Recently Victoria's Catholic Bishops distributed to parishes their advice to voters in the November 27 state election. Entitled Your Vote, Your Values, it was quickly portrayed as an attack on the Greens, given its focus on euthanasia.
The statement, however, was more complex and interesting than that description suggested. Its stated aim was to help voters make up their mind in a principled way on salient issues. It refrained from endorsing or condemning any party. It began by stating the central principle which governed its treatment: the Christian understanding of each human being.
From this starting point, the document moved to the different areas of life in which human dignity is at issue: the family, education, health and community. On each of these areas it proposed questions that Catholic voters might profitably put to candidates. In all, it suggested twenty five questions.
Within the Catholic vision of human dignity, respect for life in its beginnings and endings has a high priority. So it is natural enough that questions about human life, including those associated with war, abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment should also have a high priority. For state governments the most contested issues are abortion and euthanasia. So voters were encouraged to ask their representatives directly how they would vote on euthanasia and on their attitudes to abortion and freedom of conscience. The latter two questions took up issues raised by Victorian legislation passed in the previous Parliament.
In the bulk of the statement questions were raised about housing, support for children, education, health care particularly of the elderly, treatment of offenders, policies concerning drug use and abuse and about religious freedom.
The Bishops’ statement raises interesting questions. First, the perennial question about the propriety of church leaders buying into election campaigns. In this case the Bishops’ intervention seemed unexceptionable. They directed their writing to Catholics, proposed questions for them to reflect on and to direct to candidates, and refrained from indicating how Catholics should vote.
After the Federal election campaign in which both parties were strongly criticised for avoiding any discussion of principle or of policy, the intervention of the Bishops should not only be tolerated. It should be applauded. Contributions from any group that lead to discussion about the moral dimensions of government policies and about the kind of society that they further should be encouraged.
The second question raised by the Bishops’ statement is whether it is right to