SPEECH NOTES FOR CANBERRA LAUNCH OF

James McAuley was all too familiar with the interaction of religion and politics. In the mid-1950s, he was drawn to the work of BA Santamaria whose commitment to Catholic Action had led to a campaign against communism in the trade union movement. In largely defeating the communist union leadership, Santamaria’s Industrial Groups became powerful enough to influence the wider Australian Labor Party and potentially to challenge its leadership. In a 1950s version of a sitting member under preselection threat all-of-a-sudden discerning the dark hand of the “religious right”, the then-Labor leader, Dr Evatt, denounced the Groupers as conspirators trying to inflict a religious agenda on a political party. Thus began the great Labor split which entrenched the Coalition in power for another 18 years, helped to change the ALP, in Kim Beazley senior’s words, from “the cream of the working class” to “the dregs of the middle class”, and accelerated a process which has meant that the DLP is alive and well and living inside the Howard Government. As Santamaria’s religious and political soulmate, McAuley was in the thick of argument about the legitimate place of the church in politics and about the role of church-goers in the life of a political party. McAuley’s view was that the official church should not choose between mainstream political parties in a functioning liberal democracy but that individual church members should join the political party of their choice and work within it to build a more humane society. As it happened, at least in NSW, prominent bishops continued to regard Labor as the natural party of Catholics while undermining those Catholics inside it who were inclined to question the "party line". The result was that the state Labor government retained office and many Catholics retained their positions but those who took Catholic social teaching seriously became, at most, a small and permanently embattled minority in a party much given to political correctness. The lesson should be clear. If you disagree with people, deal with their arguments but don’t attack their religion. Habits born-of-generations change slowly but the ultimate result of Labor’s former witch hunts against the supporters of Catholic Action is that a majority of church-going Catholics no longer vote ALP, at least in federal elections. As a student of Labor history, Kevin Rudd should be aware of the dangers of trying to recruit from the pew to the party. People whose chief motivation and interest is religious are unlikely to make good party members. On the other hand, church-goers with a strong interest in politics are unlikely to be impressed by a politician telling them that serious Christians should vote Labor. At least since the last federal election, the shadow foreign minister has been pitching to attract a “Christian vote” which he thinks is unjustifiably going to the Government. Most fully in an article in the October issue of The Monthly, Rudd has argued that the Prime Minister has deliberately manipulated Christians into voting for a profoundly un-Christian government. No doubt he'll make a similar point again tomorrow in launching Father Frank Brennan's new book, Acting on Conscience. The relationship between religion and politics is well worth considering, not just because it's likely to be raised in the imminent parliamentary debate over human cloning. It's important to reinforce the clear separation of church and state but also to acknowledge the Christian derivation of our most important political values. The foundation of the western world’s ethical system “do to others as you would have them do to you” is a practical version of Jesus’ injunction to “love your neighbour as you love yourself”. There is no necessary gulf between Christians and others in politics because Christian social teaching is based on reason not revelation. Still, a religion of love should deepen the humanity with which decision-makers approach difficult choices. Every political party would benefit from more members with a stronger sense of obligation to their fellow citizens and a well-developed code of personal values. It’s a pity that Rudd’s argument is unlikely to persuade more people of faith to join the Labor Party because Labor, as well as the wider polity, could certainly benefit from the cultural depth and human decency they mostly bring. If Rudd had focussed on the strengths and the weaknesses which Christians bring to the polity, the ways in which any government operating in the real world is likely to disappoint moral theologians, or the difference between what can be exhorted of individuals and required of governments, he might have made a valuable contribution to public understanding. Instead, Rudd's Monthly article - like, it seems, his forthcoming piece on the “culture wars” - is no more than an intellectual veneer over a highly partisan attack. There are three basic problems with Rudd’s thesis that the Government has Christians conned. First, there is no evidence that those of its policies that appeal to Christians are in any way contrived. Second, there is no compelling reason why Christians should prefer a political agenda based on big government over one based on empowered individuals. And third, there is no evidence that Christians are joining major parties as agents of their church rather than as citizens of their country. Rudd accuses the Prime Minister of “political orchestration of various forms of organised Christianity in support of the conservative incumbency”. Presumably he thinks that this grave charge of coercion by the Government and capitulation by the church is self-evident for he marshals no evidence or argument to support it other than the churches’ failure to instruct their members to vote Labor (as Sydney's Archbishop Carroll was once inclined to do). Since 1996, the Government has made it easier for religious schools to expand, banned gay marriage, allowed a private members bill to overturn the Northern Territory’s euthanasia