Tony Abbott today takes time out today from responding the 25 to 50 media inquiries his office receives daily to do something that is really important - write an opinion piece about how people should stop picking on him for being Christian.  As usual it is a vast conspiracy from the Left-liberal media to cast aspersions on his beliefs:

A media staple since the 2004 election has been the rise of the so-called religious Right. This motif testifies to the historical amnesia and cultural impoverishment of most younger journalists, in whose minds views that would have been orthodox a generation ago now seem odd or evidence of religious brainwashing.

I’m not aware of a single position from any politician to whom this tag is applied advocated on the basis of scripture or an appeal to religious authority. Every position has been argued on the basis of human values, not religious teaching. Yet it is now rare for stories about particular politicians on particular topics not to be embellished with gratuitous adjectives such as “devout Catholic”.

A senior journalist from a leading paper today called my office wanting to know whether I had discussed stem cells recently with Pell. As if it were anyone’s business; as if such a discussion would somehow discredit any position I might hold; and as if any journalist would dare cast aspersions on conversations between a non-Christian politician and a leader of their faith. The journalist was told that from time to time I did indeed have discussions with the Cardinal; they were always instructive and I wished they were more frequent. Two generations after it was thought sectarianism had finally vanished from public life, this is doubtless evidence that I am the Vatican mole in the Howard Government.

It’s worth noting that when Bruce Baird, Steven Fielding and Barnaby Joyce invoked their Christian consciences to oppose the Government’s immigration bill, there were no calls to keep religion out of politics. Media outrage is confined to expressions of the church’s moral teaching, not its social gospel in what is, at the very least, a chronically politically correct double standard.

First, while I am not a big fan of Tony, I think that he has every right to express a personal moral opinion and allow that to guide his decisions in carrying out the responsibilties of his job.  I think the calls for him to do anything otherwise are ridiculous.  Surely we would expect that all pollies carried out their duties out of conviction rather than base politics.  If Tony’s beliefs are too far departed from the views of Howard’s supporters, then this would certainly force Johnny to make a change.

But this is also what annoys me about the above opinion piece.  Some of the “poor me” preaching about the media is just painful.  The conservative politicians are firmly entrenched in government but feel like that darn leftist media won’t give them a break.  Well fer cryin’ out loud.  The overwhelmingly “leftist” media doesn’t seem to have convinced too many punters to change their opinions when it comes to election day.

Surely politicians realise that being in power will lead to media criticism?  For the Howard government, it is criticism in favour of left-liberal values.  For the Victorian Kirner government it was criticism about their profligate spending.  The Hawke/Keating government were done in for “causing” a recession.

And Tony, I think that if a non-Christian politician ever was appointed Health Minister, you can bet your bottom dollar that the meeja would be asking questions about meetings with the leader of that person’s faith.  Of course they bloody well would.  It is an easy comparison to make of course because we all know that the chances that we would see a non-Christian yet practising religious politician in a prominent ministry position are minimal (with the possible exception of a jewish politician for any ministry apart from defence or foreign affairs).  As Tony points out, even a christian politician in such a ministry cops a fair bit of scrutiny as to the influence of his religion on his decisions.  If it were a muslim or hindi politician who was opposing therapeutic cloning, I suspect there would be a bit of media attention on that angle as well.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 2:01 pm by dan and is filed under God politics, oz politics and society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.