Economics.org.au

Religious leaders talking politics/economics led to these thoughtful responses, from the Devine to the McGuinness (and the sublime to the ridiculous), in The Australian in the early 1990s. They remain relevant, have nice tension of perspectives and occasionally refer to each other.
1. Devine: Fred leads the charge of the Light brigade, 15/10/90
2. McGuinness: Shepherds of faith — not economics, 23/10/90
3. McGuinness: A flaying for the faithful, 7/11/90
4. Devine: Welfare: a taxing problem, 29/11/90
5. Graeme Cole: Charities: the head or the heart?, 7/12/90
6. Greg Lindsay: Give givers a say, 14/12/90
7. McGuinness: Divine light glows dimly, 31/1/91
8. McGuinness: Secular welfarism can’t replace Christian charity, 1/2/91
9. Devine: Rendering unto Caesar a dimension of morality, 4/2/91
10. Archbishop Foley: Reflection is also a path to wealth, 6/2/91
11. McGuinness: Selling economics as a market force, 13/2/91
12. Devine: On a mission from God, not a political drive, 5/12/91
13. Devine: How Horatius united Left and Right, 11/5/92
14. Devine: Marxist mirage mars truth and justice the Catholic way, 21/9/92
15. McGuinness: Churches lose the plot on political stage, 16/10/92
16. Devine: Thank the Lord for the vision of this free-market priest, 24/5/93
17. McGuinness: Faith and hope, but scant authority, 23/6/94
18. Devine: Impossible to overlook the power of church authority, 27/6/94
19. McGuinness: Religious analysts fail to grasp the scriptures of economics, 23-24/7/94
McGuinness-Devine to-and-fro continued in Santamaria obituaries:
20. McGuinness: Greatness born of faith and fantasies, SMH, 28/2/98
21. Devine: Remember him as an intellectual, The Australian, 2/3/98
Encore:
22. Devine: Message to the PM from on high: leave Me out, 25/2/99
23. Devine: Do-gooder priests should stay out of the asylum debate, 12/12/03

***
1.
Frank Devine, “Fred leads the charge of the Light brigade,”
The Australian, October 15, 1990, p. 11.

Talk about a prophet without honour! Fred Nile is a 56-year-old Congregationalist clergyman, a member of the Upper House of the NSW Parliament and founder in Australia of the Festival of Light movement. He is a Christian fundamentalist in the sense that he believes all the answers to life’s questions are contained in the Bible.

A couple of weekends ago, Nile led several hundred hymn-singing Festival of Light supporters on a march through central Sydney to Kings Cross, where they held a prayer meeting aimed at helping to clean up the “soul-destroying” evils of the place — drugs, organised crime, prostitution and pornography.

Denizens of the Cross did a satisfactory job of mocking and reviling Fred and his followers, with homosexuals in nuns’ habits (the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence) and glamorous evening gowns (Poofters for Jesus) earning the biggest laughs and getting most television time. Staff of a new Kings Cross strip joint used mobile telephones to organise the action.

Later this year, Fred Nile and his Christian crusaders will parade against Canberra’s pornographic video dealers, who are banned in all the States but legally operate mail-order businesses from the capital.

Fundamentalist Christians have an unfortunate knack of seeming both gauche and self-righteous when they confront the more popular consumer sins, and Fred Nile and his followers are no exception. But their style flaws hardly explain the bucketing they received from fellow Christians. It is as if Fred were the bad guy.

George Fisher, a spokesman for the Anglican archdiocese of Sydney, described the Kings Cross march as “distinctly unhelpful”. He said: “It is of concern when people are motivated by the hatred of evil rather than the love of good.”

Father Brian Lucas, from the Catholic archdiocese, says: “All Fred does is attract media attention. His Kings Cross protest was just a stunt.” Next day he and his followers would be gone, but there would still be nuns in the park “putting a bandage on some poor derelict’s knee”.

The Reverend Harry Herbert, secretary of the Board of Social Responsibility of the Uniting Church (with which Nile, as a Congregationalist, is affiliated), says: “He is out of touch with the Church … He is entitled to do all sorts of things as a politician, but he is not entitled to say … that his views is that of the Christian Church.”

Not long ago, Australian Presbyterian Living Today magazine began a profile of Fred with a series of rhetorical questions: “Is Fred Nile nothing more than a bumbling buffoon, operating out of his depth …? Is he nothing but a moralistic bore, a sexually obsessed do-gooder without a handle on the real world? Is there no one else out there who would make a better fist of representing 20th-century Christianity …?”

Nor is the politician-evangelist lacking in secular critics. Of a counter-parade Fred organised during the annual Gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, former senator Jim McClelland wrote: “My strongest impression was of the futility of it all. Fred’s flock might as sensibly have been engaged in a crusade against the left-handed or the blue-eyed.”

McClellan noted that Fred’s organisation “had evidently bussed their adherents from country centres. The provincials, carrying banners indicating their provenance, seemed greatly to outnumber the urban zealots, giving the procession an overwhelmingly bumpkin flavour …

“I don’t know much about the composition of Fred’s sect, but an impressionistic assessment could be … that his real demographic base is the provincial poor.”

Being poor and provincial should, purely on precedent, create no insuperable barrier to being a Christian, but it is definitely a block against being chic — and Jim McClelland is correct, I think, in identifying lack of chic as the main reason for the quite extraordinary hostility directed by “respectable” Australians against Fred Nile and the Festival of Light.

With their lack of chic, they threaten the tremulous balance of aesthetic and moral values that our times have created in the name of tolerance. As a shrewd acquaintance recently pointed out, contemporary confusion between the moral and the aesthetic is epitomised by the phrase “beautiful people enjoying the good things of life” — with fine appearance ranked as the ultimate attainment of human beings, and goodness attributed to things.

But even if one does not include homosexuality among the good things of life nor observe Kings Cross to be inhabited mainly by beautiful people, there is an inclination to cringe at the sight of the Festival of Light commandos confronting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who are capable of being cruelly funny, or the aggressively world-weary pimps and pornographers of the Cross. The Festival of Lighters often look outmatched.

On the other hand, Fred Nile’s unwavering certainty about the location of the dividing line between good and evil — a certainty that has been with him for close to 40 years — makes considerations of chic irrelevant. Son of a Sydney taxi-driver and a Kings Cross waitress, father of four (including two policemen), Fred started going to church as a teenager, because that was a requirement for membership of a tennis club he wanted to join. Within six weeks he had been converted by an old-fashioned evangelical preacher and “accepted Christ as my Saviour”.

Nile is not without humour. He takes unfeigned pleasure from the rain that fell on the Gay Mardi Gras, and hopes God will oblige again next year. But mostly he is grave of manner and formal and subdued in dress. He is meticulous about observances, always showing up in time for prayers in Parliament and prefacing all meals taken in all circumstances by saying grace.

It is wrong, Nile says, to portray him as being simply against forms of behaviour. He is ardently for “purity, love and family life” and thus against all that is inimical to them. He seems to speak ill of no individual.

He concedes that he seeks media attention, but not from vanity.

“I make people uncomfortable,” Nile says, and he considers this to be a valuable public service. “If nobody is speaking against sin it becomes easier to live with, and eventually to condone.”

