Page 3196 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 16 August 2011
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sought to destroy the Speaker’s office or Mr Rattenbury’s personal property? And what if the Speaker of the House of Representatives condoned such behaviour?
And this was no minor crime. This was not a peaceful protest. The actions of these vandals destroyed over a year of work, destroyed around $300,000 worth of property and set the cause of feeding the world back significantly. It was an act of thuggery and intimidation as much as an act of property destruction.
And it was an act that flies in the face of any claim Mr Rattenbury makes about evidence-based policy or listening to the science. How can you base policy on evidence if that evidence is being destroyed? Do we only listen to scientists who carry out experiments we agree with?
Dr Christopher Preston, Associate Professor in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine at the University of Adelaide, said the attack was upsetting:
“As an active scientist, I am appalled that a fellow scientist’s experiments have been destroyed through this action,” he said, adding that the OTGR had assessed the trial to offer no significant threat to human health or the environment.
He said:
These trials are not just about the development of genetically modified crops that may at some future time be developed commercially, but frequently provide spin-off information that is of use in our understanding of gene action in the environment. This important information is also lost.
Professor Mark Tester, a plant scientist at the University of Adelaide, said that the protest was deeply disappointing. He said:
GM technology is not a magic bullet but it does offer new opportunities to improve the quality and quantity of wheat …
One cannot make any generalisations about GM or any other technology—it all depends on how it is used … One cannot say that all GM is good or that all GM is bad but it is one of many tools in our toolbox to try and help protect the environment and feed people around the world.
Even if their cause was just, which it is not, they would deserve condemnation. The alternative is that every group with a cause would be encouraged by Shane Rattenbury to take the law into their own hands. Where would it end?
We know where it ends; we have seen recently on the streets of London where that kind of attitude ends. There are people who claimed in London to have had a cause they were standing up for, who claimed that they had been let down by the laws of the land and therefore took the law into their own hands. This is not precisely the same situation, but the principle is very similar. The point is this: how would it appear if the Speaker of the House of Representatives in Britain said that he supported such an illegal protest? What would happen if he said he believed that the end justifies the means?
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