At the Sir Thomas Playford Annual Lecture

It’s a privilege to be invited to deliver the Sir Thomas Playford Lecture.

Much has been written and said about the success, the authority and the honesty of Sir Thomas’s political career.

But it was also a career that was profoundly influenced by his Baptist upbringing and lifelong commitment to Christian principles.

It’s from them and the sometimes turbulent relations between Church and State that I take my theme today.

Let me begin with a personal anecdote.

Listening to the ABC’s AM on Saturday morning 19^th October I was dumbfounded to hear the announcer Hamish Robertson say “well, the head of the nation’s Anglican Church says the Bali Bomb attack was an inevitable consequence of Australia’s close alliance with the United States…Dr. Peter Carnley says terrorists were responding to Australia’s outspoken support for the United States and particularly its preparedness to take unilateral action against Iraq.”

Here was the head of my own church, reported by the ABC as rushing to judgment and blaming the Australian Government for bombing incidents in which so many of our people were killed or terribly injured.

Whether this report was fair or not, it struck me hard.

There was no concentration on comforting the victims and their families, no binding up of the broken-hearted while a shocked nation mourned.

Yet surely that first and foremost is what was needed and what we were entitled to expect.

It was a stark reminder of the tendency of some church leaders to ignore their primary pastoral obligations in favour of hogging the limelight on complex political issues –and in this case a national tragedy –in ways which would have been inconceivable in the Playford era. 

This is something that has troubled me for some time.

I will always defend the right of the Churches to enter the political debates of our time. 

But they have special responsibilities –to the facts, to their congregations and to their faiths.

Too often, it seems to me, the Churches seek popular political causes or cheap headlines. 

And this tends to cut across the central role they have in providing spiritual comfort and moral guidance to the community.

It may surprise some of you to know that an unusually high proportion of federal politicians on all sides are practising Christians who have a sense of faith and listen to what the churches tell us and the rest of the community.

Imperfect as we all too obviously are, we’re sincere about the faith that nurtured Western Civilisation.

It’s because of our beliefs that we tend to see public life as a vocation –a calling, not just a job.

Beyond the theatre of question time, some of the most impressive and heartfelt speeches in Parliament arise over questions of conscience where shared values make unexpected allies and cross-party acquaintances develop into lasting friends.

Despite deep differences, Don Dunstan the young Labor turk and one-time Anglican synodsman developed a friendship like that with Playford over the years when the premier very often gave him a lift home in his car, on those nights the house was sitting late.

Playford was a religious Non-Conformist.  My own denomination is, as I’ve said, Anglican.

These days that means that, like my denomination, I’m very often torn between hope in “the church militant here on earth”and near-despair at her divisions.

I remember where once there was a confident global communion, with room for civilized doctrinal disagreement under a canopy of shared belief.

Those days are long gone.

In their place, uncertainty or disbelief in the fundamental tenets of Christianity are commonplace among senior clergy.

Not since the Enlightenment swept through France has clerical scepticism been so much on the ascendant.

I’m reminded of the dilemma faced by Louis XVI and his advisers, when the see of Paris fell vacant.

In the Gallican church the king had almost as much of a say in senior appointments as in England.

The problem was one of finding someone both suitable and orthodox.

When, in 1785 the Archbishop of Toulouse was recommended, Louis replied “Ah, no; the Archbishop of Paris must at least believe in God”.

The last forty years of the church has seen even core issues of faith such as the resurrrection become the subject of vigorous dispute.

Of course it is possible to believe in God in some sense, or other, without believing in the resurrection, as many good Jewish and Muslim Australians do.

But the Christian church has always taught that belief in the resurrection was the central tenet of Christianity.

As a politician, I offer no judgement on this issue:  just the observation that some church leaders have moved away from their core beliefs.

Not surprisingly then, it’s often said that we are entering a post-Christian age.

Whether there is a terminal decline in Australia remains an open question.

It depends in part on whether you place more reliance on what people say they believe or in their actual church attendance.

43 per cent of Australians believe the resurrection was an actual historical event, yet 20 per cent attend church frequently according to the ACS 1998 survey.

It may be that the gap can best be explained by what contemporary congregations experience in the pews.

