1) Anti-terrorism legislation
2) Workplace Relations legislation
3) Suicide and euthanasia legislation
The latest infringement of our rights as citizens of Australia has come from the Federal government in the form of the new “Criminal Code Amendment (Suicide Related Material Offences) Act, which became law on 6 January 2006.
According to Marshall Perron, who was chief minister of the Northern Territory, leading a Country Liberal Party government, between 1988 and 1995, and whose “Rights of the Terminally Ill Act was overturned in 1997 by the private member’s bill introduced by Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews, Australia has gone backward in this area.
During the period 1985 to 1998 many people in Australia had watched friends, relatives, lovers with AIDS and AIDS-related diseases suffer unbelievably from some of these, due to the nature of the illnesses they caused. Some of the people with these distressing and painful illnesses decided they could not go through what they had seen other people suffering and decided to end their days by euthanasia. There was not a great deal of pain management available for many of these conditions, some of which, like cytomegalovirus, caused blindness in addition to other painful diseases, and, with limited financial resources and also limited availability of care, both in hospitals and at home, it was easier to commit suicide.
There may be some statistics available of the numbers who suicided, although this is doubtful, but it has to be acknowledged that many of these suicides were assisted, by friends, partners, doctors, nurses and others who knew that the patients were going through unbearable suffering and wished to live no longer.
Fortunately, by the late 1990s, new drugs had come onto the market which, to a certain extent, has made HIV/AIDS manageable, so that many people were able to return to work and to live lives more or less normally, within the limitations of the side effects many of the drugs caused. So the suicide situation for people living with HIV/AIDS is no longer as it was in those earlier grim and unhappy times.
Back to 2006, where we have a federal government which is eroding the civil liberties of all its citizens as it increases controls over every aspect of our lives. How could one equate censorship with suicide? By passing legislation which determines that people may no longer talk about suicide, write about suicide, have any items about suicide on web sites, and will, according to Marshall Perron “prohibit free and open dialogue between Australian citizens in a fundamental way. It will make it a crime to use a telephone, fax, email or internet carriage service to discuss the practicalities of end-of-life options. Passed by the Federal Parliament in July (2005) with only the Greens and the Democrats voting against it, the law is a devastating blow to the rights of the terminally ill and to the many elderly people who support voluntary euthanasia.”
It should be noted by the federal government and all those working in the field of youth suicide, whose new law it seems is aimed at preventing young people from gaining access to any items discussing suicide, that the numbers of young males, even more than young females, committing, or attempting, suicide, are more often than not, young people from rural and regional areas where help is not available and where the issue is very often a depth of despair about the person’s developing sexuality awareness.
Rather than addressing the problems, the government thinks it can legislate the suicides out of the public’s consciousness. This will only exacerbate an already criminal situation in which governments around Australia all share the blame in allowing this horrendous situation to continue without attempting to remedy it.
We now have sedition laws which means that we can be arrested for criticising the government. If the government carries out its threats on this basis it is going to have very full prisons if people agree to go to jail rather than recant their “sins”!
Police state is on its way, Howard has shown himself unwilling to accept any challenge to his ways of thinking, and he is showing marked signs of megalomania. This is dangerous for us all, because when it is time for the next election in 2007, some situation can be manufactured which will ensure that the government, through the governor general, can declare a state of emergency and state we are under threat of terrorism and need to “protect our country”. The biggest threat to our democracy comes, not so much from the Howard control as from the fact that there is no opposition in Australia. Howard has been lucky to have a compliant branch of his party called the Alternative Liberal Party (ALP) which supports everything he has done – children overboard, Tampa, asylum seekers, sedition laws – the list is endless – and now includes censorship of discussions about suicide and everything else.
The following article appeared in The Age newspaper on 4 July 2006:
The Commonwealth is heading for a showdown with South Australia over plans to introduce a voluntary euthanasia bill before the end of the year.
A decade ago, the Federal Government overturned Northern Territory legislation allowing euthanasia. But Canberra does not have the same power over states as it does over territories, which means that if a bill goes through, it will stand.
After reports that an Adelaide woman had travelled to Switzerland to end her life, two members of the SA Parliament have signalled their intention to put up a voluntary euthanasia bill.
Labor backbencher Steph Key said that while it would be the sixth time such a bill had been introduced in SA in the past decade or so, she was hopeful that this time it would pass. Ms Key, who has just returned from a fact-finding mission to the Netherlands, and Independent MP Bob Such said they planned to introduce a euthanasia bill.
“I get the impression there is genuine support for voluntary euthanasia,” Ms Key said.
(ABC - Last Update: Friday, September 22, 2006. 3:22pm (AEST))
Euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke has compared Customs' seizure of his new book with the burning of literature in Germany during the Nazi era.
On Tuesday, 45 copies of The Peaceful Pill Handbook were seized at Brisbane airport. They will now be withheld, pending appeal.
Speaking at a conference in Sydney to mark 10 years since the overturning of Northern Territory's euthanasia laws, Dr Nitschke says the action goes to the heart of the right to free speech.
"The comment that was made was that it's an incitement to suicide, which, of course, we would argue against. There's no incitement in the book," he said.
"We've also been told that unless we take steps to legally appeal the decision, they will be destroyed in 21 days."
4) (a) Gay Marriage Overseas Consular Instructions
---(b) Gay marriage in Australia
5) Censorship
6) Identity Cards
7) Concentration Camps
8) RU486 and Abortion
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