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A peaceful night vigil of hundreds of people at WA Parliament on June 16 will declare ‘No life is disposable at any time’ amid law changes that attack the safety of thousands of women and their children.

“Since we love all mothers and all their children, we reject the deceptive ‘Safe Access Zones’ Bill that threatens mandatory jail and huge fines for caring, silent offers of support to mothers,” said the rally organiser Darryl Budge, who is President of The Coalition for the Defence of Human Life.

“Mothers tell us that abortion leads to decades of pain and regret, and they wish they knew what damage it would do beforehand,” said the pro-life advocate who also represents FamilyVoice in WA.

“As a movement for life in WA, we mourn the deaths of 190,000 unborn children and the thousands of women who have been hurt since abortion was legalised in 1998.”

The WA government has a history of censoring offers of assistance to mothers in distress, according to Mr Budge.

“Amber-Jade Sanderson MLA has ordered the WA Health Department to delete pregnancy assistance groups like Abortion Grief Australia from the ‘Contacts’ section in three pregnancy-related Health Department brochures, even though the group employs qualified counsellors,” Mr Budge said.

“Ms Sanderson excused her discriminatory rejection of these three pregnancy assistance services in Parliament on November 10, by saying they were ‘religious’ and ‘outdated’.

“She did not explain why the government is already partnered with dozens of religious organisations to provide health, aged care, and welfare services.”

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The WA government’s ‘Safe Access’ Bill will have a profoundly detrimental effect on the safety of distressed mothers, according to the Coalition for the Defence of Human Life, which is holding a large rally against abortion on June 16.

“The truth about abortion may be uncomfortable but the solution is not the criminalisation of communication about these matters,” said CDHL President Darryl Budge, who also represents FamilyVoice in WA.

“After helping a woman fleeing an abusive situation, a woman can be jailed and fined $12,000, due to this Bill, for having an abortion-related conversation in a 300-metre radius of an abortion facility,” said the father-of-two, who is co-chairing the annual Rally for Life at WA Parliament on June 16.

Mr Budge said that the bill dehumanises women’s independent capacity to protect themselves and their children from abuse at any point in their lives.

“It is distressing that a woman’s free choice to seek help during her pregnancy will be judged and barred by a court, not herself.

“In over 20 years, not a single vigil attendee has been arrested or moved on by police near an abortion clinic in WA.

“This unsafe bill is anti-woman and anti-child. It places women in harm’s way.”

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Voted for the euthanasia bill:

David Basham, Finnis (Lib)
Frances Bedford, Florey (Ind)
Troy Bell, Mount Gambier (Ind)
Zoe Bettison, Ramsay (ALP)
Vickie Chapman, Bragg (Lib)
Matt Cowdrey, Colton (Lib)
Jon Gee, Taylor (ALP)
Eddie Hughes, Giles (ALP)
Steven Marshall, Dunstan (Lib)
Lee Odenwalder, Elizabeth (ALP)
David Pisoni, Unley (Lib)
Jayne Stinson, Badcoe (ALP)
Tim Whetstone, Chaffey (Lib)
Leon Bignell, Mawson (ALP)
Susan Close, Port Adelaide (ALP)
Fraser Ellis, Narungga (Ind)
Richard Harvey, Newland (Lib)
Paula Luethen, King (Lib)
Nick McBride, MacKillop (Lib)
Stephen Patterson, Morphett (Lib)
Carolyn Power, Elder (Lib)
Joe Szakacs, Cheltenham (ALP)
Corey Wingard, Gibson (Lib)
Blair Boyer, Wright (ALP)
Nat Cook, Hurtle Vale (ALP)
John Gardner Morialta (LIb)
Katrine Hildyard, Reynell (ALP)
Peter Malinauskas, Croydon (ALP)
Stephen Mullighan, Lee (ALP)
Chris Picton, Kaurna (ALP)
Rachel Sanderson, Adelaide (Lib)
Peter Treloar, Flinders (Lib)
Dana Wortley, Torrens (ALP)

*Geoff Brock, Frome (IND) - Did not vote but granted a pair in support of the bill.

