Serial Ignorance 

One Man's Web > Politics and Ethics > Serial Ignorance
July 16 2003

  UNITING CHURCH PRESS RELEASE

 Church leader accuses government of 'serial ignorance'

The retiring President of the Uniting Church in Australia today spoke out against abysmal moral standards in Australian politics and a conspiracy of ignorance on the part of the Federal Government and Opposition.

The Rev. Professor James Haire, in his farewell address to the church's 10th national Assembly, said, "Many things in this nation, frankly, are rotten - in foreign policy, in immigration policy and in welfare policy."

And the Opposition federally was as responsible as the Government for this, he said.

He said information emerging that the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq seemed to have been totally false pointed to "a self-created serial ignorance" among the nation's political leaders.

Professor Haire said Australians were living in a time of profound turning away from God in much of their social and national life.

He said, "At the time of the last Federal general election I said that I believed that, egged on by both political groupings in the country, we as a nation had reached new depths of political depravity, especially with the duplicity and harshness of the Tampa incident, and the total inability of the Federal Opposition to act as an opposition in the nation, thus depriving this nation of any genuine democratic debate leading up to the election. 

"What is now emerging from the lead-up to the Iraq War demonstrates yet again the abysmal moral standards within the U.S., U.K. and Australia."

Professor Haire said, "In democracies, the military must be totally under the control of the elected Government, and the Government must be entirely transparent to the parliament and the people.

"Truth lies at the heart of these relationships. Now that truth has been thrown overboard, our democracy is under a fearful attack from a joint conspiracy of the Government and opposition."

He said, "When 'truth' becomes a commodity manufactured by spin doctors, and aided and abetted by Government departments and political minions afraid to tell it like it really is'... and then on that basis so manipulate public opinion, to send people to war where killing is inevitable, then, indeed we are in a parlous moral state."

Professor Haire concluded, "And we are called to proclaim the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As church - as the people of God - we are bound to stand for truth. We are bound to stand against this cynicism. We must offer an alternative."

He said, "We need as Christians to face these things squarely."

 UCA Media Officer Kim Cain

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