For your edification - commonsense and Christian should not be used in the same sentence.
" Revisit what the Jesuits taught you about Social Justice." Like discouraging condoms in AIDS ridden Africa. Legalizing same sex marriage. Christianity and social Justice should also not be used in the same sentence.
And why should a Christian receive any preferential treatment.

What I found most telling in this article was the comment made almost in passing about when we last voted. In parenthesis it reads (is it really only a month ago?).
Indeed. How quickly have the Rudd/Gillard disruptive years passed into history.
Abbott will do well as PM. He did what he had to do to get elected, and he will do what he has to do to govern. Witness his first foray overseas. Suddenly finding himself not campaigning but representing Australia, he dealt with the issues at hand - boat people, our relationship with Indonesia and our place in Asia being chief amongst them - with skill and necessary compromise.
Abbott could become one of Australian politics biggest surprises. I admit to having mixed feelings going into that election booth, and my vote for the Coalition was as much anti-ALP as pro-LNP. But so far, so good.

So, we should continue to borrow money simply to send it overseas? The borrowed money will be repaid by Australian workers (with interest) and we will get no direct benefit other than the warm fuzzy feeling of possibly having helped out people in countries which are too corrupt to help their own people.

Between 2003-2011 the UK sent 1.9billion pounds to the Congo in "aid". Half of it was wasted and a lot went to politicians whose salaries increased by 800%. They now account for 11% of the country's GDP.

Ethicists should attack the source of the problem not the outcome. Its far too easy to spend other peoples money.

There is no necessary connection between being "educated", or more correctly brain-washed by the Jesuits and social justice concerns.
Yes some sections of the Jesuits have a strong social justice orientation, but not all of them. Do a Google on Jesuits and fascist politics in World War II - particularly in Croatia.

Have you ever noticed there are many people in academia who are closer to the problems of the world, than they are to the problems of folk in Oz?

Have you also noticed there are many people in academia who take themselves, & their opinions far too seriously, treating their ideas as gospel?

Have you ever noticed these people also are in the habit of quoting themselves?

Have you also noticed they very often wear natty little beards, that require hours standing in front of a mirror, trimming them to perfection?

I wonder if this is the reason they fall in love with themselves, & talk down to the mean masses they despise.

What a disgusting bit of self aggrandizement .

As we see the usual haters come out to abuse someone telling the truth and holding the mirror up to their faces.

1. we don't borrow money from overseas countries like Afghanistan, we borrow it from other rich people, it is not the fault of the people of Afghanistan that we do that.
2. Abbott was a brown nosing groveller breaking the law in Indonesia and still the haters will claim we really do have some legal right to force other nations to jail refugees for us.

The people abusing the author show him to be telling the truth about the cruel, racist stupidity and ignorance of people who have never known a day of real hardship.

Hasbeen has spoken - therefore it must be so!

"The Director of one church aid group, Uniting World, (Dr Kerry Enright), has published estimates that as a result of the Government's cuts 450,000 lives will be lost down the years and millions of children will lose the opportunity to go to school."

And this figure is arrived at... how? As other commenters have pointed out, the link between rich countries handing out large sums of foreign aid and poor people getting richer is tenuous in the extreme. Even the corporate sponsors of sporting teams require some sort of evidence that they are getting value for their money; what evidence can you supply that restoring foreign aid is going to save 450,000 human beings? Can you name one?

What's really going on is bribery, of course: keep your nationals in Australia quiet, vet potential immigrants before you send them over, don't put too many Australian tourists in prison, vote our way at the UN, and the baksheesh will keep coming into the pockets of our corrupt elite. If Abbott has the moral courage to step out of the system, good luck to him.

I wouldn't waste my time Noel or hold my breath! The man has very strong and complex views and isn't for turning? Even so, he is a good deal more "Christian", than many might think?
Rhrosty.

Instead of cutting foreign aid they should reduce funding for institutions that produce the likes of the Professor & Marylin Shepherd at al.
They're just stirring for the sake of stirring. Let the new Government settle in & sort out Labor's legacy first.

It is typical of the posts on this forum that the only people who make any sense are the ones that don't hide behind stupid nicknames! So far in this particular thread that is precisely one.

Colin Pain,
Must feel great to be able to live up to your name. Tell us what's so wrong with not wasting our tax dollar on pointless academics ? I'd much rather see some money poured into manufacturing of foreign aid equipment.

Hi Individual - my point is not really about this thread in particular, but the fact that you and many others do not have the courage of your convictions to give us the benefit of your "witty" comments under your real name.

