Sydney, Australia - The Australian Government has sacrificed millions of people on the altar of the market, preferred to help the rich over the poor, and has made human rights negotiable, outgoing Uniting Church president Dean Drayton said in his farewell speech yesterday.
Dr Drayton, the president of Australia's third-biggest church for the past three years, stepped down with a blast for the Government, calling it morally irresponsible for its ignorance about claimed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and payment of wheat bribes of a third of a billion dollars to Saddam Hussein.
"With dreadful irony, cereal ignorance shows what happens when serial ignorance takes the place of truth and justice."
He also said Australia was "sucking dry" its Pacific and regional neighbours to maintain its own lifestyle.
He told the church's national assembly in Brisbane it had become "enmeshed and compliant as a church with those whose gospel is that if the rich get richer, all the rest will be a little better off".
"For too many of our politicians the market is God. Budget after budget of this Government has had a preferential option for the rich. At least 10 per cent of our population is trapped in poverty, and millions if not billions elsewhere in the world are sacrificed on the altar of this market economy. What we are blind about is the way we are allowing economic rationalism and the free market to control our country."
Dr Drayton said some human rights - those for Aborigines, asylum seekers, Papuans, and the poor - had become negotiable in Australia, anti-terrorist laws had traded away basic rights, and David Hicks had been abandoned. "Thank God for those within political parties who refuse to accept the excesses of these decisions," he said.
He also criticised rich Christians in the West who didn't "hear the call of Jesus to care for the poor".
Dr Drayton, one of Australia's most outspoken church leaders, said that despite many requests Prime Minister John Howard had refused to meet him. "He must have his reasons; I don't know what they are."
He said economic rationalism was a matter of faith for the Government but it meant the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer. He said that since 2001 Australians had lived in a climate of fear that led them to go along with the Government but on industrial relations the Government had gone too far and faced a profound backlash.