Voted against the bill:

Dan Cregan, Kavel (Lib)
Tom Koutsantonis, West Torrens (ALP)
Adrian Pederick, Hammond (Lib)
Vincent Tarzia, Hartley (Lib)
Sam Duluk, Waite (Ind)
Andrea Michaels, Enfield (ALP)
Tony Piccolo, Light (ALP)
Dan van Holst Pellekaan
Stephan Knoll, Schubert (Lib)
Steve Murray, Davenport (Lib)
David Speirs, Black (Lib)

*Michael Brown, Playford (ALP) - Did not vote but granted a pair against the bill.

Other

Note: Speaker Josh Teague (Heyson - Lib) did not vote.

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Reconciliation with our Indigenous fellow citizens is incredibly important to most of us, as we recall the suffering of many Indigenous families over the past two centuries or more.

Here at FamilyVoice Australia we have a deep concern to reach out to the Indigenous community, and regularly give encouragement to Aboriginal children and adults.

But as Sydney Presbyterian pastor Mark Powell said in a recent Quadrant article, “Reconciliation starts with telling the truth.”

Mark has a degree in anthropology. He has studied several primary sources detailing Indigenous culture from the late 18th century, such as those summarised by noted anthropologist A.P. Elkin.

Mark says it’s difficult to see how true reconciliation can occur when falsehoods – such as claims that Aboriginal people lived in peace and harmony until the Europeans came – continue to be perpetrated.

So what were the actual beliefs and practices of Indigenous peoples living in Australia, especially since Europeans arrived?

In his classic account published in 1964, The Australian Aborigines: How To Understand Them, Elkin describes how Indigenous communities treated their women. They were considered chattels, or worse. Some examples:

  • Before a revenge expedition sets out on its dangerous enterprise, its members temporarily exchange wives, thus expressing their unity and friendship to one another.
  • The final making of peace between two groups may always include the temporary exchange of wives, and on such occasions, all the usual tribal marriage laws (except those concerned with incest within the family) may be and are usually broken.
  • Very often at times of great excitement during ceremonies, the men go aside to prearranged places and there have sexual intercourse with the women, and once again, the usual rules governing the intercourse of the sexes are ignored.
  • These occasions are communal in nature, but there is another – the lending of a wife to a visitor.

Robert Hughes AO wrote the early history of British penal settlement in Australia, The Fatal Shore. He sought to provide an unvarnished snapshot of the cultural standards of that time, such as:

 …the unalterable fact of [Indigenous] tribal life was that women had no rights at all and could choose nothing. A girl was usually given away as soon as she was born. She was the absolute property of her kin until marriage, whereupon she became the equally helpless possession of her husband. Before and after [marriage], she was merely a root-grubbing, shell-gathering chattel, whose social assets were wiry arms, prehensile toes and a vagina…

As a mark of hospitality, wives were lent to visitors whom the Iora tribesmen wanted to honour…. If a woman showed the least reluctance to be used for any of these purposes, if she seemed lazy or gave her lord and master any other cause for dissatisfaction, she would be furiously beaten or even speared.

There are many other accounts, such as one by escaped convict William Buckley. He lived for over 30 years among different Aboriginal groups, mostly in Victoria. In his story published in 1852, he reported that “violence, treachery, and killings” were common, almost everyday occurrences.

In many cases the conflicts began over sexual jealousy and abduction of women who, according to Buckley, were the “source of almost all the mischief in which the men engaged”.

Female Aboriginal skulls and bone fragments, uncovered and recorded by archaeologists and dated thousands of years old, had many more massive bone lacerations and scars compared with those in male skulls in the same burial site.

None of this evidence justifies the appalling treatment of Indigenous people by some white settlers.

But Australia’s Indigenous culture was far from idyllic before 1788. As Mark Powell says, true reconciliation cannot be achieved while historical falsehoods continue.

Peter Downie - National Director

FamilyVoice Australia