I am not surprised by the Uniting Church’s position on human rights, it seems to be a denomination ready to baptise any fashion that comes along with little or no theological reflection in order to present itself in a favourable light to the surrounding society. This piece by the president of the national assembly reads like a PR exercise that is unbecoming of a Christian church.

The decision to support a human rights charter indicates a displacement of what should be central concerns of the church. The prophetic call for justice pertains to the community of faith and cannot be transformed into rights thought to adhere to the individual. As in all developments of this kind that owes it origin to the European Enlightenment, community does not exist, it is only the individual that exists and this is the reason that justice is also individualised. So instead of the community of faith ensuring that the orphans and the widows have a place in the community we have to invent a new species of existence, a human right. What the character of these mythical species is is determined by the councils of the United Nations where they seem to breed like rabbits. Any well meaning sentiment may be turned into a right. It is this path of good intentions that will lead to unforeseen and undesirable outcomes.

By supporting human rights legislation the church abandons its expectation that God will bring about in the church the kingdom of heaven and, as its activist agenda predicates, attempts to bring about that reality by its own efforts. This is nothing less than an attempt to take the kingdom by force, it is a sin against the Holy Spirit because it takes the place of that Spirit and conforms to the Enlightenment agenda of the self-made man/woman.

Human rights can only diffuse community by setting competing rights against each other. It leads to ethical conundrums as we have seen with the abortion debate. The church would be better off preaching the gospel and letting the Spirit do its work in the world.

Peter Sellick

Are we just looking after Christians, or also including peoples like the Sri-Lankan Tamils most of whom are related to those forcibly brought over from South India by our colonial Brits.

As one of a mixed old and young students doing research in Sri-Lanka in the early 1980s, it was part of our studies to look into the Sri-Lankan Tamil problem, Tamils having been brought over by the Brits mainly to clear the hillsides to grow tea, a practice which the Buddhist Sri-Lankans were very much against, particularly the Jainist sects.

It is so interesting that Dr John Macquire our leader gave more than one lecture about the above post-colonial problem.

Indeed, a problem caused so much by our British Christian fore-fathers, but now lumped so much together with other so-called terrorists borne so much from the heinous practice of colonialism.

From a secular point of view, the proposed charter of rights is profoundly anti-democratic because
it vests ultimate power in the hands of unelected judiciary and officials.
Those who would impose their will on the people can bypass the election process and would not be held unaccountable.
Nice work if you can get and it will be the zealots who will be seeking it.

The statutory rights of any population may be inalienable, as via the Common Law in Australia, but not universal. This is because of the variability of individual circumstances.

Peter Sellick sums up the dangers of a Bill of Rights very well. His take on the pathetic result of a merger between some Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists is pretty good too.

I note that Alistair Macrae isn’t prepared to reveal the people – or class of people – who “fall through the cracks”. There is no reason for anybody in Australian not to have access to rights; and legislating a B of R would not make any difference to people who are not accessing their rights now.

One of the usual suspects drags up Tamils. I don’t think that even the proponents of a Bill of Rights for Australia had illegal immigrants in mind when the idea struck them. Refugees are covered by the UNHRC, and people using people smugglers to avoid putting their case for refugee status are not the sort of people who should be claiming rights as they pertain to a Bill of Rights. If it is the Tamils remaining in Sri Lanka that Bushbred is concerned about, their welfare is in the hands of the Sri Lankan government, not the Australian government.

As for the hated “Brit” colonists, they have nothing to do with Australia, Bill of Rights or no Bill of Rights. If the UK has any bad conscience about its long-gone empire, leave it to them.

There is no rational reason why Australians should allow themselves to be shackled by a Bill of Rights

I am again disgusted at the slavery to lawyers exhibited by so many pseudo Christians, who either cannot read properly, or refuse to read and understand the fundamentals of Statutory Interpretation. Just because a lying cheating lawyer says we have not enacted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights into Australian Law, doers not mean you have to believe him.

