In a time of robotic parliamentarians, isn't Zed Seselja's independent stance on euthanasia refreshing?

I have done a little grumbling about this myself around the house (while, strangely restrained, never feeling able to burst into print about it). But, hearing me grumble, my vigilant and independent mind (certainly she is independent of me) has leapt to shirtfront about this.

"Hang on, hypocritical Ian," she (for my mind is assertively female and feminist) remonstrates.

"Aren't you the same Ian known to rhapsodise about the principles of parliamentary representation that the towering political philosopher Edmund Burke spells out in his speech to the electors of Bristol, one of the pillar texts of conservative thought?"

"Ye-es, that may be me," I own up in trepidation, feeling an alarming sense of where this interrogation is going to go, of how it will embarrass me.

Just to interrupt my mind for a moment and so as to set the scene, the great criticism raged against the senator (how the letters pages of this paper clatter and rattle with the sound of gnashed dentures!) is that he refuses to do what the majority of Canberrans want. His disobedience in this infuriates and bewilders the gnashers.

But Seselja appears to be a deeply, zealously Christian believer (although, disappointingly, he never mentions God or Jesus or faith when he is addressing the euthanasia subject). And somehow he has become, by a set of curious chances, a bristling Christian representing in the Federal Parliament a very secular territory significantly populated by non-believers.

He appears to believe that how and when we die is the exclusive business of almighty God.

Meanwhile, most territorians either don't believe that there is such a deity for these momentous decisions to be left to or fancy that, if there is a God, He is likely in His kindness to want we poor creatures (born to die) to be ushered out of this world with the minimum possible anguish.

The gnashers, then, think it is axiomatic that the senator should do what a majority of territorians tells him to.

But Edmund Burke (and my contrary mind, agreeing with him half the time) doesn't think it should work that way.

We have no room here to do Burke's famously intellectually elegant, principled, feisty (but courteous) speech justice. It's short and highly readable and you can easily find and read it online.

But, just elected to parliament by the voters of Bristol, he is socking it to them that he is never going to be their tame and obedient dog.

"Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the ... most unreserved communication with his constituents ... It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you ... These he does not derive from your pleasure.

"They are a trust from providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. A flatterer you do not wish for."

Of course the great allure Burke's stand has for those of us who know and admire it is the principled contrast it offers with the Australian experience of how shamefully, robotically, elected members of Parliament behave.

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They are party automatons exemplifying the Gilbert and Sullivan character, undeservedly elevated to high office because throughout his parliamentary career:

"I always voted at my party's call, I never thought of thinking for myself at all."

One sees a very, very faint glimmer of something Burkeian in Seselja's choice to do what he believes God has told him rather than what territorians are telling him to do. There is a very, very faint glimmer there of an actual personality (however misguided) at work.

Those of us usually so quick to condemn parliamentarians for being robotic, for being unthinking Daleks who always do what the Dalek-in-Chief orders, might ask ourselves if the senator's independent stance on euthanasia isn't refreshing.

Is it perhaps the only endearing thing about him?

Alas, I am used to my federal Labor MPs (I am in the unfortunate division of Canberra) being believe-in-nothing time-servers who never say or do anything but I know I would rejoice to have an MP who acts upon and speaks up about beliefs contrary to my own.

Give me an MP with a pulse, with a personality. I'm afraid I find (just as the mighty Burke would) the petulant letters-to-the-editor mantra that Seselja must "bow to the will of the people he represents" clichéd, tiresome and wrong.

But the great weakness of my half-hearted defence of the senator, of my crediting him with a Burkeian backbone, is my aforementioned finding that he, the senator, doesn't spell out how religious his underpinning anti-euthanasia beliefs are.

In a long (and readably feisty and combative) essay in Wednesday's Canberra Times, railing against what he calls "assisted suicide", his faith doesn't get a mention and his God doesn't get a guernsey.

Why?

One suspects a canny, pragmatic, politically astute (but perhaps cowardly custard) nervousness about wearing one's religiousness on one's sleeve lest it alienate voters in this enlightened post-Christian city.

One wonders how God (in the Bible famous for needing to be always centre-stage, in the divine limelight) feels about this, being kept out of sight, in the shadows, being thought unmentionable?

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