The reluctance of his contemporaries to make their voices heard on moral issues is a frustration. Nile says there are many good Christians in the NSW Parliament, and a parliamentary prayer group with about 30 members. But even among these 30 few are willing to mention God’s name in public or discuss the moral values underlying issues on which they vote.

Nile believes homosexual practices to be sinful and recoils from the ideas of homosexuality being as natural and irrevocable as blue eyes and left-handedness. He would settle for a cessation of scandal-giving public display by homosexuals, being of the opinion that a Gay Mardi Gras is no more justified than a fiesta of sado-masochism.

Pornography outrages him. He considers its prevalence to be an extreme outcome of the depersonalisation of women that began when the Family Law Bill undermined marriage and the family in Australia.

Fred does not consider harassing Canberra pornographers and stirring up the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to be among the Festival of Light’s main tasks. For at least the remainder of this year and all of next year, most effort will be concentrated on an educational program aimed at informing the public about the Ten Commandments.

No doubt this crusade will have its naïve and bumpkin aspects, and Fred will continue to be denounced for indulging in media over-exposure. But pointing out the differences between the good guys and the bad guys is an ancient and honourable profession. If Fred is the only one doing it, people are bound to pay attention.

***
2.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Shepherds of faith — not economics,”
The Australian, October 23, 1990, p. 11.

Can priests be sacred cows? Apparently they can, when it is a matter of a politician criticising a man of God, as Prime Minister Hawke did the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane recently.

Hardly anyone seems to have stopped to think that Mr Hawke might have been right in complaining about the way in which Archbishop Hollingworth was entering the public debate on child poverty. He accused him of economic ignorance — and he was almost certainly right.

Now, to accuse the former Canon Peter Hollingworth of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, one of the leading non-governmental welfare organisations of Melbourne, of ignorance about the reality of child poverty would be absurd. And the Prime Minister did not do so. But it is perfectly true that the brotherhood, for all its work in the field, has never shown much genuine interest in our understanding of the great issues of economic policy or of the actual causes of child poverty.

To do this requires some pretty serious economic and statistical analysis, and an awareness of the fact that if you actually want to do anything about the phenomenon of poverty, as distinct from expressing horror at its existence and acting to help some of its victims, it is absolutely essential to distinguish between emotion and analysis.

Now, there is absolutely no evidence that Archbishop Hollingworth is particularly distinguished as an economic analyst. And this is where it is necessary to point out that while there is every reason why a clergyman should make moral judgments (as distinct from judgments of individuals), and should denounce the evils of the world as he sees them, and from the point of view of his religious beliefs, it is quite another thing to actually understand those evils.

In a word, the archbishop’s views as to the effects of high interest rates, or other aspects of the Government’s economic policies, on the incidence of child poverty are worth no more than those of any other casual amateur. Here his religion is no guide whatsoever, nor are his emotions or his Christian charity. While he is perfectly entitled to demand that the Government, and the rest of the community, act in such a way as to diminish the problem of poverty now and in the future, the question of how this is to be done is a problem for policy analysis, not for preaching.

But there has always been a certain arrogance in the mainstream churches as to their ability to somehow draw on divine inspiration when it comes to economic issues. The churches, and the Anglican Church certainly chief among them in this country, used to produce arguments as to the sacrosanct nature of existing social and economic arrangements. In recent years it has, rather, been the fashion for them to endorse alternative social and economic arrangements, and to make moral claims about the nature of economic institutions which have both a dubious moral foundation and a totally non-existent foundation in any actual analysis.

The moral foundation is dubious simply because since so many generations of Christians did not feel it necessary to draw the same conclusions then it has to be at least possible that future generations of perfectly sincere Christians may be able to in absolute good faith judge differently; and indeed many do so even today. The fashionable denunciation of markets, private wealth, incentives to invest and inequality of income is not shared today by many perfectly sincere and theologically sophisticated Christians. The same obtains for Jews, Muslims and other great religions.

It is, moreover, perfectly possible to share the detestation of poverty and injustice expressed by such as Archbishop Hollingworth, as I am sure Bob Hawke does, while realising that the means to curing these social ills and the political path to doing so are a matter which is by no means simple and straightforward. You cannot wave a magic wand, or pray, in such a way as to being about a sudden reconciliation of conflicting interests. Prayer may indeed by effective, and is likely to be more so than empty preaching about matters which are complex.

But the Christian, and other churches, these days have taken it upon themselves to espouse a whole set of economic and social propositions which they are not, as churches, entitled to do. Whether it be half-baked dependency theories about the causes of poverty in the Third World, or theories of income redistribution, or assertions about the lack of any connection between wage increases and the rate of unemployment, or the belief that measures of control or redistribution will have no adverse economic effects, they are way out of their depth intellectually.

There are, indeed, committed religious who are versed in the special fields of economics and other disciplines which bear on the question of the causes of child poverty and the reasons why it persists. They are by no means unanimous in supporting the kind of assertion which the Archbishop was making — some do, some don’t.

At the very least, however, an economist would want to analyse the proposition that higher interest rates cause poverty. He or she might even relate the high interest rates of the past year or so to the wage-tax trade-off of 1988, and argue that it is really the buying off of union demands, and the consequent necessary tightening of monetary policy, which caused an increase of child poverty (if there has been such an increase).

Certainly, in the previous recession, that of 1982, there is now little doubt that excessive wages growth caused the recession, and therefore higher levels of unemployment, and therefore higher rates of child poverty. But even the link between the growth of employment since 1983 and the lessening incidence of poverty has been challenged.

So, although the Prime Minister might have done better to restrain his irritation, he had a case.

Just because a priest or other minister of religion speaks on social issues there is no special reason to take any notice. When they do so in such a manner as to participate in the present political debate, then they deserve to be judged as amateur politicians.

In fact, as far as most such contributions go these days, they have much the same intellectual status in the economic debate as creation science does in the scientific debate. They are based on doctrine, or religious faith. They do not have equal status with the analysis of those who do base themselves in observable fact, as distinct from faith.

While it is possible for a sincere and religious person to hold to beliefs which are satisfying in terms of his own faith and emotional needs, it is totally illegitimate to pretend that these are a satisfactory basis for policy-making in a secular, pluralist society where the claims of divine authority are not accepted.

Perhaps the way in which the traditional churches these days hitch themselves to fashionable political bandwagons is a sign of their declining influence. But it is strange that many of the people who would deride or ignore the traditional churches when it comes to a genuine matter of religion or theology will spring to their defence when they meddle in affairs outside their competence.

By all means let the churches condemn poverty and do good works; but let them stick to their last.

***
3.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “A flaying for the faithful,”
The Australian, November 7, 1990, p. 9.

There has been some curious reactions to the writings by myself and my colleague Frank Devine in recent weeks on subjects pertaining to religion. It says quite a lot about the climate of intolerance which pervades discussion of these important subjects.

