Harvesting a secular Greens vote

Cardinal George Pell last night told a virtual audience of churchgoers with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott that the Greens have an “explicitly anti-Christian agenda”. He is “concerned about the likelihood the Greens will be gaining the balance of power in the next Senate. Their program is explicitly anti-Christian”, he said. Catholic News, June 22, 2010.

Cardinal Pell’s comments cited above drew many neatly divided responses from Catholics in the online Catholic News. Since he made those comments, Kevin Rudd has been replaced by Julia Gillard who has made her atheism known; practising Catholic Premier of New South Wales, Kristina Keneally, has supported gay adoption of children; and a new Christian survey (“We’re losing our faith in Christianity, says a new survey”, Sydney Morning Herald, June 15, 2010) has produced some surprising statistics.

It follows that the Labor Party as well as the Greens would now have to be in Cardinal Pell’s firing line. The purpose of this review is to assess the likelihood that the response of Australia’s religious right, best represented by the followers of Cardinal Pell and the Australian Christian Lobby, will influence the outcome of the next election and what the Greens could do about it.

In my article “The politics of religion” (On Line Opinion, June 4, 2010) I argued Family First’s wealth enables them to field candidates in state and federal elections with little hope of winning a seat but every hope their preferences could determine the outcome in close seats. Nothing has changed there. In fact, the Christian right has been spooked by Gillard’s ascendancy and are already mobilising to make the Labor Party pay at the ballot box.

Thus, the Labor Party have taken a gamble that the conservative Christian vote, be it evangelical or Catholic, will be trumped by Greens preferences, if they get them, and by the novelty of Gillard’s appointment.

But what is it exactly that agitates Cardinal Pell, his followers, and evangelical fellow-travellers?

• Atheism: to hold a non-Christian, non-religious belief, is deemed anti-Christian rather than indifferent to religion. They also confuse atheism with secularism, that is, government neutrality towards all beliefs;
• abortion;
• contraception;
• voluntary euthanasia; and
• gay rights, including marriage

It’s true the Greens would be sympathetic to all of the above. But, while they are sympathetic, they don’t go out of their way to make a big deal of it. I argue they should. The Greens should declare openly they are a secular party.

The reason they should do this is that while they may gain the balance of power at the next election, it is at this stage no sure thing. Before the ascension of Julia Gillard to the prime ministership, the Greens vote was shown to be artificially inflated by the animus the electorate felt towards Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party. The Greens vote had risen to 15 per cent. It then took a steep nosedive back to 8-9 per cent after Gillard became PM.

This false dawn ended because the Greens have nothing else to retain such an increased vote. For all the variety in their many progressive policies, the Greens can’t shake off their image as a one-dimensional pro-environment party. It is sobering that the threat of global warming has not led to a dramatic increase in the Greens vote.

It is likely that what keeps the Greens in the secular closet is the negative experience they had in a past election when a religious Murdoch journalist published an article just before the election claiming the Greens were “soft on drugs”. Conservative commentators recycled this falsehood to such an extent the Greens believed it cost them seats.

This is the likely reason why they are reluctant to come out of the secular closet, despite Bob Brown recently accepting the Humanist of the Year Award. Maybe they believe the downside of coming out is that they will be subject to a torrent of abuse from Christian-leaning media alleging they are communist atheists intent on transforming Australia through godlessness, hyper-sexuality, abortion and euthanasia, where no one, from the unborn, to the elderly in nursing homes, is safe.

While the power of the media has been demonstrated by the mining lobby’s victory in removing Kevin Rudd, I suggest it does not follow that a similar media campaign of abuse and misrepresentation would necessarily work this time.

First, Julia Gillard’s atheism has muddied the waters.

Second, the electorate is already polarised. An attempt to demonise the Greens would only succeed in alerting those voters who recently swung to the Greens for a negative reason, to swing back again for a positive reason. Namely, that the party is further differentiating itself from Labor and Liberal by openly embracing secularism, and all that means in terms of republican policies, especially, I suggest, the proposal of a new law advocating separation of church and state.

A Murdoch Newspoll survey undertaken in 2006, which Murdoch’s Australian refused to publish, found Catholic majority support for a new separation law. Separation speaks to an issue dear to Australian hearts across the board but ignored by all political parties, including the Greens: that religion should be kept out of politics.

There is no separation in Australia at either a federal or state level of government, and no political party has ever advocated there should be. It would be difficult for Cardinal Pell to argue against this because in 1988 he said: “All Australians believe in the separation of church and state, in a division between God and Caesar.” (Letters, The Age, 2 September, 1988.)

While some of the public, along with some politicians, detest what they see as interference in politics by clerics meddling in public issues, rather than the rightful exercise of their free speech, many are equally angered by the way politics is heading in the US direction with duplicitous politicians affecting religious belief for perceived political gain. The Greens could successfully press that hot button.

Third, an approaching high court case challenging the constitutionality of Howard/Rudd’s financing of religious chaplains in state schools could blow the lid off this whole issue (see www.highcourtchallenge.com).

Of course, the Greens would have to declare that their secularism would not mean a reconsideration of funding for Catholic schools, but they could certainly demand there should be transparency into how that school funding is allocated, a policy that may be no different to Julia Gillard’s.

Catholic parents, and the public at large, should be entitled to know where government funding is spent. The church itself has admitted that up to half of Catholic children attend public schools because their parents cannot afford the lowest fees at their systemic schools (see “Catholic schools too expensive, says bishop”, Sun-Herald, August 19, 2007).

Fourth, in the above-mentioned Christian survey, it was reported that “Believers in God, including those who believe but have doubts and those that believe ‘sometimes’ fell from 61 per cent to 47 per cent” between 1993 and 2009. “Correspondingly, there was a large increase in those claiming to have ‘no religion’ - from 27 per cent in 1993 to 43 per cent in 2009.”

The earth has moved beneath everyone’s feet. The question is why the Greens lack the courage to move with it to be not only green, but also secular.

Notwithstanding her backdown on gay marriage, Julia Gillard has had the guts to declare she’s an atheist. So, what is the Greens’ problem in giving the public what they want: the advocacy of some political space between religion and politics, to be achieved in principle through a new law separating church and state? New votes are waiting to be harvested by the Greens who are secular in everything but name and political will.