law, and stopped the ACT’s heroin trial. Presumably Rudd thinks that this was “dog whistling” for the Christian vote. The possibility that the Government actually thought that these measures were right in principle never seems to have occurred to him. To the extent that the Government really has attracted a Christian vote, its actions and policies are responsible rather than any subterfuge. The conscience vote on RU 486 and the impending vote on human cloning, for instance, could hardly be sneaky ways to make the Government look good in the eyes of Christians. Both votes have arisen through the parliamentary tactics adopted by MPs generally hostile to religious influence on public life. Rudd contrasts what he calls the “Liberal view that we live in a dog-eat-dog world and the law of the jungle should prevail” with the Labor view, as he sees it, that “success should be properly rewarded…without killing off the idea of a fair go for all”. He invites Christians to be concerned about the Government’s workplace relations policy without mentioning the two million new jobs since 1996, including more than 200,000 since WorkChoices was introduced in April. If the Government had deliberately lied about Iraq, for instance, people would be entitled to pass the moral judgment against it that Rudd demands. To legitimately do so, however, they would have to weigh all the evidence including Rudd’s own 2002 claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Christians have to be concerned about the vulnerable but that doesn’t mean they should support policies that would make a bad situation worse. Before the welfare state softened the harsh edges of capitalism or the collapse of communism exposed the myth of the worker’s paradise, it’s hardly surprising that there were adherents of “Christian socialism” but it's a strange survival now. Especially after Pope John Paul II, in the ground-breaking encyclical Centesimus Annus, praised the many positive aspects of modern capitalism and described it as “human freedom exercised in the economic field”. Rudd claims that the “religious right has mounted a step-by-step takeover of the Liberal Party”. It’s true that people who attend the Hillsong church have joined party branches in northern Sydney and that one NSW Liberal MP has friends involved with the Catholic group Opus Dei. Rudd fails to explain why this makes them political extremists or why attacking people for attending the wrong church is likely to persuade Christians that Labor is their natural political home. If parties of the left want more support from Christians they should start taking Christianity more seriously. Concern about the abortion rate is not a “pre-occupation with sexual morality” as Rudd suggests. A failure to discern in the Sermon on the Mount a wholesale endorsement of collective bargaining is not to support “a redistribution of power from the weak to the strong” as Rudd ludicrously caricatures the Government’s economic policy. In his inability to concede a single worthy motive or sensible decision to John Howard and his Government, Rudd comes perilously close to exemplifying the lack of civility in political debate recently lamented by the Anglican archbishop of Sydney. Despite the Government joining the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, discouraging boat people, introducing work for the dole and cracking down on welfare fraud, religious leaders such as Cardinal Pell and Archbishop Jensen seem to have a great deal of respect for John Howard. One explanation is that he does not hector people who disagree with him or parade himself as the epitome of moral or political virtue. To the extent that Howard has attracted a Christian vote, it’s almost certainly his character as much as his politics which has done so: his persistence and consistency, his decency and modesty, his readiness to assert a point of view without pretending that his side has a monopoly on truth. It’s precisely because Howard has never used faith as a sales pitch that people with faith often find him reassuring and trustworthy even if they don’t entirely agree with him. In a celebrated letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, just as the Labor split was developing, McAuley lamented the tendency of Labor’s then leaders to regard the party as the “supreme and total moral authority to which all other loyalties must bend or break”. “Does one have to check one’s principles at the door”, he asked, “or is it permissible to take them into the party rooms? In particular, may Christians seek to develop the consequences of their Christian principles and persuade men to their views without being accused of tainting the pure milk of Australian Labourism with a Levantine ideology?” Rudd’s own religious commitment notwithstanding, along with that of the group associated with the shop assistants union, no one could accuse the contemporary Labor Party of being under religious sway, other than, perhaps, a politically correct deference to any religion but Christianity. Rudd’s shrill denunciation of religious people inside the Liberal Party is hard to reconcile with supporting a role for Christians in politics. As every Christian knows, faith does not make people perfect but it calls them to be their best selves amidst all the world’s distractions. If only for this, it is a valuable leaven in every political party, not just Rudd’s. McAuley identified four elites which had provided morale and integrity to Australian society: a transplanted Anglican ascendancy, non-conformists with a “deep impress of moral earnestness”, a Catholic community with a “definite profile of values and loyalties”, and a “disciplined movement of humanist-rationalists” anxious to show that “moral uprightness was enhanced rather than diminished by separating it from religious entanglements”. The fact that at least some Christians in public life are no longer apologetic about the faith of the west suggests that McAuley’s pessimism about the survival of these elites was not entirely justified.