MEDIA RELEASE
FOR RELEASE: January 27th, 2011
The Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) is calling for Hobart’s new museum to remove its suicide machine.
ACL Tasmania Director Mark Brown said euthanasia advocate Dr Philip Nitschke’s device at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is appalling and encourages people to commit suicide.
“Allowing people to see how they could commit suicide by using this machine is promoting suicide as a solution to a person’s problems,” he said.
“If a person is in a fragile emotional state, what they need is professional help – not ideas on how to kill themselves.
“We’re also concerned this exhibition piece is accessible to children who are very impressionable. It’s also highly insensitive to people who have lost loved ones to suicide.”
Mr Brown said the exhibition piece shows Dr Nitschke’s deeper ideological views that suicide is a good idea.
“It’s concerning that people want to encourage suicide. Suicide has only brought harm to our society – causing emotional pain to loved ones.”
Dr Death is really working for the Government under the title ‘Population Control.’ Oh, thats right, and he thinks hes God, he can get rid of you in a flick of a switch or needle. I wonder what he receives for each cadiver.
Get rid of that machine in the Hobart Museum, its an abomination to us as a people that we should even entertain it there.
Remove that abomination of a machine from the Hobart Museum, disgusting!!!
Not content with turning Tasmania into a giant retirement village, now we have the means to rid Tasmania of all those who are too old and infirm . How ridiculous-life is sacred-ordained by God. We have no right to end our life by any means. Take the suicide machine out-it has no place in the Tasmanian Museum. I am affronted that such a wonderful place-somewhere I spent hours of my childhood(before we had to leave because there were no jobs) enjoying the exhibitions should have a monstrous machine is very upsetting. This man’s ides should not be entertained
This is just another form of sublimination that Nitschke uses, using the liberal art form to try and get his message across.
I haven’t seen the exhibit but think this is a great debate! The museum’s ability to exhibit such an item is an example of free speech and in turn allows us, (me too as a Christian) – to express freely my opinion against it. We can’t have one without the other. Why don’t we make an art piece that speaks from a different point of view that argues the sanctity of life rather than state “get rid of it!!!”, or , “ban it!!!”?
Jill Stirling, the place where you use to play before the “jobs went away”, was polluted by those jobs: the Zink Works, Boyer, Cadbury,,,and those suburbs have run rough shod over Aboriginal middens and places they called sacred. I should know I grew up there and still live there. Let’s pray MONA, despite some of it’s ‘offensive’ art brings an appreciation to the enviroment and the suburbs there which the last 50 years polluted and denigrated.
Sorry I just wanted to add to Jill and others – please everyone go to the little beach there around the corner from MONA, Windemere Beach, what a beautiful creation God made there, but it has a sign there saying “no swimming allowed”. My neighbour who is in her 80′s said she use to take her kids there to swim after their dad knocked off work. What a disgrace the River Derwent in Tassie has beome- once titled “the most polluted river in the southern hemisphere” ,the church just sat silent on this matter and only now is speaking out about an art exhibit that sits in a museum out that way! You have got it so wrong! The gov’t and local council in the last 10 years have been trying to do something about the river. Mark Brown, Philip Nitchke’s death machine is indeed a sad endictment on our society but so is the enviroment out there. As Rosa Gorbachov stated ( wife of the former Russian President), the natural world and how we treat it is a reflection of humanity’s internal/ spiritual health: so perhaps the site of MONA and that machine are symptoms of deeper ills that the church must now address these causes and their complexities. The machine now seen as an art work in this space is speaking to us the church – don’t kill another prophet! What;s it saying? We as a society are not well. Lets allow art to do its job: challenge us, appall us, be a litmus test for how we’re travelling. The enviroment is yelling that out to us too! They are intertwined. aying ban it is not good enough. I say “thankyou” it’s telling me what Jesus said, ” repent, death is near, the world always discards and denigrates”, we the Church , Christ offer life.