What Australia MUST do: Part III
What Australia MUST do to advance: Part III
One of the most significant universal laws set in place in the western world, originally (though not officially until much later) by France and, like most things, made famous by the USA is the separation of Church and State.
In Australia, our constitution also includes this little nugget:
The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.
That is from Section 116, and it prohibits the Government from setting a state religion (Take that Christian Australia!), and from prohibiting the Government from intervening in any citizens private beliefs.
But where is the stipulation that Government must not give favor to any one religious view when formulating law? Banning Stem Cell research because of “moral” objections is unmistakably Christian morality being given free reign, as is the “ban” on stores trading on Easter Sunday.
Then again it is ONLY our constitution and isn’t really worth the papers it was scribbled on in a pub one night. Don’t believe me? Look at section 115:
A State shall not coin money, nor make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender in payment of debts.
Oops.
(Just a side thought, does that mean I can use gold to pay off my house? I mean, it is well established that our coins and banknotes are now legal tender (instead of being like an I.O.U for gold), but my Constitution says that making coins and notes legal tender, thus taking away any REAL value they might have had is and was illegal. But yeah, we have separation of Church and State.)
In Australia, no law can pass without the Royal Assent. This means that no law can pass without the Queen’s blessing and as the Queen isn’t really here (nor would she want to be), she assigns a representative to do all the dirty work, that person is the Governor-General. So while many people might think KRudd is in charge, our (defacto) head of state is the GG.
This is where the lines between church and state begin to blur, making a big, blurry, fuzzy… thing.
The Queen, under and English monarchy is the head of the Church of England, thus making the Governor-General, Australia’s representative for the head of the Church of England. That means that all laws must get the royal assent from a defacto head of a Catholic-ish church.
To add more fuel to the flames of absurdity when trying to pretend Australia and any church are separate, in 2001 John Howard, everyone’s favourite gnome, put forward his support for Peter Hollingworth, an Anglican minister for Governor-General, which the queen accepted.
Hollingworth eventually retired due to Anglican priests in his Diocese showing the Catholics they too can fiddle hard and Hollingworth doing his best impression of a Pope.
This piece is about the need for the Australia to setup and demand a 100% secular government free from any and all hindrance from religion.
Abortion is a perfect example. Under a secular, rational Government abortion would be legalised, without debate. It would than be up to the citizen if they would get an abortion. Marijuana would be legalised, Voting would NOT be compulsory and neither would wearing a seatbelt.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, not voting and not wearing a seatbelt are stupid, dumb things to do, but I’ll be damned if a Government with a hard on for soft paternalism will tell me what to do.
If we had a truly secular Government, we wouldn’t have to deal with Sentator Fielding. If a truly secular Australian Government existed, after his outing on Q&A as being a person who believes the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, he would have been laughed out of Canberra while wearing a dunce cap.
Again this isn't meant to be a pieve on the ridiculousness of religion, or the absurdity and hypocrisy of the people who believe, but the need for Australia to take a hard stance on allowing a representatives personal morality getting in the way of governing a country which, I feel, is in a unique position to become a world leader in all the major sticking points of our civilization.
The problem Australia clearly has, is that the lines between religion, specifically Christianity, and the Government are blurred beyond recognition.
According to Senator Fielding, on the same episode of Q&A, Kevin Rudd opens his private meetings with a reading from the bible. Our leader, regardless of his personal private views should never be using scripture to base his decisions.
Before each sitting of Parliament, the Lord's prayer is read - in my local council the Lord's prayer is read before each meeting. How in holy hell can Australia claim it has a multicultural society when before each meeting of our elected "leaders" a Christian prayer is read?
It has been suggested, multiple times, that a politician can not, and should not, separate his or her personal religious views from their public self.
That point of view is all fine and dandy, if one day they woke up and magically became a representative - but they didn't. What the public has seemed to forgotten over the last decade or century is that these people work for us. They represent an entire electorate regardless if someone voted for them or not. Unless they are certain the 100% of their district would approve of a reverse logic, hypocritical moral stance then they should not represent it in their public persona.
An electorate will never be wholly one religion or moral viewpoint, especially in times such as these there fore the government can not make decisions based on one religion or viewpoint. Any and all decisions made by the government must be based on rational fact and evidence and must never intervene with anyones personal life.
The only way to ensure that Australia becomes an untarnished, beacon of freedom and liberty is to clearly define and defend the complete separation of religion and the governing body.
- db
