WorkChoices: talk about separation of church and state!

And what are we to make of the prime minister’s appointment of Ian Harper, a “dry” economist and evangelical Christian, to chair the new Fair Pay Commission? Harper, currently executive director of the Centre for Business and Public Policy at the Melbourne Business School, grew up nominally Anglican but embraced an evangelical faith in the late 1980s.

He is not coy about his Christian convictions, citing “strong religious convictions” as a chief reason for accepting the job. Those convictions appear to shape his worldview and influence his perspective on economic policy. He claimed his acceptance of the new job was consistent with his Christian duty, “concerned with the circumstances of the less well-off and vulnerable rather than the top end of town”. Interviewed on ABC Radio on October 14, he said he was particularly interested in hearing from  unemployed and low-paid people. He claimed to live by values that addressed the best interests of poor and vulnerable people, adding, “That’s what Jesus Christ stood for”.

Harper presented the 2003 Acton Lecture titled, “Christian morality and market capitalism: Friends or foes?” for the Centre for Independent Studies, in which he acknowledged the difficulty of working as a Christian and an economist. Christians, he said, “often find it hard to accept that someone who claims to follow the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount could also follow the teacher of the doctrine of ‘the invisible hand’” while for his professional colleagues, “the rationality of economics reigns supreme, sweeping all forms of non-rational enquiry - including superstition and religious dogma - before it”. His response was “to have an appropriately modest view of the realm of the market within the sphere of our lives. The trouble starts when one begins to treat market capitalism itself as religion.” Amen to that.

What the mainstream churches and their lobbyists will make of Harper’s appointment is unclear. Perhaps they will view it as an opportunity to kill two birds (economic rationalist and evangelical Christian) with one stone. Already Anglican, Catholic and Uniting Church leaders have criticised the appointment - though I suspect Ian Harper is adept at dodging missiles lobbed by meddlesome priests.