Minority poised for victory


Edition 1SUN 02 FEB 1997, Page 047
Minority poised for victory
By RICHARD FARMER 
THE moral minority is on the verge of a horrible victory. While the opinion pollsters might tell us an overwhelming majority of Australians favour voluntary euthanasia, the Federal Parliament is about to veto a Northern Territory law that allows it.
The House of Representatives has already voted that way and the Senate is almost certainly going to follow suit.
Yet again, what the people think is being proved irrelevant.
There are two reasons that occur to me in explanation of the willingness of our elected members of parliament to ignore the views of those they are elected to represent.
The first is the unfortunate ability of a minority which feels strongly about a question to influence MPs in a way that a sensible majority never can.
Very few, if any, of the 75 per cent of ordinary Australians who support euthanasia would switch their vote from one candidate to another on the basis of this issue alone.
Sensible people see the way we are allowed to die as but one of a myriad of important issues. Yet among the militant "antis" there are many whose moral indignation about euthanasia runs so deeply they would change from Labor to Liberal or vice versa on this question alone.
In these circumstances politicians, who naturally enough see their primary interest as being elected, are far more influenced by the minority that will change than the majority that will not.
What the politicians might think themselves in many cases becomes irrelevant.
Added to this electoral self-interest of the politician is a second influence which favours disregarding the wishes of the majority.
Almost by definition, the people who enter parliament are those who have a belief they know what is best for their fellow men and women.
MPs tend to have a great confidence that if it were not for the restraints imposed on them by the need to be elected they could solve all the problems of the country.
When this do-gooder desire to meddle in the lives of people is reinforced by the electoral imperative of winning votes through the meddling then there is no stopping them.
Thus it will prove on euthanasia and would have proved on abortion if it had been left to the parliaments of Australia to make laws, rather than to the courts to find a way of giving expression to the view of the majority.
Our system of government does not produce rulers capable of making even popular decisions because the very good sense of most voters, who see each decision as but one minor part of a whole rather than as an end in itself, prevents them punishing politicians who pander to the militant minorities.
It is a depressing truth.

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