Victoria, Meet The Super Far-Right, Anti-Abortion Politician You Might Vote For Tomorrow By Mistake

With Victorians heading to the polls in just 24 hours, it’s high time you were introduced to a candidate who you might not be familiar with.

Australia, meet Bernie Finn.

A member for Western Metropolitan Region in the upper house, Bernie “abortion is like being raped a second time” Thomas Christopher Finn is a former shock jock, a vocal member of the Coalition’s religious right and one of the most rabid conservatives in the parliamentary Liberal Party. He’s the guy who, along with “some of his crazy mates”, Ted Baillieu accused of sponsoring the rise of Geoff Shaw – the anti-abortion crusader from Frankston responsible for ending Ted’s own reign as Premier in 2013 and for overthrowing Speaker Ken Smith earlier this year.

Still not ringing a bell? Well, don’t worry. I’ve compiled a list of the views Bernie represents most eagerly in Victoria’s Parliament – the issues that get him out of bed each morning, ears pricked and heart pounding with excitement – so that we can get an idea of exactly who is representing us. Let’s take a walk.

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Abortion

In March this year Bernie got himself into a bit of hot water for voicing this quaint thought bubble about a woman’s right to choose a safe abortion. “In this day and age, no, I don’t think there is any acceptable reason for having an abortion,” he said. “In years gone by when they needed to kill the baby to save the mother, then it might have been acceptable, but in today’s world I think that’s a very 1950s argument.”

He went further: “I think many rapists and particularly paedophiles use abortion as a defence, they use it as a way to destroy the evidence”. Yep. Take that, feminazis – supporting abortion amounts to conspiring with kiddy fiddlers and the perpetrators of violence against women.

It’s not just feminists that Finn has offended on this issue; in April he also managed to get the Jewish lobby in a tizz by joining an anti-abortion Facebook group called ‘Silent Holocaust’. I guess they must have missed it back in 2008 when Bernie claimed that “there are two other eras in human existence that have been comparable to the last 30 or 40 years when millions upon millions of babies have been killed by abortion throughout the world. One is slavery and the other is the Holocaust and the Final Solution that Hitler attempted back in the 1930s and 1940s.

“Millions of people will feel the enormous guilt of having been involved in the horror of abortion – Holocaust Mark II, if you will – that has swept the world in the past 30 or 40 years.”

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Capital Punishment

You might reasonably expect that, as a passionate pro-lifer and a church-going man, Bernie Finn would uphold the sanctity of human life as a categorical principal. Not so. Last year he told members of Parliament that “in certain instances I believe sentences are very lean, if I can use that term, and need to be stiffened up, particularly for drug dealers and terrorists. I have made no secret of the fact that I believe we should reintroduce the death penalty for such offenders”.

Onward Christian soldiers.

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Climate Change

Though it didn’t feature in his inaugural speech before the upper house in 2006, as carbon pricing became a hot topic under the Rudd government, the ‘climate change scam’ swiftly became one of Bernie’s favourite conversation pieces. He’s been able to turn debate on almost any topic – from elective surgery waiting lists to freedom of information requests – into a diatribe on “the new green religion” (what some of us might refer to as ‘scientific consensus’) led by “Pope Bob Brown”, the “shyster” Al Gore and Tim “Sandbags” Flannery.

Forget ocean acidification and the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet – Finn gleefully contends that “there has been no global warming for 17 years” and “there is now more ice on the polar caps than in living memory”. For him the politico-economic obstacle at issue isn’t the super profits of the resources sector, it’s “the climate change industry” and the tax-payer teat sucking of the parasites at the Department of Climate Change and the former Climate Commission quango.

Srsly, guys, don’t be so uptight: As Bernie himself says, “Carbon dioxide is air; it is a part of life. Trees cannot live without carbon dioxide. Without trees to produce oxygen, none of us can live. Carbon dioxide is a part of the circle of life. I do not know from where the Greens and the extreme left got this rather intriguing idea that carbon dioxide is a real danger. I almost think that L. Ron Hubbard might have put it in one of his books, because somebody has made it up. From what I can see there is not much scientific evidence to support it.”

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Wind Farms

On the visual amenity of wind farms, Bernie (like a number of other Coalition MPs) is at one with federal Treasurer Joe Hockey. That is, he thinks they’re “grotesque”. Finn actually goes one better than Hockey, throwing his tin-foil hat in the ring with the anti-wind farm lobby and claiming that these turbines – surely the height of Nordic chic – are not only “ugly and noisy” but “unhealthy”, too. You know – because “magnetic fields and so forth”. This despite Australia’s peak medical research body, the NHMRC, finding yet again that there is absolutely no credible link between wind farming and ill health.

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Read on for Bernie’s exciting views on gay marriage, “political correctness” and the Queen.

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