In this instance hysteria promulgated by dishonest Christians, who oppose the laws made by the Parliament of the Commonwealth without a skerrick of either truth or logic in their argument, are not serving either God or man properly.

If Christians, and for that matter Jews and Muslims, will just go down to Information Victoria, or go online, at Comlaw, and just do a little clicking, as we now can, they can get a copy of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986 . In it as Schedule 2 they will see the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Just to set their logic chips up, they should go also to the Acts Interpretation Act 1901 and see that S 13 makes a Schedule a fully functioning part of an Act.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is a paraphrasing of the principles set out in the New Testament and pushed by Eleanor Roosevelt after World War II as international law, to ensure peace after the violence of that enormous war where 60 million died. Misguided and misled Christians, are listening to the wrong advice. A basic misunderstanding of the function of a conjunction, in the English Language, leads Christians astray. And joins two ideas.

Failing to make laws meeting the criteria of the Covenant as it is called, in the Criminal Code Act 1995 means a 17 years jail term. ( s 268:12 ) It is a pity lying to a member of Parliament is not such an offence, or the Hon Robert McClelland would no longer be qualified to be Attorney General.

It is no wonder closet Liberal lawyers in the Labor Party want to stop the Australian Federal Police from working properly

The reason lawyers are refusing to be honest about the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights hereafter called the Covenant, is because it abolishes their monopoly. It provides in Article 14 that all persons are equal before the courts and tribunals. That means anyone can select anyone else to represent them, and it also means no one person can exercise the judicial power of the Commonwealth over any other, so all Judges and Magistrates in Australia are criminals. They have been crims, since 2001, when the Criminal Code Act 1995 came into force, but Mick Keelty was chasing fake terrorists, when the real terrorists in Australia are still sitting and still drawing humungous salaries, tax fee in many cases, on the benches of the Courts created illegally by all State Governments and the Commonwealth.

Just imagine if all the members of the Australian Federal Police were serious about the war on terror, and sat in every court in Australia just to make sure the Judge complied with the Covenant. We would have a major outbreak of the benefits of Christianity. The separation of powers, enacted as a Godly Statute in John 5 Verses 22 and 23 would be applied as law, because the Judge would have to apply S 80 Constitution to everyone and grant a jury trial. The Holy Spirit which in Godly Statute, is said to be present when two or more are gathered together in the name of Jesus Christ, is again enacted in the Covenant. ( Matthew18:20)

Sentencing and guilt were enacted as the prerogative of Almighty God to be exercised by a jury. The Royal Prerogative, once present in every court, but abolished by Governments dominated by atheists, is restored by the Covenant. We should have some accountability from lazy Christians who do not read their Holy Bible and the Covenant together. It is good law, sanctioned by Almighty God and lawfully enacted by the Parliament of the Commonwealth. If KR does nothing else, he should instruct the Australian Federal Police to enforce the Covenant, and apologise that it was not done since 2001

Back to your old tricks again, Leigh.

Would do you good, and others like you to do the type of studies we did in Sri-Lanka under Dr John Maquire.

As I said in my earlier thread, proof how much of the present terrorism is the result of colonial greed, as we learnt in our studies.

Finally, might let you know, Leigh that letting the Sri-Lankan government handle the Tamil boat-people problem, is just another example of the weakness of Australia's global awareness.

Alistair
If the majority vote for a crime, does that make it okay?
Is a right whatever the state says it is?
Is anyone justified in using violence or threats to promote equality?

What do you mean by equality anyway? Obviously people aren't to be equal in weight, or height, or singing ability, or aptitude for mathematics, or the number of children they have, or house size, or their preferences, or the values they hold, or skills, or experience, or income, or capital.

Bah- it's usually the Bills of Rights from Church groups that I fear mostly- hence why I'm not remotely interested in supporting the current Bill- because a fanatical Jesuit loony is chairing it.

