ACL compiles a daily media monitoring service of stories of interest to the Christian constituency relating to children, family, drugs and alcohol, marriage, human rights, religious freedom etc. Visit the ACL’s website each day to see what’s of interest in the news. Please note that selection of the articles does not represent ACL endorsement of the content.
Abortion
Anti-abortion pamphlet furore
Sarah Martin - The Advertiser
Anti-abortion pamphlets published by MP Ann Bressington have come under fire for misleading information. Ms Bressington said she was funding the printing of 120,000 anti-abortion pamphlets to be distributed by a group who had contacted her office concerned about the practice of abortion in South Australia.
Bioethics
The price of life
BBC
A story that investigates the ethical and medical dilemmas involved in keeping tiny, premature babies alive. Who decides if they live or die and what, ultimately, is the cost of keeping them alive?
Children & Family
Ten policies for renewing family life
MercatorNet
The state of the family in many advanced societies is unsustainable. Which public policies could reverse this decline? What then are the appropriate policy responses to the unsustainable state of family life in many advanced societies?
Classification
Porn link tipped in net piracy case
Karl Quinn - The Age
An Australian company trying to sue people for illegally downloading Hollywood movie Kill the Irishman has extensive links to internet pornography, raising suspicions that the legal action may in fact be a stalking horse for a larger assault on behalf of the porn industry.
Drugs & Alcohol
Survey finds more users warm to ice
Barney Porter - ABC
The latest annual survey of illegal drug trends in Australia has found more people are using ice, despite its widely-publicised dangers. This year the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre surveyed around a thousand intravenous drug users, and another thousand recreational drug users to help develop more effective public policy.
Drug trade rife in detention centres
Nikki Tugwell - ABC
Prescription drugs are being traded among asylum seekers who are becoming addicted to sedatives, sleeping pills and powerful painkillers inside Australia's immigration detention centres, the ABC has been told.
Environment
Carbon trading will fail because property rights cannot exist for gases
Tim Wilson - The Australian
Economically sustainable markets are built on the back of secure property rights, but because secure property rights cannot exist for greenhouse gases, emissions trading has a structural flaw that will ultimately unravel.
Green groups get $3m from ALP's largesse
Sid Maher and Lanai Vasek - The Australian
Labor has handed $3 million in grants to supporters of climate change action to promote efforts to cut global warming and support the government's clean energy package as it seeks to head off Tony Abbott's anti-carbon tax campaign.
Euthanasia
Euthanasia drug won't be used to die
Jordanna Schriever - The Advertiser
A South Australian woman who wants access to the euthanasia drug Nembutal does not want to kill herself. But she still believes she should have the right to make that choice.
Gambling
Xenophon hoses down compo for clubs
Lisa Martin - SMH
Calls to compensate community clubs over planned poker machine reforms have been dismissed as a red herring. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has indicated she is open to discussing issues such as compensation for charities that might lose out under new poker machine rules.
Pokies reform backing crashes
Phillip Coorey, Matthew Moore, Josephine Tovey - SMH
Support in NSW for restrictions on poker machines has plummeted under the onslaught of a multimillion-dollar publicity campaign by clubs, hotels and the NRL. The latest Herald/Nielsen poll shows that support for mandatory pre-commitment technology on the machines has fallen from 66 per cent in April to 52 today.
Souris's concession for clubs
Sean Nicholls - SMH
Registered clubs will be allowed to transfer poker machines between amalgamated venues, without having to forfeit a proportion of them, under a state Parliament bill.
Indigenous
Labor's new-look Northern Territory intervention
Lauren Wilson - The Australian
Parents who allow their children to become truants will lose welfare payments under Labor's plan to toughen elements of the Northern Territory intervention after a report found widespread acceptance of the controversial program in Aboriginal communities. In a redesign of its attack on indigenous disadvantage, the Gillard government will announce plans to legislate to continue alcohol bans but its extension of some of the intervention's measures will not include introducing a floor price on alcohol.
Marriage
Alert the gay thought police!
Matt Akersten - Same Same
A leading columnist for the Sunday Telegraph says it’s increasingly taboo to disagree with gay marriage and adoption by same-sex parents, as the relentlessly campaigning homosexual lobby is on the warpath.
Prostitution & Sex Trafficking
Call for Australia's prostitution laws to be tightened
ABC
A group called the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women in Australia says moves to tighten laws in the state of Victoria don't go far enough and they're calling for the purchase of sexual services to be made illegal.
Religious Freedom & Persecution
Egypt's Arab Spring turns dark
The Australian
Egypt's Coptic Christians are understandably terrified. And as a reality check for those who naively ignored all the warnings about Islamic extremism and insisted enlightenment and tolerance would follow the Mubarak dictatorship's downfall last February, their fate could hardly be more telling.
Refugees
Refugees the real losers again in yet another 'solution'
Phillip Coorey - SMH
As refugee advocates and others applauded the demise of offshore processing last week, they may have missed what was a big backhander delivered in the process. As a result of last week's events, 4000 poor wretches languishing in refugee camps in Africa and elsewhere will continue to do so, rather than be afforded a new life in Australia.
More
Hate is the new debate
Ged Kearney - The Punch
If the catch cry of the 60s was “all you need is love” it seems the slogan of the 21st century is “all you need is hate”. We are seeing death threats to climate scientists, a resurgence of shock jocks on the radio, Facebook groups set up with the sole purpose of “hating” reality TV contestants or celebrities. Add that to a political culture characterised by hyperbole, derision and negativity.
