Joe de Bruyn’s ACU graduation speech

GRADUATION ADDRESS
ACU GRADUATION. MELBOURNE, 21 OCTOBER

Firstly, may I express my sincere appreciation to the Senate of the Australian Catholic University for bestowing on me an Honorary Doctorate. It was most unexpected and it has made me consider the contribution I have tried to make to the Catholic Church during my adult life.

Secondly, may I congratulate all the students graduating here today. Whether you continue with further academic studies, or turn to your professional career, I wish you every success. I also urge you to look at the diverse society around you as I have done, and try to contribute to the common good.

For more than 20 years now, I have served on the Board of Campion College in Sydney, Australia’s first and only Liberal Arts educational institution, modelled on the Catholic Liberal Arts colleges well-known in the United States.

For over 40 years, I worked for the SDA, the Trade Union that covers workers in warehousing, the retail industry and fast food companies. My work involved enforcing and improving the wages, working conditions, job security, superannuation, health and safety, and workers’ compensation for employees in these industries. It also involved dealing with State and Federal Governments on tax cuts, family payments and various industrial relations issues and legislation.

I also spent 31 years as a Director of a large Superannuation fund covering the retail industry, ensuring good financial earnings on the retirement monies of workers.

All this work is consistent with the social teachings of the Catholic Church, particularly the social encyclicals starting with Rerum novarum of Pope Leo XIII in 1891 and through to Centesimus annus of Pope St John Paul II in 1991.

None of this is controversial and is no different to the work of many others in the Labour Movement, whether Catholic or not.

However, I have also been involved in other issues that are controversial in our society where I have tried to bring the teachings of the Catholic Church into play.

For example, I have for several decades been involved in opposing abortion, the deliberate killing of unborn human beings. This first became a public issue in 1969 with the Menhennit decision in the Supreme Court in Victoria and the Lusher ruling in the Supreme Court in NSW in the following year.

Today, over 80,000 unborn children are killed by abortion in Australia each year. World-wide, the estimated number is 42 million per annum.

Abortion is the single biggest killer of human beings in the world, greater by far than

the toll of human life in World War II. It is a tragedy that must be ended.

In the 1980’s, researchers at Monash University developed the technique of IVF for infertile women. The Cain Labor Government legislated that IVF could be available to women who were married or in a stable de-facto relationship with a man.

In 2000, a single woman in Victoria applied to the Federal Court for a ruling that this Victorian legislation was in conflict with the federal Sex Discrimination Act and that the federal law should therefore over-ride the State Law, enabling her to access IVF. The Court ruled in her favour.

In the controversy that followed, the media asked me for my opinion. I responded that it was morally wrong to deliberately bring children into the world in an environment where the child would have no father.

Unbeknown to me, the Labor Party leader at the time, Kim Beazley, had also been asked the same question and he had replied that he could see no issue.

This led to a debate some weeks later at the 21-member National Executive of the Labor Party, a body on which we both were members. My principled view, consistent with Catholic teaching, was defeated by 14 votes to 7.

The issue now forced the Labor Party to deal with the matter of conscience for its members on serious moral issues. After an investigation by a committee of which I was a member, the Party adopted a policy of giving its members in the State and Federal Parliaments a conscience vote on a range of moral issues. This was a significant benefit for Labor politicians faced with Party policies contrary to their sincerely-held beliefs.

Marriage between a man and a woman was instituted by God at the origin of humanity in the Garden of Eden as the book of Genesis in the Bible tells us.

Since then, every society on earth at all times has recognised marriage as being between a man and a woman.

When he lived on earth 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ elevated marriage to be one of the seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church he established.

It was not until the year 2000 that Holland became the first country in the world to allow two persons of the same sex to ‘marry’ under its laws.

In 2004, the Howard Government decided to legislate a definition of marriage in the Marriage Act. Previously, the common law definition of marriage, inherited from British Law, had been accepted and used. Marriage was defined as ‘between a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into, for life’.

The Labor Party, led now by Mark Latham, decided to support the definition and it was passed by Parliament with bipartisan support.

The Labor Party then went a step further. It put this explicit definition of marriage into its policy platform for subsequent elections in 2007 and 2010.

During the 2010 federal election campaign, the Australian Christian Lobby asked the then Labor Party leader and Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, about this issue. She responded that, if re-elected to Government, the Labor Party would not seek to change this definition of marriage.

However, in 2012, during the term of the re-elected Gillard Government, certain elements in the Labor Party let it be known that they intended to change this policy at the forthcoming Labor Party National Conference so as to endorse same-sex ‘marriage’.

For several months leading into the Conference, I worked with the Prime Minister and with many others to defeat any change in policy. However, on the eve of the Conference debate by the 400 delegates, we found we had only 190 votes for our position, not the 201 votes needed to win. In the ensuing debate, the Labor Party changed its policy and endorsed same-sex ‘marriage’.

The Party’s conscience vote now came into play. A small but sufficient group of federal Labor Parliamentarians were prepared to use their right to a conscience vote to prevent any change in the Marriage Act. This proved sufficient to block any change.

In 2015, the supporters of same-sex ‘marriage’ in the Labor Party gave notice that they would move to abolish the conscience vote for same-sex ‘marriage’ at the forthcoming Party National Conference.

Again, I went to see the Labor Party Leader, now Bill Shorten, who told me he would work to ensure that the conscience vote for the definition of marriage would be retained.

However, despite our best efforts, we again fell short of the 201 votes needed to protect the conscience vote. The only consolation was that the new arrangement forcing all Labor Parliamentarians to vote in favour of same-sex ‘marriage’ would not apply until after the May 2019 election.

In the meantime, the Liberal–National Coalition under Prime Minister Turnbull decided to submit the issue of same-sex ‘marriage’ to a plebiscite of the Australian people in 2017. The people voted 60 per cent in favour of same-sex ‘marriage’ and the law was changed before the end of that year. This remains the position today.

There have been many other controversial issues in which I have been involved over the years but time does not permit me to detail them here. Suffice it to say that I always tried to put the position of the Catholic Church informed as it is by the teaching of Jesus Christ.

May I conclude with a word of advice to the graduates here today.

As happened to me, you will be faced with issues in your professional and personal lives where the general opinion of the majority of the population is at odds with the teaching of the Church.

My experience is that many Catholics cave in to peer pressure. They think their professional lives will be harmed if they promote the teaching of the Church. My experience is that this is not so.

Despite my view on some issues being at odds with the views of my contemporaries over the past 50 years, it never affected my career at all.

The key determinant is how you present your case.

If you do it in a manner offensive to others, they will respond in a hostile manner.

If, however, you use logic in a persuasive way, others may still disagree but they will respect you for your point of view.

In the Gospel, Jesus said: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ God has made us in his image and likeness and, as St Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they rest in him.

So, if you put God’s truth in front of people in a respectful way, they will know in their hearts that you are right.

Thank you.