Paul Collins theguardian.com, Monday 2 September 2013
You would think that the candidates' moral convictions might have some impact on their policy stances. Not so
Both Popes Benedict XVI and Francis take climate change seriously... but what about Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott? Photograph: Alessandra Benedetti/Corbis
Something that has gone largely unnoticed during this 2013 election is that both major party leaders are practising Christians. Tony Abbott is a Catholic of a conservative hue, and Kevin Rudd sits somewhere between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. Both have theological backgrounds.
Abbott was a student for the priesthood and not long after he left the seminary he wrote an article for The Bulletin in August 1987, entitled Why I Left the Priesthood. In it he attacked one of Australia’s finest theologians, David Coffey, virtually accusing him of heresy. The article led to a massive row in Sydney Catholicism with Coffey being reported to the Vatican doctrinal congregation, formerly the Roman Inquisition. Coffey was eventually cleared of all charges. Nowadays Abbott, the erstwhile heresy-hunter, eschews the title “captain Catholic”.
Rudd, in contrast, is theologically self-educated. Most people only became aware of his religious interests after his article Faith in Politics was published in The Monthly in October 2006. Rudd is no theological tyro; he is up-to-date with the latest writings and often privately talks theology with some pretty well-informed people.
But what strikes you about both men is the inconsistency between their committed Christian stances and their parties’ policies. Sure, politics is the art of compromise and in a pluralist democracy they have no right to impose their religious convictions on everyone. But you would think that their moral convictions might have some impact on their policy stances.
Take climate change for instance. The churches have been onto this issue since the 1980s and the first entirely carbon neutral place on earth is the Vatican City State which has bought carbon credits to cover its emissions. Sure, it is the smallest state in the world and doesn’t suffer from a population explosion, with most of its 824 inhabitants claiming to be celibate. But it points to the fact that both Popes Benedict XVI and Francis take climate change and environment seriously.
For decades now Catholic thinkers (like Thomas Berry) and Protestant theologians (like Jürgen Moltman) have focused on environmentalism. Just recently the leaders of the Protestant and Catholic churches together with the Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist and Muslim faiths issued an Open Letter to the Australian People begging us to take global warming seriously and asking us to make policies on this issue a deciding factor in our voting intentions. If this was really taken seriously all religious people would have to vote Green.
Certainly Abbott and Rudd’s current climate change and environmental policies hardly convey a sense that this is, as Rudd said, "the greatest moral challenge of our generation." Rather, environment has been relegated to secondary issue status, with the Coalition far more concerned about clearing away "green tape" so miners and polluters can get on with what they do best. As The Guardian reported last month, the Climate Institute’s Pollute-o-Meter gave Labor "2.5 stars out of five for its climate policies, with the Coalition lagging on one star." The Greens got five stars.
So how do Rudd and Abbott square this failure with the recent strong Christian theological emphasis on the integrity and protection of creation? The simple answer is: they don’t.
Both have talked about being Christian politicians. Speaking at Adelaide University in March 2004 Abbott said that "A Christian politician faces the double test of not only being an effective politician, but also being a credible Christian ... This is not easy for anyone, but is especially hard to reconcile with the hyper-partisan culture of Australian politics." But this is just a statement of the obvious; it doesn’t tackle the vexed question of how you square being Christian with the nitty-gritty of policy formulation.
Rudd has been more hard-headed. In The Monthly, he wrote that "A Christian perspective on contemporary policy debates ... must be argued. And once heard, it must be weighed, together with other arguments from different philosophical traditions, in a fully contestable secular polity." In other words, policy in a pluralist democracy emerges from the contestation of ideas. However, Rudd also said unequivocally in 2006 that "the fundamental ethical challenge of our age to protect the planet ... The scientific evidence is now clear, and the time for global, national and local action has well and truly come." That is both science and morality have come together so that policy action on climate change is no longer contestable.
But, like the Coalition, Labor doesn’t have a serious climate change policy. They have pious platitudes about 2020, but they remain as enslaved to the coal industry and CFMEU as the Coalition. Guy Pearse points out that the expansion of coal exports will mean that by "2020 or soon thereafter, Australia [will be] exporting nearly twice as much CO2 as is Saudi Arabia today." So much for the greatest moral challenge of our generation.
In a way, secularists need not worry. Neither of these guys is ever going to hand Australia over to the parsons, priests and God-botherers.