Perhaps the funniest response was to the sympathetic piece about the Reverend Fred Nile by Devine. Since this was not totally uncritical, Nile’s supporters wrote furious letters attacking the author and his good faith; while Nile’s critics all thought Devine should have adopted the usual media line of mocking the man and all he stands for. It just goes to show that the real trouble with the pro- and anti- Nile forces is that they are all too similar — the offensive gay lobby is the obverse of the Bible-thumping scourges of sin.

When I wrote that Mr Hawke’s complaints about the amateur economic notions of a clergyman were justified, there was equally a response which did not deal with the issue — except that from the Brotherhood of St Laurence, which claims economic expertise it does not possess — but rather assumed that I was demanding that the churches be silent on social issues. On the contrary, I was merely suggesting that they should try to understand what they are talking about, since divine inspiration is a good guide to neither wages policy nor balance of payments policy, let alone the solution to the difficult problem of poverty.

Indeed, was it not Jesus Christ who said: “The poor always ye have with you”? (John, 12:8). At the very least this would suggest that there is room for disagreement among Christians on the subject of approaches to poverty. (A friend of Father James Murray recently complained that I know far more about the Bible than an atheist should.)

Despite the worries about the supposedly anti-religious views of myself and perhaps Frank Devine (who is, of course, a sincere and practising Catholic), if I were concerned with defending religion these days I would be far more concerned with the intolerance being expressed elsewhere and the attacks on religion, organised or individual, coming from some quite respectable sources in our community.

One of these has been the proposal to impose a charter of “rights” on nursing homes for the aged, which has aroused the resentment of both Catholic and Anglican churches — quite rightly. As with schools, when religious bodies engage in such works they do so for reasons of (in these cases) Christian charity and the spread of the good word, the gospel. They are conducted by religious people who feel deeply about their religion, and who believe that religion can require respect from the people who enter those institutions, which are not compulsory.

Now, in the event that I am single and sexually active at the age of 90, I would also expect to be active in other respects — and therefore able to live by and look after myself. So really that issue is something of a red herring. But in any case I see no infringement of individual liberty in a Catholic nursing home demanding respect for Catholic beliefs about sexual morality and so on, just as a Catholic school has a right to demand that its teachers not undermine such beliefs, or scandalise the little ones. (The same, of course, goes for Protestants, Seventh Day Adventists, Hare Krishnas, and so on.) If I did not want to submit to such rules I would exercise my freedom of choice to go elsewhere — as an inmate, or a teacher, or pupil.

However, the intolerant meddlers of the federal welfare bureaucracy want to insist that if homes for the aged are to receive government subsidy they must not forbid behaviour from inmates which offends their religious beliefs. This is similar to the demands that religious schools submit totally to supervision by government education authorities.

It is the old sectarian intolerance which used to inflame the State Aid issue in our society, and which seemed happily to have been buried. This time, however, it is not so much Catholics versus Protestants, but more a matter of the half-baked humanism of the 1960s versus religion, traditional and modern, of all kinds.

It is an important social goal that the old and helpless be looked after, and that the young receive an adequate education. Therefore, it is desirable that public funds should be devoted to this goal. But that does not mean that public funding should become an instrument for breaking down social pluralism and diversity. A religious education (as I know to my benefit) can be perfectly satisfactory without having to abandon its religious context — what, other than sheer intolerance and hatred of religion, could be the reason for wishing to deny taxation revenue (which derives from religious as much as non-religious people) to the support of religious schools, nursing homes, etc?

This intolerance of religion, the determination to destroy it, goes even further. It has long been apparent that the crazier elements of the feminist movement are determined to break down the traditional structures of many churches by insisting on the ordination of women. Now, I do not care whether a woman wants to be a priest or not. There is nothing to stop any group of women from setting up their own church, and ordaining only women. Nor any group of people from setting up a church and ordaining their own priests of any sex.

But why do they want it to happen in the existing churches? Chiefly because they are intolerant of the supposedly “sexist” traditions of those churches. They want to destroy them rather than leave them be. (It is also clear in many cases that they want to get their hands on the property.)

And I was appalled to see reported the remarks of Justice Elizabeth Evatt, chairman of the Australian Law Reform Commission, to a parliamentary committee last week, in which she apparently said that the churches should be compelled by law to allow the ordination of women. I confess that I have not yet been able to check the full transcript, so I may be doing Justice Evatt an injustice. But what a proposition!

How could a legal compulsion on any religious body to conform to present fashions (whether held by the majority or not) and the claims of some feminists be compatible with any conception of civil or religious liberties? To behave in such a way is tantamount to genuine religious persecution.

Mind you, it might not be a bad thing for the mainstream Christian churches, smug and silly as they have become, to be persecuted. As was found in Eastern Europe, intolerance and persecution tend to produce vigorous and deeply held religious faith; it serves to concentrate the minds of the faithful on the essential role of religious feeling in their lives. Last June I wandered into a High Mass at the marvellous St Vitus Cathedral in Prague a few Sundays after the free elections after the overthrow of communism in Czechoslovakia. President Havel was there; the music and choir were indeed heavenly. The emotion of the packed church was palpable.

But such religion comes at too high a price. It is better to allow the faithful to lead their lives as they wish, and within their own walls to apply their own standards. The non-Christians, or those of different religious persuasion, can always stay outside those walls if they prefer. However, it seems that Stalinism is not dead, but alive and well and living in Australia.

***
4.
Frank Devine, “Welfare: a taxing problem,”
The Australian, November 29, 1990, p. 13.

In its early days, the first move by the St Vincent de Paul Society when somebody asked for help was to inquire if there weren’t family members who could help instead.

The Society would even make house calls sometimes to ask challenging questions like, “Do you want Uncle Brendan to end up in the old men’s home?” or “How do you feel about forcing your own sister’s daughter out on the street?”

Not only was this policy economical so far as the St Vincent de Paul Society’s funds were concerned, but it affirmed the primacy and power of the family.

I learned the other day, however, that the Society hasn’t felt it worthwhile for years to ask its clients the once routine question. And naturally it is outside the brief of civil servants who distribute some $24 billion a year in social welfare payments to propose alternatives to their clients.

In many respects it is a good thing to have a social security system that frees Uncle Brendan from dependence on the caprices and possible inadequate resources of his nephews and nieces.

It is a great privilege to have a job and to be able to contribute. But there are serious questions to be asked about the erosion of social and family cohesion that seems to occur when virtually all the decisions about how to help the poor and sick are made impersonally by government.

Why haven’t we been raising such questions in the month since the Leader of the Opposition, Dr Hewson, proposed more private participation in social welfare activity, and a diminution of the Government’s role to a point where the abolition of the Federal Department of Social Security might eventually be contemplated?

Dr Hewson’s lead provided opportunity for fruitful debate in an important area of public policy. Instead, an ominous silence has fallen. It is as if everybody has been cowed by Paul Keating’s contrived frothing at the mouth at the very idea of civilians running social welfare programs.

Dr Hewson, the Treasurer asserted, was practising “vicious, sectional, ideological politics” and must be lacking even “a morsel of compassion for ordinary Australians, the aged, the children, the sick and infirm to come out with trash like this, with disgraceful rubbish like this”.

Some of my brothers and sisters in the Canberra press gallery hailed this outburst as a highly significant application of the good old Keating blowtorch to a hitherto untested — even pampered — political rival.

