Capital’s offence is to drag us into perilous territory

Far-left and Greens members of the ACT parliament envisage remaking all of Australia in their own radical image.

The latest move by the Greens-Labor ACT government to legalise voluntary assisted dying is part of a suite of legislation, an ideological package that aims to create in the federal capital territory a social template for the rest of the country. Make no mistake, this legislation, along with several other controversial laws, aims to cement the ACT’s reputation as Australia’s social laboratory. But that is not all.

As Chief Minister Andrew Barr has often boasted, the ACT will be “the first” and “the leader” in social legislation. In other words, what a handful of far-left and Greens members of a local parliament envisage is remaking all of Australia in its own far-left Greens image.

This is not an exaggeration of what some see as the ACT’s crazy dystopian Greens social policies: legalising hard drugs; transgender laws that undercut parental authority by preventing confused children from leaving the territory; forcibly acquiring a Catholic-run hospital and hospice at the same time as introducing liberal VAD laws. All these things may seem to people outside the ACT a limited social endeavour, particular to the territory, widely ridiculed as a Truman-like bubble of privilege.

The propensity to make fun of the ACT’s demographics and social agenda is dangerous and actually works in favour of extreme ideologues. Why? Because this is not just a social endeavour; it is a precisely targeted political endeavour aimed at the entire country. And how, you might ask, are they to do that?

First, the Greens are seeking to spread the Labor-Greens political power-sharing arrangement that exists in the ACT across Australia.

As reported in The Australian, their plan is to begin with a signed agreement with Anthony Albanese before the next election to share power federally in the likely event of a Labor minority government. However, at present the Prime Minister is resisting a formal arr­angement with the Greens. He has attacked them because they won seats from Labor at the last election that he must win back.

However if, as many pundits believe, Labor will go into minority government, he might not have any choice.

It would not be the first time this has happened in Australia. Julia Gillard, although she did not sign a formal agreement, needed Greens leader Bob Brown’s support to form minority government. Despite the support of independents, the Greens were the foundation partners of her government because they were the largest independent bloc.

As I have written previously, the second front the Greens have opened in their attempt to take over traditional Labor politically is by pressing for an expansion of the number of senators in the ACT. At present the ACT has two senators. The Greens are pressing for as many as six, claiming, logically, that the population expansion of the ACT warrants the extra numbers. At present, the ACT has just under the population of Tasmania, which has 12 senators.

Despite the logic of the argument, however, this also would have the calculated effect of locking in progressives’ control of the Senate. So the Greens are seeking the balance of power in both houses of the federal parliament – and the ACT is the policy and ideas ideological model. What is that model? It is an inconsistent model of progressive “liberty”.

The recent liberalisation of the drug laws and the introduction of VAD have given some people the impression that the ACT is a harbinger of individual liberty. The term “personal use” of drugs is always the qualifying factor. Fair enough, you may say, if people do drugs they may harm only themselves. Think again. There are families in Canberra who have lost several children, dead before the age of 30. Liberalising drug possession has a society-wide effect.

Likewise, liberalising euthanasia, seemingly an individual’s choice, has a cumulative social effect. In Canada, euthanasia has increased by 30 per cent since it was introduced. In Belgium, people such as the mother of anti-euthanasia ­advocate Tom Mortier now are euthanised for depression (and he wasn’t even informed). So it doesn’t matter what safeguards are in place, it always expands and has bad social and individual effects.

However, the real problem with the so-called progressive agenda is that progressives have exchanged the “punitive” attitude of the Judaeo-Christian model of morality and ethical behaviour for an even more punitive model of their own devising, steeped in their own ideological concerns.

So, for example, in our ideological template of the ACT it is now unlawful for a loving parent to remove an unhappy child suffering from gender dysphoria from the territory for any treatment other than a treatment that affirms the child’s confusion. So parental authority and love have been replaced with a new state-mandated notion of what constitutes children’s welfare. It is not an ethical framework grounded in the natural love and authority of parenthood but in gender queer theory, which the progressive state has decreed surpasses parental love and authority.

So, to fulfil another aim of the ideological Greens catechism, Calvary Hospital and the related hospice had to be forcibly taken over. That is because the accepted ethics of public healthcare and palliative care, which come from Christianity and the foundation of hospitals, had to conform to a new set of morals and be replaced in the territory with a morality of easy-to-get abortion and the choice of euthanasia. However, the morality of choice will probably exclude medical staff, who may not have any choice since the government now runs both hospitals. Taking over Calvary was a convenient way of avoiding the brouhaha in Queensland where Labor tried to force Catholic hospitals to accept euthanasia on the premises.

The readership often has great sport with the crazy Canberra agenda – as do many of us living in the people’s republic of the ACT. What is there to do but laugh about Big Brother in a place where you can be caught by a mobile camera and fined $132 for parking your car facing the wrong way and only $100 for having a gram of heroin. But laughing is dangerous. Canberra is richer, younger and better educated than the rest of the country and none of these policies were articulated by the Barr government before the election. If the political success of the Labor-Greens alliance here is anything to go by, we are in for a Big Brother Greens-dominated future in Australia.