{"id":11720,"date":"2022-05-24T13:10:41","date_gmt":"2022-05-24T03:10:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=11720"},"modified":"2022-07-15T22:28:15","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T12:28:15","slug":"liberal-party-following-the-christian-right-into-electoral-wilderness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2022\/05\/24\/liberal-party-following-the-christian-right-into-electoral-wilderness\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberal Party: Following the Christian right into electoral wilderness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christian right lobby groups now have the Liberal Party they want \u2013 a lot more conservative and no doubt a lot more favourable to their pet issues.<\/span><\/p>\n

Too bad that this party, once proudly a \u2018broad church\u2019 but now, perhaps, just a church, seems unelectable.<\/span><\/p>\n

With many of the moderates now gone, booted out of their seats in big-city suburbs across the country, it appears clear the Liberal Party\u2019s long-running internal divide between moderates and conservatives is resolved.<\/span><\/p>\n

For many of the party stalwarts, the weekend\u2019s election result was a disaster. For the likes of the Australian Christian Lobby, there were silver linings.<\/span><\/p>\n

During the election campaign, the ACL specifically targeted a number of sitting Liberal Party members who had listened to the concerns of their electorates and voted to block Scott Morrison\u2019s Religious Discrimination Bill.<\/span><\/p>\n

The powerful lobby group distributed leaflets and conducted push polling in the electorates of Trent Zimmerman, Dave Sharma, Bridget Archer and Fiona Martin, arguing, according to <\/span>The Guardian<\/span><\/i>, that these members of parliament had \u201cvoted against protecting people of faith from discrimination\u201d<\/a> and had swung a wrecking ball into religious schools.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yesterday, the ACL\u2019s managing director, Martyn Iles, told <\/span>Christian radio<\/span><\/a> that the defeat of moderates was one of the \u201csilver linings\u201d of the election outcome. In dancing on the grave of the moderate wing of the Liberal Party, he boasted that the ACL\u2019s targeting of moderate politicians had been successful.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve known that the Liberals are going to lose at some point soonish. And the question for me is, \u2018What will be the manner of their loss? Will it be an improvement or will it not?\u2019 And I\u2019m here to say that, without a doubt, that it has improved the Liberal Party significantly going forward as an opposition force and as a potential future government,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I think the ACL had a role in this improvement.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For many of the party stalwarts, the weekend\u2019s election result was a disaster. For the likes of the Australian Christian Lobby, there were silver linings.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By his own calculation, of 15 Liberals who lost their seats, at least 12 were \u2018moderates\u2019 \u2013 or, as he put it, these were the sorts of people \u201cwho weren\u2019t really Liberals at all\u201d and who stood up for \u201cnasty anti-Christian social policies\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a result, the Liberal Party would, in going forward, have \u201cstronger Christian values \u2013 I\u2019m pretty confident of that,” he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Iles revealed that data showed the ACL\u2019s targeting of the moderates\u2019 in the electorates of Reid, Wentworth, North Sydney and Bass had been successful, with awareness of the ACL campaign message hovering at around 40 per cent two days before the election.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd, of those people, we found that between 25 to 33 per cent, depending on the electorate, said that the message affected their vote,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSo we [inaudible] didn\u2019t make the difference, as the ACL, between the Liberals winning and losing, but we certainly made sure that what happened was that, as they lost, four of the five Liberal MPs who crossed the floor to vote against \u2018religious freedom\u2019 and vote against Christian schools have lost their seats today. And the last one hangs in the balance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Although <\/span>right-wing commentators<\/span><\/a> have been quick to blame the Liberal Party\u2019s demise on its pandering to moderates and progressive social causes, they appear oblivious to the community\u2019s concern about the efforts of religious fundamentalists to infiltrate the party in many parts of the country in recent years.<\/span><\/p>\n

The same commentators suggest there\u2019s some mythical \u2018quiet\u2019 majority behind them, though it\u2019s not clear if this is the same majority that was supposed to come out and vote against same-sex marriage but didn\u2019t turn up.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wherever the Christian right has sought to infiltrate or exercise overt influence over the party \u2013 such as in South Australia, Western Australia, Victoria or at the federal level \u2013 voters have abandoned the Liberal Party in droves.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Christian right\u2019s agenda is a losing one. Very few voters want a bar of it. If the federal Liberals now lurch even further to the right in trying appease the ACL and others like them even more, the party may as well kiss goodbye to any chance of winning back those old blue heartland seats that have turned teal, red or green.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s groups like the ACL that pressured the Morrison government to march on in developing a Religious Discrimination Bill that overreached so far that it turned many of the government\u2019s own MPs off it and found little appeal outside the shrinking conservative religious ranks.<\/span><\/p>\n

Iles himself dealt the legislation a blow last year when he declared prematurely on Christian radio that, after negotiations with the then Attorney-General Michaelia Cash and then Prime Minister Scott Morrison, <\/span>the ACL had been successful in having the \u2018Folau clause\u2019 re-inserted into the draft legislation<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At such a sensitive time, his comments wedged Cash and Morrison between the demands of religious lobbyists and many of the government’s own MPs who had been warning over a number of months that parts of the previous draft bill, including the \u2018Folau clause\u2019, were unacceptable.<\/span><\/p>\n

As <\/span>Paul Monk wrote in <\/span>Rationale<\/span><\/i> recently<\/span><\/a>, a range of issues to do with religion have been a source of division within the Liberal Party. And it left party members, he said, needing to ask themselves where they stood.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, voters have now answered that question for many in the Liberal Party. While the religious lobbyists may welcome a more conservative party that\u2019s interested in pushing their fringe agendas, this is the road to electoral wilderness, not<\/span> redemption, for the once broad church of the Liberal Party.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you wish to republish this original article, please attribute to<\/i><\/b>\u00a0Rationale<\/i><\/b><\/a>.\u00a0<\/i><\/b>Click here<\/i><\/b><\/a>\u00a0to find out more about republishing under Creative Commons.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Image: ABC screengrab and Gerda<\/a> on Unsplash.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christian right lobby groups now have the Liberal Party they want \u2013 a lot more conservative and no doubt a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":447,"featured_media":11721,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[343,340],"coauthors":[79],"class_list":["post-11720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law-politics","tag-christian-right","tag-liberal-party"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/447"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11720"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11727,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11720\/revisions\/11727"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11720"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=11720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}