The religious right on the move again

The underlying objective of this forum, as with other similar conferences, is always to be found in the issues to be discussed and the speakers selected. The forum discussion, in this case, was around four themes: culture and education, social services and the family, business and commerce, and law and politics.

When it came to education, the forum organisers had a choice. The speaker could be a representative from the religious elite private school system. Or alternatively a female, or a member of the teachers union, or a church attendee, who believes that the elite religious private school system, and the booming Christian community school movement, do not reflect “Christian values” and in fact are white-anting and will ultimately destroy the state school system.

In the end it was the religious elite private school ex-principal who spoke.

Business and commerce was just as predictable.

On the day the forum met, Catholics were reading the Bishop of Parramatta’s statement, that the Howard Government’s Work Choices legislation was “manifestly unjust” and that the Government had “failed in its duty to promote the common good”. At the same time, the major churches in their submissions to the Fair Wage Commission were rejecting economic arguments that “cuts in real wages for the low paid would boost employment”.

The forum organisers could have had the Bishop of Parramatta to speak, or a church-attending worker who could have affirmed the Christian values which provide the basis, for her opposition to Howard’s industrial relations or welfare to work policies.

On the other hand they could provide a platform for a CEO on $3,000-an-hour(100 per cent increase in one year): who runs Australia’s biggest liquor retailer; who’s company is the biggest operator of poker machines in Australia; who cuts jobs in Australia and off shores them to Asia; who’s company was “found to have misled consumers”; which took “$500 million out of the pockets of milk processors and farmers, passed some of it on to consumers and pocketed the rest for its shareholders”; which had just been fined some $9 million for price fixing; and continues to be a major distributor of tobacco, much of it produced by child labour.

There are no prizes for guessing who spoke.

To complement that speaker, they could have chosen someone to affirm that the industrial relations system of conciliation and arbitration had delivered justice and a fair go for both workers and management, or they could have chosen someone who by their very position is complicit in the destruction of that system. Guess who.

For this forum, the agenda was clear.

Historians had failed to tell the truth abut Australia’s Christian heritage, children were being corrupted, immigrants knew nothing about Christianity, the media was oppressive and “controlling values even of Christian communities”, but while the “Great South Land has been marked out by God’s spirit and by prophecy”, there is still hope.

When conservative preachers, politicians and unrepresentative para-church organisations get together, then pew-sitting parishioners need to be wary, and should carefully read the fine print before they accept their next invite to Parliament House.