Disencumbering the improductive burdens - Quadrant caught out

Here's a letter I wrote some time ago to Quadrant magazine. It's written in the particularly arcane language of Quadrant at the time. I'm one of those bleeding heart types who left with Robert Manne. I'm sure I'd be despised by the continuing readership. But you can see here how I learnt to despair of conservative argument. This is an early incarnation of my concerns over conservative political correctness and Orwellian language.

Sir: I must reply to Simon Ley's Open letter to the Governor-General (Quadrant, September 1995, p. 19), where he comments on Hayden's speech to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians of 21 June 1995.

Hayden was widely reported as supporting the redefinition of the family to include homosexual couples and voluntary euthanasia. On the issue of euthanasia, Leys quotes the G-G as arguing "Succeeding generations deserve to be disencumbered of some improductive [sic] burdens", and later repeats the quote as "disencumbering of improductive burdens". On reading this, I was both stunned at such a statement by the GG, and stuck by the use of "improductive", which seemed such an obscure word. On investigation, the word did not appear in the Macquarie or unabridged Webster's dictionaries, and the definition in the Shorter Oxford seemed particularly inappropriate.

When I checked a copy of the speech which I had requested earlier from Government House, I found that the paragraph containing the quote is highly qualified by the last sentence of the preceding paragraph: "I speak only for myself in saying the following" and further that the actual quote in context reads somewhat differently from the meaning suggested by Ley, and sounds personal: "This loss of personal control, of autonomy, of human personality for me would destroy my sense of human dignity. Moreover, having had a full and satisfying lifetime there is a point when the succeeding generations deserve to be disencumbered - to coin a clumsy word - of some unproductive [sic] burdens. That is why I support voluntary, medically assisted euthanasia and the provision of a living will."

Leys seems to have seriously misrepresented the intention of Hayden, and I feel mischievously suggests Hayden's position is simply a short step from "providing every household with special garbage bins in which elderly relatives could be hygienically discard and collected for recycling into pet food". In fact, several times in the speech, Hayden questions less extreme utilitarian approaches to our aged populations!

I remain unconvinced by several of Hayden's arguments elsewhere in the speech, especially those on the redefinition of the family. These seem to simply argue that given that we have decriminalised homosexuality, we should accept that the family should be redefined to include homosexual couples. However, Ley's apparent misrepresentation serves himself and his argument poorly.