In the run-up to a federal election on May 21, Australia’s Catholic bishops have urged voters to consider the nation’s most vulnerable people.
In an election statement the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference did not endorse any political party but said voters should consider candidates who might prioritise people who need palliative care, those in low-paying and insecure jobs, indigenous Australians, asylum-seekers and refugees.
Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge, president of the conference, said no one political party fully embodies Catholic social teaching.
But he said Australian Catholic leaders “long for what Pope Francis calls a better kind of politics, one truly at the service of the common good”.
“Since the last federal election, we have seen the impact and the challenges of a global pandemic, floods, summers of bushfires, wild weather events and a world on edge because of military conflict,” Archbishop Coleridge said.
“Foremost in the minds of many will be Australia's economic recovery from the effects of Covid-19. The societal disruptions from the pandemic have revealed significant levels of poverty and disadvantage within Australia. We need a new social contract that focuses the economy more clearly on the common good.”
In their statement, the bishops said the government should improve healthcare, especially the standards of aged care and palliative care, since human dignity requires that society give value to “the lives of all people, including those near the end of their lives”.
Access to palliative care is essential, the bishops said, so that the dying are not pressured into opting for assisted suicide, which has now passed into law in five of Australia’s six states.
The bishops urged an increase in minimum wage “to at least meet the poverty line” and advocated for “greater investment in affordable and social housing”.
They also said religious agencies, including schools, need to be able to hire staff who support their mission. “We call only for the same level of protections against discrimination on the basis of religion that Australia already has on the basis of race, sex or age,” the bishops said.
The bishops reaffirmed their endorsement of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and its call for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people to be recognised in the constitution and given a permanent voice in the Australian Parliament.
They called for a greater intake of refugees from Afghanistan because of the support shown to Australian military forces.
“The situation in Afghanistan demands a special intake of at least 20,000 additional places,” the statement says.
“We have a moral duty towards those who supported Australian military forces as interpreters or in other capacities.”
The statement also calls for a special intake of Ukrainian refugees, saying they require “similar mercy”.
“Refugees and asylum-seekers fleeing persecution, violence or life-threatening poverty, and people who have been displaced by climate change, are our sisters and brothers.”
The bishops called for a wider reassessment of refugee policies, saying the people fleeing violence or persecution have a “moral claim on our assistance, whether they fit legal definitions of a refugee or not”.
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