Confidence in the church has fallen in recent years—from 56 per cent in a comparable survey in 1983 to 39 per cent.

Still, the growing role of televised services for an ageing population and the unexpected strength of new Pentecostal, Evangelical and Catholic youth movements may not have been captured in the survey.

However, a post-Christian age poses a relentless question to politicians and everyone concerned with the character of our society.

Family life, the education system and the moral instruction provided by other faiths all play an important part.

But without consistent moral teaching and example from bodies like the churches, how can most Australians be expected to behave selflessly or consider the common good and abide by any kind of social contract?    

Nature can be relied on to some extent through sturdy instincts like parental love.

But the ties of kith and kin are less binding; the weaving of the social fabric is less confidently and competently undertaken than in Playford’s era.

Most of the givens and imperatives in his world view are now optional—relative rather than absolute.

When “everything is relative”is the best that many clergy have to offer on major moral questions, morality starts to become a matter of convenience, being seen to do the decent thing, what feels good at the time or what you can get away with.

This is a kind of ecclesiastical post-modernism.

Those categories may coincide with the good of society as a whole from time to time, but the erosion of a shared sense of the obligations enforced by conscience is disturbing.

I should stress immediately that Christian politicians prize their faith primarily because they believe in it, rather than as an instrumentalist might see it as a useful management tool to encourage civic virtue.

The lament is not for “the good old days”in any simple sense, but for foreshortening of a larger notion of what it means to be fully human.

Those clergy and theologians who have lost sight of the fundamentals have filled the vacuum with all manner of diversions.

For some, social work has become the be all and end all.

Environmental causes, feminist and gay agendas and indigenous rights provide constant grandstanding opportunities.

Most intoxicating of all, and most divisive for their congregations, is overtly partisan politicking.

Apart from disdain for traditional pastoral duties and pontificating self-regard, how best to explain the clerics who issue press releases at the drop of a hat on issues where the mind of the church itself is unresolved or not yet engaged?

The then Bishop of London, Graham Leonard, put it this way; “The Church today, having lost her nerve, shows at times an almost pathetic desire to be loved by the world”.

Ingratiating oneself with current popular opinion is a doomed strategy.

Dean Inge summed it up, saying “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon become a widower”.

Perhaps that is partly why 29 per cent of Australians feel negative and another 39 per cent neutral or unsure about the church.

As Graham Leonard was wont to remark –bishops and theologians in their public utterance are remarkably vague and uncertain about matters which their faith should teach them with certitude but remarkably certain and dogmatic on matters of considerable complexity and ambiguity about which they have no particular expertise.

Hence political and social judgements are delivered with magisterial certainty while utterances on fundamental Christian doctrines are characterised by scepticism and doubt.

I think it’s a polite way of saying that if you can’t rely on what they say about what they’re supposed to understand, why take all that seriously their opinions on anything else?

It’s of a piece with the ADF’s Anglican bishop, Tom Frame, recently counselling caution about presuming to know the divine mind on strategic questions.

I am not always in agreement with Bishop George Browning of Canberra and Goulburn, but I do agree with his remark that the Church had become involved in the social agenda of Western governments with “indecent speed”.

A temperate approach to political engagement would be as welcome now as the end of Labor’s attitude to the Catholic Church as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

As Gerard Henderson remarked, the 30 per cent of Catholics on the Howard Government’s front bench “is about the same as the percentage of Catholics in the Australian community”.

The old legacy of sectarian bitterness which meant that, Judith Brett noted, “Catholics did not join the Liberal Party up until recent times because they felt unwanted”has disintegrated.   

Unfortunately, the integration of the Catholic Church into the broader body politic as represented in Parliament has not prevented some of its bishops from making intemperate denunciations of Australia’s participation in the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq.

The churches, and in particular the Catholic Church, had called for the application of humanitarian intervention in Rwanda, the Balkans and East Timor.

They were right to do so –but this contrasts dramatically with the approach of many church leaders to the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

Few church leaders appeared concerned about the grotesque human rights abuses within Iraq of the Saddam Hussein regime –already the remains of at least 300,000 people have been found in mass graves since the end of the war.

Few church leaders expressed concern that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons not only against other countries but against his own people.

Few church leaders seemed concerned that Saddam Hussein had invaded neighbouring countries at the cost of over one million human lives.

