Page 1064 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 8 April 2008
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debate is fairly cute, and some members who have spoken on this are somewhat deceived. I think they read the first part of the legislation, division 2.1, where there are a whole lot of things which are outlawed, but if they read it in conjunction with division 2.2, they would see that a whole lot of those things then become legal with the issuing of a licence. This is one of the things about which we as a community should draw a line and say that no licence is enough to justify this abuse of our capacity to manipulate genetics.
I also want to comment on remarks made by Dr Foskey, Ms MacDonald and others in the in-principle debate last week about people’s so-called religious motivations for moving amendments like these and opposing the bill in general. This theme was echoed in an interview with Professor Tom Faunce on ABC radio late last week. After that interview, I was asked by the same interviewer whether my opposition to human cloning, the creation of hybrid embryos or the creation of embryos containing more than two lots of genetic material was based on my “deeply-held religious belief”. I answered at the time that I could not tell. I was actually taken to task by a couple of people on the ground that this sounded somehow weak or indecisive. So I want to explain why I cannot tell.
Like many of my colleagues in the Assembly, I have moral instincts, and I have an intellect. Like the majority of them and the majority of the Australian community, I am a Christian—in my case, a Catholic. I make no apology for this, and, short of boasting, I have never tried to hide it. The Catholic Church has particular views about moral questions. It teaches that morality is real and that the best way to resolve moral questions is rationally, by using our intellect. So when I have the feeling that it would not be the right thing to walk across the room and punch one of the members opposite in the nose, I know that that feeling is not just an evolutionary instinct developed to help us live in communities; it is something that is real, it is built on the design of the universe and it ought to be taken seriously.
I know that rationality is not merely one of a series of possible ways of viewing the universe. I know that truth exists, that things happen for a reason, and that many statements are either true or false. That is how I approach the question of public policy: rationally, and on the basis that morality exists. This is nothing new to Catholics. The church has been doing this for millennia, as have, indeed, other children of the book and the followers of other traditions.
Would I take this approach if I was not a Catholic or a Christian? I hope so, but, as I said to the interviewer the other day, I cannot really tell. Perhaps I would take the view that morality was just a series of social conventions and that, if you learnt the trick of how to circumvent them, those in the know could amend them to suit themselves. But there is an increasingly popular view that religious views have no place in public policy debate.
On one hand, if I were to stand up here in the Assembly and support or propose a law on the grounds that it was against the church’s teaching—that is, that the Pope told me to, or that the Bible said so, or that I had a vision from the Archangel Gabriel who told me that to vote in a particular way was the way I should go—that would rightly be rejected. I could then be legitimately accused of taking a position on purely religious
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