Catholic Archbishop Mark Coleridge attacks euthanasia law ‘rush’ in Queensland election campaign

Brisbane’s Catholic Archbishop Mark Coleridge has ramped up his attack on the Palaszczuk government over euthanasia.

Catholic Archbishop Mark Coleridge in his official residence in New Farm, Brisbane. Euthanasia has become an issue in the Queensland state election. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

A week from the Queensland election, Brisbane’s Catholic Archbishop Mark Coleridge has launched a blistering attack on the Palaszczuk state government over euthanasia.

At Saturday-evening masses, a strong statement from the archbishop was read out. The process will be repeated at Sunday masses.

The intervention comes as Newspoll shows next weekend’s election as being too close to call, with the implosion of the One Nation vote giving both major parties a boost in key seats.

Archbishop Coleridge’s statement said that Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s decision to rush euthanasia legislation before state parliament in February next year – rather than waiting for the Queensland Law Reform Commission to deliver its report to the government in March — had made the issue intensely political and front and centre in the maelstrom of an electoral campaign.

It had done so “in a way that does no justice to the complexity and delicacy of the issue’’, he said.

“Inevitably too it makes people like me and Anglican Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, who joined me in a public statement, seem partisan in the electoral context when neither of us wants to play the partisan game,’’ Archbishop Coleridge said.

The statement posed the question: “Why the rush?’’ The archbishop said he was unconvinced by Ms Palaszczuk’s explanation that so many people had asked her to hasten the process.

“It’s more likely that the Premier has succumbed to political pressure of one kind or another, and one can only speculate as to what that might be.’’

The question of euthanasia, he said “is quite literally a matter of life and death; and there are no issues more important for a community and for individuals than those that touch life and death.

“At a time when suicide is a national problem – especially among youth and First Nations people – the government wants to sanction suicide in law, saying that suicide in some contexts is an acceptable solution.’’

The assumptions underlying palliative care and VAD (voluntary assisted dying) are so utterly different that they are in the end incompatible, he said. “A choice has to be made, and the only really human choice is properly palliative care.’’

In a separate move, some parishes also condemned the Palaszczuk government’s 2018 abortion legislation.