Bipartisanship

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
26 Sep 2004

Censorship in Australia is all but a lost cause, although you wouldn’t know it from the nonsense about “free speech” that greets even the possibility of a particularly graphic or brutal art-house film being denied a classification for screening.
 
The one area where this is not true is in the area of child pornography. Even here there are voices telling us that censorship is not the answer, and that it is wrong to tell adults what they can and cannot read and watch.
 
Thankfully, our two major political parties do not accept this point of view. Both parties have announced strong policies to combat child pornography and access by children to pornography on the internet. These initiatives build on legislation that was passed by the parliament with bipartisan support before the election was called.
 
Clive Hamilton, the Executive Director of the Australia Institute, reported recently on an alarming number of children presenting at Canberra hospitals after being sexually assaulted by other children. There were 3 such cases in the early 1990s. In 2003 there were 70.
 
Doctors estimate that in 90 per cent of these incidents, the assailants regularly viewed pornography on the internet. Despite these statistics and others like them, there are still those who repeat 40 year old slogans about pornography being playful and liberating.
 
These points of view are particularly prevalent amongst academic, media and artistic circles – and of course among those lobbying on behalf of pornography providers and retailers. Back in the real world, however, parents are worried about the threat pornography poses to their children, and to their capacity to develop a healthy attitude to sexuality.
 
It is one of the great strengths of the Australian electoral system that the major parties have to take these sorts of concerns into account. Preferential voting makes it too costly electorally to disregard them, and encourages sensible policies.
 
Another example of sensible bipartisanship is the passage of the amendments to the Marriage Act which preserve the traditional understanding of marriage as a union of a man and a woman voluntarily entered into for life.
 
There are elements on both sides of politics which would have liked to have gone a different way. In the end, however, it was clear to all concerned that making it more difficult for the definition of marriage to be changed by stealth through the courts was consistent with what the overwhelming majority of voters wanted.
 
There has been talk of the changes to the Marriage Act being “wedge politics”. But it is difficult to drive a wedge between political parties and their constituencies if they are listening to people’s concerns and responding to them effectively.

Far from any of this representing an absence of vision or leadership, as critics sometimes allege, this is what democracy is all about.