Surely that is enough evil to enrage even the most placid church leader.

Instead vocal church leaders seemed more engaged in an esoteric debate about whether the Coalition of the Willing was adhering to international law - when in fact it was Saddam Hussein who was in breach of that law.

To debate international law is fair enough, but these commentators provided a one-sided moral message on war that offered no insight into the moral price the world would pay if it failed to address the vile immorality of the Saddam Hussein regime.

These commentators neither confronted that difficult moral dilemma, nor gave clear guidance.

In some cases they apparently failed to understand that for god-fearing people there was a moral dilemma that needed to be confronted. 

Symptomatic of these types of problems was the retiring address by the President of the Uniting Church, Professor James Haire.

He said “[W]e live in a time of profound turning away from God in much of our social and national life”.

He went on to say that he believed “egged on by both political groupings in the country, we as a nation had reached new depths of political depravity, especially with the duplicity and harshness of the Tampa incident, and the total inability of the Federal Opposition to act as an opposition in the nation, thus depriving this nation of any genuine democratic debate leading up to the election.”

I find the accusation of political depravity –not just misguidedness in particular policies, mind you, but depravity –profoundly personally offensive as well as foolish.

That he was attacking both the major parties is no comfort.

As I said at the beginning of this speech Archbishop Carnley, the Anglican Primate, was almost as outspoken and ill-advised on the issue of the Bali Bombings.

Not content with his radio performance, he went so far as to issue a press release, compounding the offence.

He expressed his “concern that by targeting two Bali nightclubs in which large numbers of young Australians were known to gather, terrorists were responding to Australia’s outspoken support for the United States.”

I felt obliged to respond to this premature and, as later events demonstrated, erroneous posturing and made it clear that we did not know precisely who was responsible for the bombing and the Archbishop needed to be careful before drawing any firm conclusions.

Dr Carnley was obliged to “do a little back tracking”as they say, especially when the bombers began to speak for themselves about their motives. 

We have heard from them mostly that Australians were not deliberately targeted.

Rather the idea was to kill Americans and Westerners generally.

One alleged bomber, Imron, declaring “Australians, Americans, whatever –they are all white people.”

But where one of these terrorists did mention targeting Australia, the motive was a world away from Iraq.

Imam Samudra said Australians were deliberately targeted because “Australia has taken part in efforts to separate East Timor from Indonesia which was an international conspiracy by followers of the Cross.”

There were other reasons offered but the ending of the carnage in East Timor and its liberation, one of Australia’s most significant foreign affairs achievements and one of which its people are generally and rightly proud, was uppermost in the conspirator’s mind.

So Dr Carnley was wrong.

And sadly, he was wrong in a way that came dangerously close to suggesting that our foreign policy should somehow be dictated by the actions of terrorists.

I firmly believe that when we have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing, we should not allow terrorists to influence our judgement.

As Foreign Minister, of course, I’m committed to using diplomatic means as all but the last resort in achieving outcomes in the national interest.

Diplomacy, once almost the special preserve of the clergy, requires patience, good manners and steadfastness in ascertaining the facts in any particular case—attributes which, among many modern clerics, are in short supply.

There are some signs of hope.

In particular, there’s the resurgence of youth movements in some of the churches and the thousands of undergraduates who turned out formally to greet Archbishop George Pell when he first visited Sydney University as their new archbishop.

The link between the growing, well-documented social conservatism of many young people and religious observance is part of a pattern.

Demographically it fleshes out the increasingly plausible hypothesis that the baby boomers’children have tended to skip a generation and prefer the values of their grandparents rather than their parents. 

Sir Thomas will be viewing that development with the same optimism that many contemporary politicians feel.

The Christian churches, as with other great religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, have a central role to play in providing a moral compass to an increasing materialistic world. 

While many people, although still too few, have material comfort, as they have achieved that state, they have lost much-needed spiritual sustenance. 

The greatest challenge today for leaders of all religions is to forego the opportunity to be amateur commentators on all manner of secular issues on which they inevitably lack expertise, and instead to find the spark of inspiration to give our lives greater moral and spiritual meaning. 

I know Tom Playford would have wanted them to rise to that challenge.