I am wondering whether the Coalition is beginning to regret jumping into bed with the Family First party. Much of the comment before the election seemed to assume that conservative evangelical christianity would promote essentially the same political agenda as the coalition. This has never been a reasonable expectation, as the policies published on the party’s website demonstrate that they are opposed to the government on significant issues. However, this observation didn’t get a lot of airtime in the face of the media-driven “religion is taking over politics” frenzy.

Since the election, Family First retains a huge voice in the media completely out of proportion to its position in parliament (one senator in a coalition controlled senate is hardly the most influential person in the political scheme). The media coverage seems to exhibit partly a lurid voyeurism about the religion and politics issue and partly because some of the more controversial statements and releases by the party are exactly the sort of things that journalists like to throw in the face of government politicians.

First, with the help of Tony Abbott and Chris Pyne, the party pushed the issue of abortion back to the fore. This of course prompted a very noticeable silence from Howard and Costello, barely masking their frustration at having such a controversial issue raise its head.

And then, Family First jumped into the refugee bunfight, objecting to the deportation of Iranian asylum-seekers who had converted to christianity whilst in detention (non-christians be damned, but we won’t send god-fearing people back to that hell hole). Thus demonstrating that a group which is loosely “representative” of a particular constituency may become a lobby group for that constituency - much in the same way that the Greens often operates.

I predict that Steve Fielding will continue to garner a disproportionate amount of media attention, as will the handful of seats that the party may eventually pick up in a number of state parliaments. This is partly because, well, it is much more interesting than a lot of political reporting to “ordinary Australians”, but also because of the increased profile of the so called moral issues in the White House.

And while Howard was happy to have the support of the party through preference deals at the election, I am less certain that he will be happy to have conservative morality as a key issues for him during this term. Family First has a much stronger “mandate” to speak for moral issues than Harradine ever did, and the coalition found his moralising to be exceedingly annoying.

Also, check out this post at Troppo Armadillo for what promises to be the beginning of an interesting discussion of a similar issue.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004 at 8:25 pm by dan and is filed under God politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.