Page 1400 - Week 05 - Thursday, 25 June 1992

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I say "should" because you make so much of Your" openness" to public consultation, and here we have the very opposite - deliberate concealment until after an election. If you are not to stand condemned a arch hypocrite, guilty of colossal humbug about consultation, you will make a public statement that this, matter should not proceed during this terra, but may be canvassed in the lead-uto the next electi Such a course would command respect for yourself and restore some respect or your party. Incidentally, the matter was not mentioned in the list of policies which you addressed to me in your pre-election letter.

Were we a true democracy, which we are not, the constitution would require that any legislation on matters or policy, which were not canvassed prior to an election, but raised surreptitiously after that election, would require .^5% or more of members to approve it. Perhaps you could demonstrate the genuineness of your openness to consultation by so amending our constitution and give a lead in democracy to all other governments .in Australia. .

In discussions on the pro-osed abortion clinic, I hope you will not lend yourself to the dishonesty of using the pro-abortion terminology such as "pro choice". -his ploy of using sweet-sounding euphemisms is meant to conceal the fact, itself quite undeniable, that every abortion involves at least two humans; the pro-abortionists are "pro choice" for the potential killer, but not for the defenceless one who is killed:.

I suggest that you move your government in the same direction as that of the pro-life :movement, including the Right to Life Association and the thousands who have already petitioned your government not to legalise an abortion clinic. Their opposition to abortion and is facilities for abortion only one side, the negative side, of the coin and, viewed in isolation from the positive side, is regularly parodied as lacking compassion for ;:regnant women who are under pressure to end the lives of the children they are carrying. The positive side of the coin . is the positive help given to such women by pro-lifers, through such bodies as Pregnancy Support Service. Many or these people spend their own money, their time and their loving care in this admirable endeavour which I commend to your government. They, the women they help and the babies whose lives they save, deserve all the encouragement and helpthat you and your government can give them.

I have canvassed these issues at some length. As what I have written is relevant for all MLAs, and I am without the services of a secretariate, I am sending a copy of. this letter to each of the other 16. Yours sincerely,

Rev. John P. Kelly, P.P.

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