Oh Gawd, not another finger wagging moral puritan piously telling Australians how disgusting we are. Mr Preston calls himself "an ethicist". Who is paying his wages and how much does he earn?

One presumes that Preston gets his bucks from the good old Aussie taxpayer, the very person who's welfare he is least concerned with. One newspaper report in Sydney's "Daily Telegraph" claimed that some of these public servants responsible for handing out Aussie taxpayer cash to every foreigner they can find are earning $300,000 dollars a year with special tax provisions for working overseas.

I am always very suspicious of people who always claim to be acting for the most altruistic reasons. Scratch the surface and you usually find the most blatant self interest.

If Mr Preston is one of those characters on $300 grand a year, of course he can find a million "altruistic" reasons why Aussie taxpayers should keep on giving.

Memo to Mr Preston. An Australian was found dead in the carpark of Liverpool hospital after seeking help their and being turned away because of overcrowding. 840 Aussies have died on the Sydney-Brisbane Pacific Highway in the last 20 years because the NSW government has been unable to find a miserable few billions of dollars to complete this national highway to dual carriage standards. Hospitals in Sydney are routinely at "condition red". Homeless people abound on the streets of our CBD.

If you really are an "ethicist" then you had better get it through your head that charity begins at home. It is unethical of you to demand that Australia give away $ 4.5 billion that we just don't have when we are $200 billion in dept., and we have our own deserving poor who are being shafted by people like you.

Noel, the reason why we need rules of just conduct in the first place is to establish the principle that’s it’s not okay for the stronger to abuse or simply grab from the weaker.

Here’s a couple of basic ethical precepts that you obviously missed in Ethics 101:
1. Other people are not your property. Don’t treat them as such.
2. There is no more basic moral and humanitarian distinction that that between voluntary and charitable transactions, and transactions based on attacking or threatening to attack people.

Imagine if someone had written an article in praise of making love, but on examining it, it turned out that they had failed to distinguish between making love and rape, totally confusing sex based on aggressively threatening people with making love. Well that’s the level of moral and intellectual blunder you have made in your article.

Did Jesus say “Go around with some armed men and threaten to attack people, or lock them in a cage if they don’t give you as much money as you demand, and then with that money, do unto others as you would have them do unto you?”?

No, he didn’t say that, did he? And to confuse his charitable message with anything based on initiating aggression against anyone shows complete moral idiocy, doesn’t it?

In fact and in law, taxation is a compulsory impost. Marilyn in an earlier post referred to the “torture” of refugees, meaning, detention. So even Marilyn understands that it is moral nonsense to ostentatiously pretend “compassion” funding gifts to people based on taxation.

Also, have you actually checked AusAid to see what so-called foreign aid money is spent on? People should no more be forced to fund political, than religious indoctrination of children.

There is simply no reason for asserting that gifts to non-Australians, taken under compulsion and given to foreign government bureaucracies and academics, are morally or pragmatically better than gifts given by people who voluntarily donate them, directly to the objects of their compassion in other countries.

Noel’s is an ostentatious display of completely fake moral superiority.

Colin Pain,
If people with your mentality do not have the integrity to make sober assessments hence your reply. Why not prove to us you have some integrity & OFFER solutions instead of bagging.
I have offered solution from a... hole to breakfast but the likes of you keep pushing the "look after me from cradle to grave" mentality.
Yes it was a Professor writing to the new PM not a sober thinking realistic thinking self-supporting citizen with a more stable mentality of what reality is all about. When a do-gooder mentions give it actually means give me. They want to look good by asking others to fork out for their idealistic schemes but never put their hands into their own pockets.

The Christian teachings of the Jesuits tell people to donate their own money to the poor - not other people's money.

Every dollar taken in tax is a dollar that cannot be given in charity as an expression of its owner's love and compassion.

Hey Ducky, you wouldn't have one of those prissy little beards yourself would you? It certainly is a good visual aid to advance warning that the wearer is totally & incorrectly convinced of their own importance.

Come on Colin, admit it. This is a joke isn't it? I just don't believe any one can be so well represented by their real name.

Could it really be Pain by mane, & pain by nature?

Nah, it's a joke!

We no longer have any monetary sovereignty and cannot create from nothing the money to equal increases in productivity/growth or inflation.

So why do we borrow $4.5 billion in foreign aid from OS banks when they can just create it from nothing and give it directly to poor nations?

Is that Shepard real or a comedy act, can anyone be so one dimensional in reality? Reminds me of trying to reason with hormonally challenged teens, nominally intelligent life, certainly full of enthusiasm but definitely not one would even trust with anything serious or sharp.