Solving Australia's drought problems

Up until last week Australia’s newspapers were full of reports on what the various governments, Federal and State, were proposing to solve Australia’s chronic problems over lack of water. Those proposals included the installation of long overland pipes and the running of a fleet of supertankers from the Kimberley region of Western Australia to the eastern seaboard. The recent rains have brought a halt to these reports.

There is a solution to the water shortage problem, a solution infinitely simpler than any of these proposals and far more effective. The issue is that the majority don’t want to take that solution. A great Australian, the late Stan Arneil, put it succinctly when he told Caroline Jones in an interview on the ABC in the 1980s: “The very air we breathe is given to us.” The solution lies in the acknowledgment of the rights over each of us of Almighty God and of our utter dependence on His bounty in all things.

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On the last three days of May this year, a group of twelve men and women, among them three Catholic priests, conducted a Pilgrimage for the Unborn Child as an act of reparation of the sins of abortion committed in this country in the last thirty years. They carried on foot a small statue of the Christ Child, the Infant of Prague, from the Old Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul in Goulburn, New South Wales, to the Cathedral of St Christopher in Canberra. The distance was 107 kilometres and, save for a section between Bungendore and Queanbeyan, they walked the whole way.

Paul Hanrahan, the Convenor of the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants, one of the organisers, said this in a press release before the Pilgrimage began: No one thinks about the innocent unborn who are slaughtered in this country every day. This country badly needs rain but only God can give us that. We want him to send rain yet we go on killing the innocent. He concluded his press release by saying: Who knows, after we have made this act of reparation, perhaps Almighty God will send Australia the rain it needs.

The Pilgrimage concluded on 31 st May. Rain began to fall throughout the country about ten days later. Experts are saying now that the volume of rain which has since fallen is most unusual for the time of the year.

There is a fundamental problem in this country—the attitude of its people to Almighty God. None of us brings himself into existence. None of us keeps himself in existence. Yet the majority conduct themselves as if they were utterly independent of Him. We are utterly reliant on God to give us the rain we need yet we go on slaughtering the innocent unborn.

There is no need for the people or the governments of this country to be worrying over water. They need only address the fundamental issue of the rights of the innocent to life, rights given them by Almighty God. The solution to our problems lies is this: an ending of abortion; an ending to the manufacturing of embryos in vitro; and the cessation of the abuse of these embryos in experimentation.

When once we begin to acknowledge the Kingdom of God and His rule over each one of us in this country, we will find, as Our Lord Jesus Christ has said, that everything else we need will be given us [Matt. 6: 33].

Michael Baker
29 th June 2005—Sts Peter & Paul