Robert Clark to give opening address for group which campaigns against childcare centres, euthanasia, abortion and gay rights
Victoria’s attorney general will address an international group of anti-abortion and anti-gay campaigners at a conference in Melbourne in August.
Robert Clark will deliver the opening address at the 2014 World Congress of Families, an organisation that claims to “affirm, defend and promote the natural family as the lifelong union of man and woman through marriage, bound by faith and tradition, for the purposes of sharing love and joy [and] having children”.
The “pro-family” organisation campaigns against childcare centres, euthanasia, divorce, pornography, gambling, legalised abortion and gay rights around the world.
Speakers at the conference will include the WCF vice-president, Larry Jacobs, who last year applauded Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda” as a “great idea” that would “prevent [gays] from corrupting children”, and Angela Lanfranchi, a New Jersey-based surgeon who promotes a discredited theory linking breast cancer with abortion.
The federal social services minister, Kevin Andrews, and the Victorian Liberal senator Bernie Finn will also address the conference. Finn ran into controversy earlier this year when he claimed abortion was being used by “many rapists and particularly paedophiles … as a way to destroy the evidence”.
Federal Liberal senators Eric Abetz and Cory Bernardi are listed as supporters of the event.
A spokesman for Clark said: “The attorney general is welcoming an international conference to Melbourne on behalf of the government. Delivering a welcome address does not necessarily imply support for particular speakers or their topics.”
A spokeswoman for Andrews’ office said the minister had chosen to open the event “because it is a conference about families, which relates to his portfolio”.
Babette Francis, the convener of the Melbourne event, said she did not believe the conference was anti-gay.
“Homosexuality isn’t even on the program,” she said. “It’s not anti-gay, we’re not anti-homosexual men and women at all. We recognise certain disadvantages and problems with the lifestyle, one of the problems being that … for the three monotheistic religions, the actual physical practice of homosexuality is a sin. That’s a fact.”
The event was scheduled to be held in Moscow but was moved to Melbourne after Russian-backed militia seized the Crimean peninsula in March.
Earlier this year, the Victorian premier, Denis Napthine, had to rule out any changes to Victoria’s abortion laws after a push by the suspended Frankston MP, Geoff Shaw, to relieve doctors opposed to the procedure from having to refer patients to other doctors willing to carry it out.