This suggested a couple of alarming things about the Canberra gallery. A broad streak of decadence must have infected a once wholesome community for a blowtorch to be accepted so easily as a useful aid to human intercourse. In addition, the poor devils must work so hard these days that they have no time to watch classic video.

Seldom has the Treasurer reminded me more vividly than with his “morsel of compassion” speech, of the mad Frenchman in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, defending his castle by pouring semi-obscene invective down upon the besieging English knights — including the great all-purpose imprecation, “I pfart een yoerr gen-air-al dee-rek-sion.”

Fortunately, the Centre for Independent Studies has contributed some ideas to help fill the vacuum created by Keating’s windbaggery by publishing Voluntary Welfare: A Greater Role for Private Charities by John C. Goodman and Alistair J. Nicholas ($13.20 from the centre, PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW 2065).

Nicholas was an analyst in the centre’s 1987-89 social welfare research program and is now an advisor to Alexander Downer, shadow minister for trade and trade negotiations.

In writing Voluntary Welfare, he drew upon and adapted to Australian circumstances research by Goodman, who is president of an American think-tank, the National Centre for Policy Analysis.

Here’s just one idea from Voluntary Welfare that is worth discussing:

Let’s have legislation that make us free to allocate 10 per cent of our personal federal income taxes to qualified private charities of our choice. Not compelled to, but free to. If we want the Government to allocate our 10 per cent we can check an appropriate box on our tax return.

This 10 per cent is not just a deduction from taxable income; it is a portion of actual taxes paid. The taxpayer has the choice of instructing the Government to send the money to the named charities, or he can do it himself and list the amounts and the recipients on his tax return.

Thus, if all taxpayers had decided to choose specific charities in the 1987-88 financial year they would have had $4.18 billion at their joint disposal.

The Government would have been left with $18.5 billion instead of the $22.6 billion it actually spent on social welfare, and would have had to cut back accordingly.

This proposal, Nicholas says, would lead to a more humane and desirable welfare system — one that would, among other advantages, diminish chronic welfare dependency.

Partial privatisation of social security programs, Nicholas argues, would allow the level of assistance to vary considerably from individual to individual, with the ultimate objective always being to encourage self-sufficiency.

Public servants administering broad-gauge government welfare programs have no such discretion. They have to follow regulations that say everybody in generally the same circumstances is entitled to exactly the same amount of help.

Supporting Parents Benefits, for examples, are available as a right, virtually in perpetuity, to anybody who can demonstrate low income, few assets, the existence of dependent children and the absence of a partner or adult relative in the household. But not all “disadvantaged” people are equal in their capacity (or incapacity) to overcome disadvantage.

A private organisation administering a Supporting Parents Benefits program, Nicholas suggests, would require as a condition of assistance that recipients made continuing efforts to patch up marriages or find work. No effort, no dough — but no cutting off, either, of supporting parents genuinely incapable of taking responsibility for their own lives.

Because, under the 10 per cent solution, government welfare programs would not be able to count on uncontested access to money, they would have to demonstrate to taxpayers each year their ability to do the job at least as well as competitors.

Competition would compel private welfare organisations, in their turn, to back their good intentions with higher levels of efficiency. Contributors giving them real money instead of a couple of dollars at Christmas would expect to see results.

Private organisations would probably do most things more cheaply than government agencies because they could call on volunteer, unpaid labour. It is estimated that between 7 and 13 per cent of adult Australians do volunteer charity work, averaging four hours of it a week. The 10 per cent solution would probably breed more volunteers, willing to work longer for organisations they chose to support.

Personal concern for the well-being of the poor and the sick might once again be taken for granted as part of everyday living, with people down on their luck no longer being mentally consigned to a government ghetto.

This is a desirable prospect, worth striving for, not a cause for vituperation.

***
5.
Graeme Cole, “Charities: the head or the heart?,”
The Australian, December 7, 1990, p. 12,
as a letter to the editor.

The proposal by the Centre for Independent Studies to direct taxes to the charity of your choice seems to be user-friendly. Unfortunately the proposition is grounded in unreality.

Frank Devine’s article, “Welfare: a taxing problem” (29/11), also does not recognise the nature of contemporary welfare and human services. The proposed scheme has been tried in parts of the United States and Britain. It has proved a failure.

What has been found in those countries is that charities with the biggest advertising budgets tend to attract public support, but smaller agencies which might be conducting far more vital and qualitative work are neglected.

Welfare monopolies have developed. Charities have been forced to compete for the public dollar not on the basis of the quality of their services, but on their public perception and of the manipulation of the disadvantaged for the television cameras.

So much coverage of the underprivileged is focused on our inner-cities, but as we have recently seen, inequality is flourishing in the outer suburbs of our cities. Will the priorities of our charities be based on what service is most marketable or on what is most effective in the prevention rather than the cure of poverty and inequality?

It is easier to market a service which helps the street kids of Kings Cross than it is to publicise a counselling service which keeps hundreds of families together every year.

One service builds the barriers at the top of the cliff, the other picks up the pieces at the bottom. But which is more spectacular for the media? And which sits more squarely with the public perception of welfare?

There are hundreds of charities throughout Australia, saving the national public sector $900 million a year. The hidden costs in privatising welfare are not only the administration charges that would be carried by agencies but the increased advertising bill.

Nationally, the Anglican Church spends $130 million a year on welfare. It has more than 100 agencies, many of which would be sent to the wall by privatisation, simply because they don’t have the budgets for advertising and promotion or they don’t have the services which grab headlines. Each, however, is very effective in meeting the needs of hundreds of thousands of clients year.

Many services are in remote areas — like the Northern Territory — and are unknown to city folk. Others carry out work among the aged and disabled. There are hundreds of other churches running services in local communities, independent of any agency.

GRAEME COLE
Communications Director
Anglican Home Mission Society
Sydney

***
6.
Greg Lindsay, “Give givers a say,”
The Australian, December 14, 1990, p. 10,
as a letter to the editor.

Graeme Cole of the Anglican Home Mission Society (Letters, 7/12) has criticised the Centre for Independent Studies’ proposal that 10 per cent of our welfare taxes should be directed to recognised charities nominated by individual taxpayers.

He says charities that advertise the most or those that manipulated the media with “hype” and sensationalism would do better while more modest and worthwhile causes would suffer.

The main point of the author’s proposal is to give taxpayers some say and the opportunity to exercise some judgment in how their money is used to help others. And, after all, we’re only talking about a small fraction of that money.

Who are the best judges of how charitable dollars should be allocated? Five million taxpayers making individual assessments or a handful of bureaucrats and politicians who often have a political axe to grind in order to win the votes of special interests?

Under the present system, dozens of welfare lobby groups pressure politicians and bureaucrats for taxpayers’ funds and in doing so make claims that are not necessarily exposed to any public scrutiny and criticism.

Does Mr Cole have such a low view of the intelligence of taxpayers who have enough wit to earn what others want to spend that he believes they are incapable of discriminating between empty sensationalism and charitable jobs worth doing and done well (especially if strict reporting and administration requirements are laid down)?