Pass thanks.

The enlightened Uniting Church is to be commended in supporting Human Rights leglisation, distancing itself from the cruel perpetrators of so many acts of Human Rights abuse of likes of the Catholic Church and the Church of England.

Opposition to Human Rights leglisation by most Christian Churches, has nothing to with the usurping the Holy Spirit or the coming Kingdom, rather it is a fear of loss of power to the Courts, wherein Churches can be held more accountable and they will have less control.

I guess the generations of children abused by Christrians in Church orphanages would have appreciated greater judicial guardianship.

It is good when the Church yeilds to the Rights of the Citizen. This true progressive liberalism burying the elites of the past.

Goodness gracious me, I do believe the Reverend Alistair Macrae is a bit rich advocating human rights while his organisation in cahoots with the vile Mission Employment has subjected me to such degradation and misery that I consider the phrase human rights is the antithesis of what I have experienced under the work for the dole scheme. I have been led to believe that this scheme is designed to give long term unemployed people some work experience. While this may be useful for a year 9 drop-out, I cannot see for the life of me how playing shop at a Lifeline second-hand clothes depot is going to help me with my future career. I do have a couple of degrees including a first class honours, and I did work for the ATO for nearly quarter of a century, I am 50, yet the powers of Christ-inanity under the inspiration of the unholy spirit decided to punish me for my education and work history and sent me to sort old clothes by gender and size and learn how to push a broom. When I complained and declared such tasks as being beneath a man of my education and experience I was declared a ‘job snob’ (goddamn you Tony Abbott). When I had a bit of a mental breakdown while sweeping a two acre expanse of concrete at the Lifeline garbage sorting depot, precipitated when one of the supervisors complimented me on my sweeping to which I replied that I didn’t give a fruitloop, I was very nearly lost my unemployment benefits. I was also subjected to the most humiliating and personal verbal attack from Mission’s ‘community work coordinator’ who threatened me with all sorts of punishments which betrayed the deep hypocrisy of these Christ-inane outfits purporting to help the unemployed, but who in reality use their Howard-granted power to implement a neo-Calvinist agenda in order to punish the unemployed for the sin of not working.
Christianity and Human Right: as great an oxymoron as you’ll ever find.
PS
As Yosser Hughes from The Boys from the Blackstuff would say, 'gizza job'

This Forum, which should be monitored by every thinking politician, is giving some very underprivileged people an opportunity to be heard, a privilege no longer extended to all and sundry by either the Federal Court or High Court, and certainly no longer extended to anyone by any of the Supreme Courts that ply their trade in the capital cities of the States of Australia.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is a moral code, modeled on the New Testament, and enacted as law in Australia by the Commonwealth Parliament in 1981. We have in our electronic community here, a wide range of views, and have heard the people cry out for justice on many occasions.

The urge to subjugate people, is as old as the expulsion of Hagar, by the jealous Sarah, but Almighty God makes no mistakes, and the result of Hagar’s expulsion, is the advent of Islam. Ishmael probably felt as hard done by as the gentleman confined daily to a Uniting Church Charity, and made to sweep useless concrete or lose his dole. His revenge was to survive, as God intended, and create Islam, in the first application of International Competition Policy.

The Covenant as it is called, is enacted as law, no matter what the mad Jesuit priest, as he was called, may say. The justice which one poster seeks is enacted as S 268:12 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 ( Cth) and the leaders of Australia’s Christian Churches, should take note of its penalty. Seventeen years imprisonment is not a light penalty, for the failure to apply the Covenant, but currently the political Police, created by the Liberal Party in 1979, have not been interested in enforcing an inconvenient law. The State Police Services are simply a revenue raising arm of State governments, and totally subservient to the legal professions.

A return of the civil penal action abolished by the Liberal Party in New South Wales in 1970, and free and unfettered access to fully functional Federal Courts, which is the natural consequence of the enactment of the Covenant, would benefit everyone