The Lord’s Prayer is inclusive. Acknowledgement of Country is not

If the Lord’s Prayer is removed from each day of Parliament, it doesn’t mean there is no prayer at the opening.

In the Anglo-settler former colonies of the Antipodes and the Americas, it has become almost mandatory to start not just parliamentary meetings, but anything of any official consequence, with a secular prayer – the Acknowledgement of the traditional owners.

The Christian prayer might vacate, but it’s hard to see the secular one doing the same thing.

Prayers at the beginning of a meeting provide an essential function in directing discussion and behaviour.

When you deliver an Acknowledgement, you are doing a number of things. The first is dividing the community into two groups – traditional owners or custodians – and the rest. You are also establishing an original sin – that of dispossession. And a hierarchy of ownership and legitimacy.

These are not issues that the meeting can settle, or alter in any way, so they frame the decisions to be made, and the people who will make them, without directing them in any way how they will interact with each other or reach decisions.

It also undermines the whole legitimacy of the proceedings. You’re here meeting, but on a contested basis.

A good opening invocation ought to orient the participants toward things on which their conduct can have some bearing.

‘Our Father’ are the opening two words of the Lord’s Prayer. In opposition to the separateness of the Acknowledgement, this is inclusive language. No matter who we are, we are all children in the one family.

And our ‘Father’ is ‘in heaven’. That elevates our primary relationship beyond the here and now to something more essential. We are saying we should orient ourselves to the highest.

‘Hallowed be thy name’. Let’s give most reverence to those values that are above and around us and which inform the world in which we live.

We don’t just orient ourselves to the highest and the best, but we put the highest store and worship on it.