Misleading and dishonest advertising is forbidden. Honest advertising is just as essential in informing the public about charitable activities that may not be well known as about any other service. There is nothing inherently evil in advertising.

Nothing in the Centre for Independent Studies’ proposal would prevent taxpayers from directing funds to bodies, such as the Anglican Church, which support a variety of charitable activities, and entrusting to them power to distribute and supervise such funds among these activities as they saw fit.

GREG LINDSAY
Executive Director
The Centre for Independent Studies
St Leonards, NSW

***
7.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Divine light glows dimly,”
The Australian, January 31, 1991, p. 13.

The Catholic Church in Australia clearly has a problem. It does not know where it is going or what kind of social doctrine it should espouse. It is confused, uncertain and apologetic.

This becomes very obvious from the draft statement Common Wealth and Common Good on wealth distribution, which has just been issued by the Catholic Bishops of Australia through the bishop committee for justice, development and peace.

This statement has been a long time in the making, and even now it appears as a “draft” for discussion among the faithful — and outside them, without the apparatus of reports, analytical studies and factual information which was supposed to appear (according to the draft) at the same time. I am told that this is now promised for March. Well, on the basis of the draft I am at least grateful that, not being an adherent of the Catholic Church, I do not have to try to make sense of just what social doctrines the bishops appear to be espousing, or determine just what a loyal Catholic should think.

Of course the Church and its bishops have every right to express views on social issues from a moral and religious point of view. That is one of the main functions of religion. Moreover, as with Bishop Peter Hollingsworth of the Anglican Church, most people would agree with the fundamental moral propositions — that poverty is an affront to human dignity, that children should be protected and cherished, that the sick and handicapped should be cared for. It is, however, when churches begin to advance social and economic theories, recommend specific institutional and social policies, and pretend that they can identify the means to lessen these evils by government action that they need to be questioned.

Mrs Kathryn Greiner, at the launch of the draft, pointed to one of its weaknesses. It has nothing to say about the problem of welfare dependency which, in modern developed economies, is a leading contributory factor to the perpetuation of poverty. It is a long way from the moral proposition that no one should be without a reasonable living standard to the social policy that no one should be without a guaranteed income which will remove any incentives to escape from poverty. Many aspects of the welfare system in fact deprive people of their human dignity, and corrupt them morally, as well as promoting the disintegration of the family, so necessary to the welfare of children.

But it is not as if the bishops’ committee has not been listening to criticisms of its positions. This is the source of much of the confusion in the draft. It wants to hold to a position which seemed clear and rosy a few years ago, but which is crumbling in the face of criticism and evidence. And in the process, any clear instruction to the faithful becomes a casualty.

Early on, we read: “The data assembled and presented in this document are susceptible of interpretations and evaluations in the light of different economic theories and philosophies, each of which may be quite legitimately held by any faithful Catholic. If some find themselves in disagreement with theories of this kind espoused in the text, they have no reason to feel that in holding different views they are in any sense failing in loyalty to their Bishops.”

That is to say if anyone believes, after indeed some serious thought, that the views expressed in this document are a load of codswallop then that is perfectly okay. You can still receive the sacraments. So much for moral instruction.

And, of course, much of the content of the document is a load of codswallop. It is a hotch-potch of all the stuff about income redistribution, wealth redistribution, the “preferential option for the poor” (a frequently repeated piece of jargon), Latin American liberation theology, anti-imperialism, women’s rights, and so on that grew out of the 1960s and 70s. It is what one might sum up as ABC social theory, all prejudice and feeling and precious little analysis or factual support. It is the economics of the warm inner glow.

From this there are some strange leaps of logic. Thus, the committee says, “we declare our support for the social security system as it has developed in this country, in the conviction that it is based on justice, not simply on benevolence.” This rather begs the whole question of what should be done about improving or redesigning the social security system so as to lessen its harmful side effects. They just want more of the same.

The central theme of the draft is, of course, that the distribution of income and wealth in our society is inequitable, much more so than is just or fair, and that something must be done about it. Well, yes — but the real question is what and how, and what effects will this have on the long-term welfare of the whole community. One of the most elementary points to deal with is the trade-off, often described, between efficiency and equity.

The draft does refer to the issue of wealth creation (as a result of criticism directed against some earlier statements), but merely says that: “we are sceptical about claims that the increased production of goods automatically leads to a fairer and more just distribution of the wealth resulting from that increased output. Over a long term, it may well lead to a raised standard of living for the community as a whole, but history does not show that the so-called ‘trickle-down’ process either eradicates poverty and disadvantage or results in a more equitable society.”

Well, the one thing that is perfectly clear from history is that economic growth has lifted the standard of living even of the poorest. That is the point of supporting wealth creation. Why is it better to have greater equity instead of higher living standards in absolute terms for those at the bottom of the pile? This is an ethical question the adherents of this view simply do not confront. The draft lamely adds: “It has to be recognised, of course, that some respected commentators think otherwise.”

In fact the whole document demonstrates a sloppy disregard for evidence (just to refer to the very worthwhile work done by economists such as Fred Gruen or Peter Saunders is not enough). Thus after a standard whinge about Latin American indebtedness, without any discussion of changing views in Latin American countries about economic policy, the draft goes on: “It has also to be recognised, however, that the economies of some nations, mainly in East and South-East Asia, which were previously categorised as Third World or ‘developing’, have improved dramatically in the same recent period.”

It then claims, wrongly, that such growth has not led to a reduction in inequality of income distribution, has been accompanied by “human rights abuses” and “has not so far resulted in a truly equitable distribution of riches”. True, as of every other economy in the world in history — but are the poorest members of those Asian countries better off in absolute terms than they used to be? The answer is yes. So the Asian model is surely to be preferred to Latin American political theatre.

It is a pity that this document is such a poor rehash of old propaganda. The issues it deals with are of the utmost importance, and any human being ought to fervently desire an improvement in the lot of the poor and the disadvantaged, and feel desperately the need to improve the conditions of Aborigines especially. But to do something effective requires difficult and conscientious analysis, not wailing and breast beating. To sacrifice the poor to sloppy thinking and silly politics is, in my opinion, immoral.

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8.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Secular welfarism can’t replace Christian charity,” The Australian, February 1, 1991, p. 13.

It would be a pity if the fact that the draft statement of the Catholic bishops on wealth distribution is full of nonsense were allowed to detract from the underlying sincerity of the authors and of those members of the faithful to whom it is addressed.

This is something to which the bishops ought to give serious thought. By allowing the social and moral positions of the Church to be brought into disrepute, they are also risking impugning the very important work of the many good Christians who devote themselves to working with the poor and disadvantaged. The work of such good people should never be criticised.

And there is much in the statement which is deserving of praise. There is nothing wrong, for example, in calling for an official inquiry into wealth distribution. The more we know about the nature, composition and ownership of wealth in Australia the better for purposes of economic and social policy. But of course it sometimes seems that wealth is a very selectively defined matter. Public housing, which is owned by governments but occupied by low income groups (or those who have discovered how to manipulate housing lists), is an element of wealth which should properly be attributed to low income groups. When this is done, the wealth distribution can look rather different.

