perception is that companies have a responsibility greater than merely that owed to their shareholders, two Australian academics observe. But “confusion between a parent company’s enforceable legal obligations and the unenforceable social obligations attributed to it in line with current expectations creates an impasse, despite all the governance measures in place.” AFR 1 Nov 04

Ethics – business – Australia

State governments will next week consider radical laws that could make James Hardie retrospectively liable for the $1.5 billion shortfall in its asbestos victims fund.

AFR 29 Oct 04

The potential asbestos victims of Sydney’s demolition boom may have no chance of compensation because only one in five asbestos removalists have enough insurance, according to the industry’s peak body. SMH 1 Nov 04

Ethics – education

An independent expert, Director of the Sydney Graduate School of Management David Lamond, was paid $2000 a day to look into allegations of academic misbehaviour and produced a report that was a “whitewash” and a “cover-up,” the Independent Commission Against Corruption heard yesterday. SMH 29 Oct 04

Ethics – resources

East Timor, which describes itself as the world’s poorest country, is demanding that the Australian government pay more than $2.6 billion in compensation for oil produced from Timor Sea fields since 1999. Maritime boundary talks between the two nations collapsed during the week. Weekend Aust 30-31 Oct 04

Euthanasia

Earlier this month a British High Court judge ruled that an 11-month-old baby, born prematurely with serious heart and lung problems, should be allowed to die. Another judge ruled this week that Luke Winston-Jones, born with a rare genetic disorder, should not be resuscitated by mechanical ventilation. Weekend Aust 30-31 Oct 04

Homosexuality & faith

A struggle between secularism and religious values has rattled the European Commission. The entire Commission has been vetoed because the proposed Commissioner for Justice said he believed his church’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin. Aust 29 Oct 04

Responding to the Lambeth Commission’s report into homosexual bishops, Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen said the report’s sidestepping of biblical teaching on sexual morality was a fatal flaw. SMH 29 Oct 04

Islam

Paul Dibb, emeritus professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, argues that there is a real prospect of a global war between Islam and the West. AFR 29 Oct 04

Politics – Australia

Confessed adulterer Ross Cameron, who lost his Sydney seat at the last federal election, is being urged to run for the NSW state parliament. Aust 29 Oct 04

The unfettered power of full Senate control means that Prime Minister John Howard can pass all the legislation blocked by a hostile Senate over the past 8  ½ years and every other policy for which he claims a mandate. But it could also mean much more: Howard now has “a golden opportunity to entrench the coalition’s power and reweight the Senate, which has for so long been hostile to conservative objectives.” The government has already begun to encourage the new socially conservative Family First Party, and uses every opportunity to delegitimise the Australian Greens. AFR 29 Oct 04

ABC election analyst Antony Green argues that preference voting deals are starting to distort rather than reflect the will of the electorate. SMH 29 Oct 04

Politics & faith – US

“George W. Bush has constructed a once-improbable coalition of evangelical and Catholic conservatives,” writes Christopher Pearson. “[John] Kerry, in contrast, has compromised himself on three crucial issues that those constituencies care about: embryonic stem cell research, gay marriage, and abortion . For millions of American voters this won’t be an election fought primarily on the state of the economy or the conduct of the war on terror but on competing liberal and conservative versions of the theology of the human body.” Weekend Aust 30-31 Oct 04

Religious vilification

The Australian Labor Party’s defeated candidate for the Sydney seat of Greenway, Ed Husic, was a victim of “a vicious and well-orchestrated attack on his religion and ethnicity,” aimed at highlighting the fact that he was a Muslim, a Labor Party official said. A bogus election brochure contained the slogan, “Ed Husic is a devout Muslim. Ed is working hard to get a better deal for Islam.” SMH 29 Oct 04

Sex

A Vatican-approved sex guide encourages church-goers to make love more often to offset “impotence and frigidity” and address papal concerns over declining birth rates among Italian Roman Catholics. SMH 1 Nov 04

Social justice

The Baptist Union of NSW Executive Committee has affirmed the Micah Challenge and Baptist World Aid Australia (BWAA) involvement in the Micah Campaign. The Executive will support BWAA in bringing the Micah Challenge to the April 2005 Assembly for adoption.

From Secretary of the Union 1 Nov 04

Sunday trading

A group of retail store franchisees in Western Australia was fined a total of $15,000 for illegally trading on a Sunday. WA is the only state with fixed hours of retail trading because of concerns deregulation would wipe out small traders. AFR 1 Nov 04

Terrorism

Accused Islamic terrorist Abu Bakar Bashir has warned an Indonesian court to be wary of interference from “two enemies of God,” Australia and the US. Aust 29 Oct 04

Militant Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir claims that his trial on terrorism charges was orchestrated by “Bush and his slave, John Howard.” SMH 29 Oct 04

War

More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, far exceeding all previous estimates, according to a scientific survey in The Lancet. Weekend Aust 30-31 Oct 04

Work

Large-scale Chinese toy manufacture for the Christmas market takes advantage of cheap labour supply, with millions of workers putting in 12-hour shifts seven days a week for meagre wages. SMH 30-31 Oct 04

Workplace relations

The Australian Industrial Relations Commission will consider whether Victoria’s militant construction unions can include “union-friendly” provisions such as payroll deductions in enterprise agreements. AFR 29 Oct 04

The federal government will legislate to make it easier for small businesses to sack workers, says Senator Ron Boswell. SMH 29 Oct 04

Other items of interest

With growing theological justification for the US-led war in Iraq, and the apparent confusion of the cross with the flag in the lead-up to the US election, Jim Wallis and friends offer “a new confession of Christ” – http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=sojomail.display&issue=041020#3

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has released its fifth Living Planet Report, a periodic update on the state of the world’s ecosystems. The Report claims that humanity now exceeds the planet’s capacity to sustain us – http://panda.org/news_facts/publications/general/livingplanet/index.cfm

Novelist Curtis White discusses the success of The Da Vinci Code, and laments “a culture that believes it can learn about theology by reading a pulp novel” – http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/182/white.shtml

READ is published by the Centre for Christian Ethics, Morling College, 120 Herring Rd, Eastwood NSW 2122 AUSTRALIA. Telephone (02) 9878 0201. The content of READ and the views expressed in articles do not necessarily represent the views of the Centre for Christian Ethics, Morling College or the Baptist Churches of NSW & ACT. Subscription is free. To subscribe, email with the words “subscribe to READ” in the subject line. Use the same email address to request more information. Copies of original articles are available on request. Abbreviations: AFR=The Australian Financial Review; Aust=The Australian; SMH=The Sydney Morning Herald.