Opinion
The left may think Australia has seen the light, but don’t expect the Christian right to retreat
Malcolm Knox
Journalist, author and columnistIn the last weeks of the federal election campaign, the conservative lobby group Advance Australia defied a cease-and-desist demand from Swimming Australia and the Australian Olympic Committee and kept trundling a motorised billboard around Zali Steggall’s seat of Warringah with an image of three Australian female Olympic athletes, declaring: “Women’s sport is not for men”. It depicted Steggall (also clad in a “secret” Greens T-shirt) retorting: “That’s transphobic.”
Steggall’s team were sanguine, even cheerful. Passing motorists thought the van was, in fact, an advertisement for Steggall. They figured, correctly as it turned out, that any grassroots promotion of Advance Australia’s preferred candidate, the Liberal Party’s Katherine Deves, would only end up driving more voters towards the independent.
Zali Steggall’s team figured that any grassroots promotion of Advance Australia’s preferred candidate, the Liberal Party’s Katherine Deves (right), would only end up driving more voters towards the independent.Credit:Louise Kennerley
While the success of Climate 200-backed independents and the Greens might have left an impression that grassroots progressives have captured the national mood, it would be wrong to think that this is a permanent state or that “people power” from the conservative side has given up the field. Defeat will invigorate conservative movements, which will want to save the country from the path of godlessness and damnation it chose last Saturday.
In the twilight of the campaign, another conservative lobby was also mobilising. Scott Morrison’s promised religious discrimination bill had disappointed his backers at the Australian Christian Lobby. It was too compromised, “Labor lite”, for their taste. The ACL’s director, Martyn Iles, had gone Achilles on Morrison, sulking over the failed bill. But when Morrison needed a miracle from above, the ACL rallied, letterboxing teal-leaning electorates, asking Warringah voters, “Do [Steggall’s] attacks on Christianity and other faiths accord with your values?”
The ACL was reprising 2019, when it took credit for Morrison’s so-called “miracle election” after leafleting thousands of homes in critical electorates.
While it might seem curious that the ACL would only buy tickets on the Titanic after it had hit the iceberg, the sense of impending apocalypse was bracing for Pentecostal conservatives. Now that all was lost for Morrison, his friends had the chance to show their loyalty and save the nation once again.
Alas, no miracles this time.
A swiftly accepted wisdom from the 2022 election is how values-driven community groups have got ahead of the two-party system. But this is not new. Conservative-leaning community groups had propelled Morrison in 2019 and One Nation in a string of state elections. The shift of community-generated electoral gravity to the progressive side does not mean active community conservatives will recede into silence. To the contrary.
Former defence minister and the federal member for Dickson, Peter Dutton, pictured with his family, is expected to take the Liberal Party leadership. He is considered a “pragmatist”.Credit:Dan Peled
The Australian Christian Lobby might never get a moment of peacocking like it had when Morrison was elected. Iles and his people were welcomed into Canberra power circles and constantly issued reminders that they had saved The Lodge for their friend. Now, with Morrison’s end, and Peter Dutton not being a Christian soldier, more a “pragmatist” as he puts it, the ACL might be considered to have lost relevance.
But when he surveys the remnants of the parliamentary Liberal Party and their bases of support in the community, Dutton is not going to see much that is cohesive. Inside Canberra, Morrison’s so-called prayer group, among them Alex Hawke, Stuart Robert, Julian Leeser and Andrew Hastie, are not only intact but, in a reduced party, proportionately enlarged after the election.
Morrison’s embrace of his church and the religious language of his concession speech suggest he will be relieved to be back in the bosom of religion, pursuing a Christian-driven agenda without the compromise associated with making laws. A plurality of Australians showed they don’t want to hear from Morrison anymore, but his group will still be in Canberra, on their mission, when parliament resumes.
One thing the conservative vanguards do not lack is energy and belief.
It might all sound so last-year, and it is fashionable to declare that the ACL, Advance Australia and their culture-war battlefronts have been swept into irrelevance. But if there is one unifying sentiment among the Christian soldiers, it is that defeat and the sense of being persecuted is galvanic. To feel rejected by voters, by the modern world, is for radical Christians a happy place. To swim against the current of Godless times is in some ways more comfortable than posing with the levers of power.
Most Australians showed themselves last Saturday to be bone-weary of culture wars. With the future of the planet at stake, are they really going to be vote-changingly worked up over how schools manage gender issues? This is a challenge for bodies like the ACL, in a new legislative cycle led by climate action. (It’s also hard to understand why the ACL and their like have been so climate change-sceptical. If you love God, wouldn’t you want to help save the planet? Or does tribal enmity – we can’t side with Godless Greens on anything – trump everything?)
But before conservative people power is dismissed out of hand, it’s worth remembering that believers are playing the longest of long games. The Albanese government will become unpopular at some point, and the forces of Christian lobbying will only gain in righteousness while fermenting in the margins.
It might seem counter-intuitive but Christian conservatives – whose urgings helped generate if not the worst prime ministership in memory, then certainly its shallowest – still expect a future influence in Australian politics. But in the mechanics of defeat, a movement can only rebuild from its strongest remaining parts. Just as Labor, after each of its defeats, had to go back to its base of industrial membership, the conservative side will first have to locate its most cohesive vestiges and reconstruct itself from there. Losing, not winning, is when you find your true believers.
The Christian soldiers aren’t going away, and perversely, the advances of the teal independents will only give them heart, because they have shown how far energy and belief, organised from the ground up, can go. One thing the conservative vanguards do not lack is energy and belief. What are the momentary ups and downs of the electoral cycle when your eye is on eternity?