But much of the statement, as well as being confused about economic issues, suffers from discomfiture as it attempts to reconcile the older, strongly anti-socialist position of the Church (as expressed in papal encyclicals like Rerum Novarum) with the drafting committee’s own very clear socialist leanings. While lip service is paid to the failures of socialism, nothing much has been learned from them. Not that the opponents of socialism and capitalism in the Church seem to have learned much from the way in which the backward-looking corporatism of the anti-socialist encyclicals led into totalitarian Fascism.

Thus, in its “suggestions for discussion and action”, the drafting committee starts off by suggesting that “the traditional concept of the common good, linked with the ideal of solidarity, be the basis for any action taken to redistribute wealth in Australia”. To determine just what this means would require a lot of discussion, but it is clear that part of the thinking behind it involves the notion of group rights as against individual rights, of group entitlements and so on.

This is followed by the suggestion that “the full implications of the expression common wealth, as it applies to the ownership, control and use of the nation’s resources, be explored”. Now, if this means that as members of the community we have common interests and institutions, and a universal law, fine; but again it seems that there is underlying this a socialist concept of State as against private ownership. It is simply not possible to reconcile the notion that collective ownership is somehow prior to private ownership with the rejection of socialism and communism.

There is, too, a strange unwillingness to face up to the fact that it is not just the holders of wealth who are responsible for social problems. Any serious treatment of unemployment must face up to the role of unions.

Then there is the tax system where the draft suggests that “the taxation system be re-ordered so that high income earners cease to receive advantages at the expense of lower income earners”. What advantages? Does the committee have in mind tax deductibility of certain items at higher rates of income tax? How is it an advantage to be on a higher marginal rate of tax? It then goes on to propose that “the increasing tax burden on middle income earners, including many in the Pay-As-You-Earn category, be lightened”. How does it think this is going to be done without reducing expenditures, especially on social welfare?

Then there are suggestions like “special care be taken to eliminate the kind of complications in social security procedures which disadvantage people with language difficulties and other handicaps”. What complications? If the reference is to excessively complex procedures, then no special care is needed — they need to be simplified for everybody’s sake. Almost by definition a person on social security suffers from a handicap of some kind. If it means that language difficulties and so on exist, then why not deal with them directly?

Then we go on to suggestions that “sufficient public housing stock be provided to meet the needs of people who are unable to afford private rents”, and “more effective controls be introduced into the home rental market”.

All we are getting here is the old agenda of secular welfarism, whereby State intervention and controls, the social security system, will replace the good works and charity which are the pride of the churches. Not much is left for genuine Christian charity and good works. It seems that the whole of the imitation of Christ which once was the core of Christianity is to be replaced by coercion of taxpayers, willy-nilly, into doing what the true Christian does for the love of God. It is strange that so much religious thinking should boil down to such an anti-religious program.

The moral shiftiness of this statement comes out nowhere more clearly than in its attempt to deal with the reality of the wealth and property of the Church.

It is true that much of the property of the Catholic Church is in the form of schools, homes for the aged, religious institutions and so on. They are part of its mission of good works, part of its determination to maintain the faith through educating its children (surely an inalienable right of any religion), and part simple accumulation through purchase, grant and bequest over many years.

The justification for this wealth is that it is deployed for religious purposes. But how can it be justified if at the same time the funding of social security, welfare, care for the aged and infirm and so on, are all to be borne by the State? Surely the charitable and similar activities of the Church must be paid for directly by the Church if any justification for its holding wealth is to be convincing.

The management and accountability for church property is a matter for the members of that church, except to the extent that there are tax expenditures (concessions, exemptions, deductions, etc) involved. We are at least entitled to know how much these cost. So if there is to be an inquiry into the distribution of wealth, it would have to include a full and public inventory of the holdings of the Catholic and other churches, directly and through trusts.

Of course a church must own property, including places of worship. It must also own premises for administrative purposes — office buildings, etc. It must own residences for its religious personnel. It must maintain its princes and princelings in some dignity. But how much of this is simply a matter of maintaining its own power structures, and how much is the work of Christ?

While it is impossible not to have the greatest respect for the many men and women of the Catholic and other churches who dedicate their lives and efforts, for little or no material reward, to loving and caring for their fellow human beings, at the same time the moral ambiguity of many of the positions of the churches has to be faced. If you are for the “preferential treatment of the poor”, can you be a member of a rich and powerful institution?

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9.
Frank Devine, “Rendering unto Caesar a dimension of morality,” The Australian, February 4, 1991, p. 11.

One of the main ways of qualifying to be a bishop is to achieve high moral stature, which puts bishops, prima facie, a rung up on politicians. Most bishops are also better educated and more cultivated than most economists.

The publication of Common Wealth and Common Good: A Statement on Wealth Distribution from the Catholic Bishops of Australia (published by Collins Dove, 122pp, $9.99) is therefore a welcome and momentous event, if for no other reason than that it adds a dimension to the language of public discourse in Australia.

I know of no other country where the state of the nation and its future directions are discussed almost exclusively in the vocabulary of economics and party politics.

The quick-draw and largely hostile media reaction to the bishops’ statement, as well as Paul Keating’s courteous by perfunctorily instantaneous rejection of its recommendations, suggest that there is a problem in our leadership enclaves of — literally — understanding what the bishops are talking about.

This language problem was vividly demonstrated last year while the Prime Minister was screaming imprecations at the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, Peter Hollingworth, for daring to tamper with the things that are Caesar’s by commenting on the impact of government policies on the plight of the poor.

Bob Hawke acted on this occasion exactly like a simple man spoken to sharply in Turkish: he didn’t really comprehend what Archbishop Hollingworth was saying but resented being addressed in critical tones by a wog.

The absolute dominance of the language of economics and party (Escopol, let us call it) has damagingly broadened the strain of philistinism running through Australian society, for these languages have no capacity to express aesthetic or moral concepts.

During the last federal election, we have the Treasurer describing statistics about rising unemployment as “beautiful figures”. They were, in fact, as ugly as hell, and only a philistine society could have tolerated Keating’s aesthetic perversity.

Nor is it fanciful to suggest that we might have avoided some of the disasters of the lately past Decade of Greed by condemning the avarice and selfishness that were behind some notorious leveraged buy-outs of the 1980s, and deriding the vulgarity of the lifestyles of the temporarily rich and famous — had we had the practised means of communicating such ideas to one another.

Critics of the Catholic bishops’ statement would do well to read Education Minister John Dawkins’s Australia Day speech in which, as the Government’s principal provider of spiritual guidance for this important occasion, he sought to invoke a new sense of national purpose.

The banality of Dawkins’s speech is awesome. Literary historians of the future may come to value it as the culminating work of a generation that spoke (and thought) only in Escopol.

What we should do, the minister urged in his sole departure from economic gobbledegook, was to emulate the “exuberant optimism and passionate commitment to an enhanced quality of life” that he says characterised the “era” of Gough Whitlam, and revive “the causes of the late ’60s and early ’70s.”

God help us!

In fact, God’s Catholic servants, at least, will be doing quite a lot this year to try to help us in temporal matters. In May, the Catholic Church will celebrate the centenary of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum — arguably the great document of 19th-century radicalism — in which the fashionable notion of working men as serfs was demolished, and the unfashionable concept of obligation accompanying private ownership was forcefully put.

