Brown attacks Catholic Church election stance

THE Greens have taken on the Catholic Church, accusing the church hierarchy of trying to tell parishioners how to vote in this month's Victorian election and wanting to ''dictate'' to the terminally ill that they should suffer.

Greens leader Bob Brown yesterday hit back at Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart, who said at the weekend that the church totally disagreed with the Greens on assisted suicide and that he could never vote for a pro-euthanasia party.

Senator Brown said he did not think Archbishop Hart's intervention would have much impact because the Greens embraced Christian ethics and Catholic voters could think for themselves.

 

He said polls showed about 80 per cent of Victorians were in favour of voluntary euthanasia, so on that issue the Greens represented the majority view and the Catholic bishops were in a small minority.

''What they are wanting to do in terms of euthanasia is dictate to people who are suffering the indignity and pain of a terminal illness that they shall suffer and to deprive those persons of their ability to ask their doctors to, with their families, help them have a dignified end when there is no hope of recovery,'' Senator Brown told ABC television.

He said a similar majority of voters supported legalised abortion and same-sex marriage - two other policies advocated by the Greens but opposed by the Catholic Church.

''I welcome the Catholic Church or the Presbyterian Church or the Buddhists or anyone having a say in that - we are a free and open democracy - but it really opens up to public attention the fact that the Greens are a 21st-century party trying to drag the other parties out of their last-century thinking on so many issues.''

Senator Brown was responding to a pointed election guide the church is sending to Victoria's 488 Catholic schools and 300-plus parishes, which urges Catholics to ask election candidates: ''Will you oppose any attempt to legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide, whatever it may be called? What is your attitude towards abortion?''

Archbishop Hart told The Age the church did not want to ''bucket'' any political party, but said: ''Our society will be judged by how we treat our weakest and most vulnerable - those in the womb and those who are very, very old.''

He told the ABC euthanasia was an ''absolutely essential issue'' for the church, saying: ''We disagree totally with the Greens' view on this.''

The church respected the right of individual voters, the archbishop said, but ''for me, of course, I could never vote for someone'' who supported euthanasia.

With an Age/Nielsen poll showing the Greens attracting a primary vote of 16 per cent across Victoria and 18 per cent in metropolitan Melbourne, Senator Brown urged the Brumby government to stop logging in old-growth forests.

''Labor has done nothing about the wholesale destruction, although 80 per cent of people in Victoria want that destruction stopped,'' he said.

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