On Q&A last night there was this proposal from panellist Corey White:
I specified that drug addicts should be given incentives, um, cash to delay reproducing because the fact is that a lot of drug-addicted people do have children and those children are condemned to lives of horror.
So the proposal is to pay people not to have children. How much?
$5,000.
Who is to pay that $5,000? Erik Jensen answers:
The health system’s pretty much to do with government. The government provides…
At least Cory Bernardi knows what’s wrong with this proposal:
I just think it’s wrong for the government to get involved in determining who can reproduce and who can’t.
That’s about right. Catherine King (who thinks the appropriate response to alleged misogyny is misandry) too:
We want every child who is born here to be wanted and loved and to be able to grow up in the best possible circumstances. But I don’t think we’d be choosing who can and can’t have children or providing incentives for people not to have them. It’s not something I’d be comfortable with.
Unfortunately neither Cory Bernardi nor Catherine King were able to fully specify what exactly is wrong with the government determining who should and shouldn’t have children. But then neither was the ABC host – Hamish MacDonald:
Do you think there are times when politicians are better off just maybe parking some of their high-minded ideas and looking at real-world problems, and trying to solve them in the way that Corey might?
Hmmmmm, no. For those people who have so little by way of a moral compass that they don’t realise that it is wrong for the government to decide who has children and who does not, here is an extract from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
Strictly speaking, of course, drug addicts are not a protected group under that convention, yet eugenics and genocide tend to highly correlated in recent human history. Again as Cory Bernardi points out:
CORY BERNARDI
Do you do it for alcoholics and gambling addicts?COREY WHITE
Yeah, totally.
Just to be clear – this is the national broadcaster sponsoring a debate on whether the Australian government should engage in eugenics and genocide.