Pope John Paul II intends to publish a new encyclical to mark the centenary of Rerum Novarum. Many Catholics expect it to deal with social and economic changes occurring with the collapse of European communism, and to examine critically the capacity of free market capitalism to restore prosperity and social justice ot the former communist States.

Australia’s Catholic bishops are falling into step with the Vatican in taking direct responsibility for Common Wealth and Common Good. Their previous efforts to deal with social problems at arms’ length ended with the disastrous takeover during the ’80s of their Committee for Justice and Peace (CCJP) by trendoids and/or the extreme Left of the Labor Party, and an outpouring of Marxist and counter-culture pronouncements more or less in the Church’s name.

The CCJP was folded by the bishops in 1987, and although some members of the junta that took it over immediately formed a new organisation called the Coalition of Catholics for Justice and Liberty, they seem to have nothing much left these days except their acronym.

In place of CCJP, the 43 bishops created out of their Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, which meets twice a year, a Committee for Justice, Development and Peace. The committee consists of six bishops, rigorously responsible to the conference, and has a small professional secretariat, headed by Dr Michael Costigan, a former priest and administrator with the Department for the Arts in Western Australia and for Ethnic Affairs in NSW.

It was the committee of bishops that supervised the two years of research that went into compilation of Common Wealth and Common Good. Costigan did most, but not all, of the writing.

Common Wealth and Common Good is, in fact, only a draft statement and the committee of six bishops has been given the task of encouraging and organising debate and criticism before coming up with an amended final draft for consideration by the full conference early next year. Consultation with the laity to this degree is unprecedented in the Australian Catholic Church. The methodology is based on that of the American bishops when they comment on social and economic matters.

There is much in Common Wealth and Common Good which I, as a Catholic, deplore.

A recurring inference that the poor can be helped by stopping anybody from becoming rich seems downright foolish. Apart from all else, history shows that hard as it may be for camels and rich men to pass through the eye of the needle, camels are the only ones who have ever been successfully discouraged from trying.

How could the bishops seriously call for a government inquiry into wealth? The last thing this country needs is a government inquiry into anything. More inquiries into government are what is wanted.

Nor am I comforted by the statement’s naïve assertion that the social security system contributes to the stability of families. Often the opposite seems to me to be the case, threatening family dissolution whenever the State comes to rival the head of a family as a reliable provider.

The welfare excesses of Lyndon Johnson’s so-called Great Society have destroyed black families in the United States in a tragedy so terrible that it is impossible even to mention it without feeling distress.

Common Wealth and Common Good has about it in its present form a whiff of liberation theology, that pernicious Latin American doctrine whose purpose seems largely to be the liberation of clergy from the necessity of believing in God. I was offended by references to women living in poverty without any support from their “former partners” instead of “former husbands”. Partners, unfettered by the sacrament of marriage, lack comparable obligation to provide support.

There are many Catholics capable of arguing these points better than I. Whether the bishops are able to stir the Australian Catholic Church from its prolonged intellectual torpor and sustain such argument in the centennial year of Rerum Novarum remains to be seen. If they are, they will have made an important contribution to cultural pluralism in Australia.

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10.
Archbishop William J. Foley, “Reflection is also a path to wealth,”
The Australian, February 6, 1991, p. 10,
as a letter to the editor.

Padraic McGuinness’s articles (31/1 and 1/2) criticising the Catholic bishops’ statement on wealth distribution reflect the narrowness of a single discipline view of society.

It is just too difficult for an economics technocrat to come to grips with an holistic (no pun intended) view of the needs of human beings?

It is interesting to note that Frank Devine holds a similar view. The lip service given by McGuinness to the “good intentions” of the bishops does not wash.

The Catholic Church’s advocacy of a balance between private ownership and equitable (not equal) distribution of wealth has been a major theme of Catholic social justice statements since the promulgation of the Papal encyclical Rerum Novarum just 100 years ago.

For McGuinness to misrepresent Rerum Novarum as the harbinger of totalitarianism is not only unjust, it is grossly inaccurate. Perhaps he should read Rerum Novarum again alongside Mein Kampf and Das Kapital to clear up his ideas on where the responsibility for the excesses lies. It is not too late to work for an equitable society.

The Australian Bishops Committee on Justice, Development and Peace has offered the draft statement Common Wealth and Common Good for discussion by Catholics and others in the Australian community. It is a reflection on some 700 submissions, many of which represent differing points of view.

They come from a wide spectrum of Australian sources, including some academics and some of those who work with the marginalised and the poor in our society.

The draft is not meant to offer instant solutions, but in their role as teachers, the bishops want to encourage people to think of ways to alleviate the problems currently identified in our society. The book is not about offering economic models but it is about encouraging Australians to think about a more equitable society. It is about healing some of its ills.

ARCHBISHOP WILLIAM J. FOLEY
Chairman
Australian Catholic Bishops Committee for Justice, Development and Peace
Perth

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11.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Selling economics as a market force,”
The Australian, February 13, 1991, p. 11.

I was very sad to read of the death of Archbishop Foley, the Catholic Archbishop of Perth, at the weekend. Primarily, of course, because he was a good man who died before his time: one is always sad to see people cut off in their prime when they have not had the time to fulfil all their potential, especially when they are of such value as the archbishop.

But I am sad for another, though lesser, reason. Archbishop Foley was the chairman of the Catholic Bishops committee on justice, peace and development, the draft statement relating to wealth distribution of which was issued recently and which was discussed in this paper by myself and my colleague Frank Devine. We had hoped for a debate on the many important issues raised by the document, and indeed Archbishop Foley had replied in a letter in last Wednesday’s The Australian.

This statement is too important to be allowed to go neglected, if only because, as the archbishop pointed out, this year is the centenary of the first effort by the church to enter the debate on modern social policy, the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (Concerning New Things). That debate will continue. However, one point should not be allowed to go unremarked in the meantime. This was the archbishop’s suggestion that somehow the criticism derived from a narrow economist’s viewpoint.

I have always been puzzled by those who criticise the economist’s supposed point of view, as if all people with training in economics were without training in or knowledge of other disciplines or moral or aesthetic areas of life. There is of course always a problem when it comes to people who are narrowly trained and have picked up a few limited and naïve notions outside their own specialist field.

You can hear such people any week on the ABC’s Science Show, parading their ignorance of economics and related fields as if it were a virtue. You can come across people in administrative roles in the arts, who have read a few books about economics and think they are experts in economics. I have read quite a few books about modern physics and cosmology — but it would be ridiculous if on that basis I were to claim to be a physicist, or to make judgments in the fields of the origins of the universe, physics or molecular chemistry. Should I set up against Stephan Hawkings just because I have read his popular book? Of course not.

Yet it seems that many people in the religions as well as in the physical sciences, not to mention the arts and literature, are all too ready to set themselves up as experts in economics. Even to understand what is wrong with economics requires years of study — but there remains a large body of knowledge and analysis which is the common property of all those properly trained in the discipline. It is all too easy to sneer at the pretensions of economic forecasters (as also weather forecasters) — but nobody with an ounce of sense would categorise the serious fundamental research which takes place in econometrics as worthless.

