Are Political Parties Dominated by the Religious Right?
One frequent statement from commentators and journalists about Australia’s political parties is that they are being dominated by the religious right.
As most of these people have aligned themselves with the political left, this is a fact they cannot stomach. Just note the adjectives they use to describe the religious right. There descriptions include ugly, troglodytes, regressive, homophobic, anti abortion, fundamentalist and so on. They are mostly loaded smear words while those from the left are described with words delineating sensible, intelligent, progressive, tolerant and so on.
Those to the left usually want to be known as moderates while they describe those to the right as fundamentalist religious extremists. This of course is just smearing with terms.
Last week former Liberal leader Dr John Hewson launched John Hyde Page’s book, The Education of a Young Liberal. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that “Hyde Page’s opinions were the driving force behind a recent ABC Four Corners expose of NSW Liberal disharmony and his book continues the onslaught, portraying the conservative men and women he once adored when a starstruck Young Liberal as a bunch of thugs and bullies.”
The Herald continued, “Dr Hewson said a small group of “extremist” right-wingers had a “stranglehold” over the party and that there should be an internal inquiry, particularly into branch-stacking. He described the right-wing powerbroker and upper house MP David Clarke as an “extremist”. “When one small element of the party takes a stranglehold on the party, which is what he’s done, the hardline right, the moral religious right, then it’s counterproductive.” A group “taking hardline positions on abortion, euthanasia, gay rights, gay marriage and the republic” was heading for “political oblivion”.
But where is the evidence? Where are the statistics to support such an argument.
I am reminded of the assertions without evidence that litter Marion Maddox’s God Under Howard: the Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics which appeared in 2005.
Last week in commenting on this in a Canberra Times article (31/7/2006) Anglican Bishop Tom Frame wrote,
“In reviewing the book for The Canberra Times, I pointed out that the Maddox’s central thesis that Australian democracy is being ravaged by an ascendant religious right had not been demonstrated with hard evidence. Indeed, this was one of the book’s least convincing elements.Other reviewers have made precisely the same point. Maddox overlooks abundant evidence of the firmly embedded left-wing commitments that can be found in most major Australian churches. Large sections of the Catholic Church (with the obvious exception of Opus Dei), the Anglican Church (not counting many within Sydney Diocese) and the Uniting Church (excluding the Evangelical group led by the Reverend Gordon Moyes) would readily confess to leftist sympathies and strong antipathy to the Coalition.
Indeed, John Howard, John Anderson, Alexander Downer and Peter Costello have all complained about the existence and propagation of pro-Labor attitudes within the Anglican Church and the willingness of its leaders to attack the Federal Government and to denounce its policies. It is simply wrong to say that Australia is being threatened by a religious right. This might be the case in the United States but it is not true of Australia.”
The Roman Catholic Social Justice Commission statements are generally left wing, as are the continuous statements from within the Uniting Church. I have named elsewhere, the political history of some Uniting Church spokespersons who were Labor Party branch officials.
Neither political parties nor religious denominations in Australia are dominated by the religious right. That is an excuse given by left-wing journalists and commentators as to why their viewpoints are consistently rejected by the Australian voter in Federal elections.
GORDON MOYES