Unfortunately, economics and econometrics is plagued with a large number of people who even if they have received some formal training are not first-class practitioners, as well as a much larger number of people who think that because economics deals with everyday life it is easy to practise with no training at all. Strangely enough, these are often the same people who have taken little if any trouble to study economic history.

The notion that trained economists must lack any sensitivity to, or knowledge of, any other aspect of life is a peculiar kind of bigotry which emanates chiefly from those people who would totally reject any interference or incursion in what they consider their own special areas of expertise. Certainly the narrowness of training which prevents any understanding of other fields is common in other disciplines, whether the physical sciences, law or the humanities — I have often been impressed by the massive ignorance in matters of science or economics, in which a perverted pride is taken, of those who pretend to knowledge or expertise in literature or the arts.

But the view that economists are an ignorant lot is often justified, as often as is the view that prelates, judges, writers or musicians are ignoramuses outside their own special field of training. When the view that economists are especially limited is espoused by economists it comes from those who have just discovered various naïve forms of faith — whether mystical environmentalism, primitive Christianity, aesthetic transports, unsophisticated Marxism or just old-fashioned sex — that is, a wife or partner who establishes intellectual sway over them by non-intellectual means.

Happily, we have now a permanent head of the Commonwealth Department of Treasury who is an excellent disproof of most of the clichés about economists. Of course, not surprisingly, the ill-educated commentators of the ABC have already decided that Tony Cole is a “neo-classical economist”. All this means is that he is well trained in economics and does not share the kind of nonsense which is the fashion in the anti-intellectual circles of the opponents of market forces. Whenever the phrase is used pejoratively, it simply indicates that the person using it has no knowledge of economics or economic history.

There is nothing sacred about “the market”. It is a term which in summary describes what happens in social interaction, in commercial terms, between human beings. Markets do not usually exist within the family; to ignore the way people behave outside the family is merely silly. Markets are never perfect, they are distorted by social factors, by lack of knowledge and information, by the attempts of big and powerful players to dominate them. But they exist. People who emphasise the importance of market forces are saying no more than does the person who points to the unwisdom of jumping of a cliff without a parachute or some motive force which will keep you aloft.

The best sociologists and economists now all accept that there are phenomena which distort or obstruct market forces — often for the good, like family and group loyalties — but do not abolish them.

Tony Cole is a good economist, who realises, especially as a result of his stint with the Industry Commission, how often market distortions not only cost the community dear, but also penalise the really poor and disadvantaged. His book (with Keith Ovenden) on Apartheid and International Finance (Penguin, 1989) is an excellent example of a serious economic study, which avoids any illusions, with moral connotations. To the extent that this fed into toughening by Commonwealth countries of their stance on sanctions against apartheid, it has contributed to the abandonment of that evil system.

But what makes his argument so effective is that it is argued in hard economic terms, with evidence adduced to support the argument. That is what a genuinely moral position in economics is about. I do not know what Tony Cole’s religion is, if any. I do not know what his political preferences are (nor should I — he is a proper public servant, and to his credit John Hewson, the Leader of the Opposition, immediately endorsed the appointment). But it is perfectly clear that he is able to think about political and moral issues as an economist who wants an effective outcome.

This is not the narrowness of which the late archbishop seemed to be accusing me and others. On the contrary, it reflects a serious sense of moral responsibility — you do not ask people to ignore markets any more than you give them the advice that they can walk on air. Not if you want them to survive.

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12.
Frank Devine, “On a mission from God, not a political drive,”
The Australian, December 5, 1991, p. 11.

“We will have an obligation,” said the priest at Mass the Sunday after the federal Opposition had delivered its GST package, “to speak out if Dr. Hewson’s proposals have the effect of entrenching the position of the privileged and making it more difficult for the poor to improve their lot.”

(Sigh.) If the package has neither of these effects, will the priest feel an obligation to speak out in praise of it? Either way his parish seems in for a divisive time.

How will the priest establish whether the Hewson proposals are advantageous or detrimental?

The church has a mission — and the experience and skills to give it a good try — to inspire economists to think and act in a Christ-like manner. But it hasn’t shown a lot of flair in converting Christians — perhaps especially priests — to thinking like competent economists.

As quick on the draw as the parish priest, the Catholic Social Welfare Commission announced that five aspects of the Hewson proposals “need a great deal more scrutiny”. For instance, there was “a disincentive to work” in a graduated fadeout of proposed family allowance increases for couples with a combined annual income of between $30,000 and $40,000.

(Sigh.) Is it the position of the commission that people don’t want to work if they can be supported by welfare payments instead? If so, it reflects an un-Christian cynicism about human nature — not to mention poor judgment.

In Sydney recently there has been much simple-minded chatter about money spent on building a cardinal’s residence and a cathedral school — money, it is said, that the church should have given to the poor, especially poor Aborigines.

What for? To take the edge off poverty for a few thousand people for a while, and thus make poverty a more attractive avocation?

Elements of the church are engaged in a great flurry of political activity at the moment. Demonstrations against AIDEX, the weapons fair held in Canberra last month, had the impetus of months of promotion from pulpits and parish newsletters.

Controversy over the sale of Fairfax newspapers gave birth to numerous parish study groups concerned about media concentration.

As a consumer, so to speak, I find these efforts to give the church “contemporary relevance” embarrassing and offensive.

They resemble the power plays that now inspire election of office-bearers in the NRMA. This huge membership of this useful organisation is considered by some to confer on those who speak for it a right to influence political decisions. Never mind that people join the NRMA only to get their cars fixed. Think of the latent power to alter civilisation as we know it that is locked up in those membership lists.

It might similarly be said that people embrace the church only to get their souls fixed. But by joining with others in pursuing this goal they create an organisation, and it is the weight of the organisation that opportunists and intolerant idealists seek to employ for largely political ends.

From this consumer’s point of view, it doesn’t matter much if the end is just, unjust or — as seems most common here — the assertion of ill-informed opinion. The church risks betraying its mission whenever it permits direct use of its putative power as an organisation, rather than deferring to and trusting in the individual authority of the faithful.

When the birth control pill was invented, confessors from a Franciscan community with which I was acquainted made a practice of asking Catholics troubled by the development: “Are you aware of the church’s teachings relevant to the matter?” If the would-be penitent’s answer was “yes” the next question was, “Do you believe you are acting in good conscience?”

The confessor’s counsel varied according to the customer’s response. This still seems to me an exemplary way of exercising the church’s true power.

To take presumptuousness a step further, during a visit to Brazil last month Pope John Paul II seemed to show a sharp awareness of the risks involved in applying the organisational weight of the church to social issues.

A detailed account in The New York Times says the Pope “blessed the concern of Brazil’s militant priests for the poor” and criticised “a system of land distribution so uneven that … a few control estates as big as some European countries”. But he told the Brazilian priests and bishops that their duty was “to illuminate the moral principles, not become political leaders”.

The Pope rather startlingly affirmed this position by declining a request from President Fernando Collor de Mello to bless an architect’s model of a recreation centre for poor children.

The Pope is taken to task for this sort of retreat from contemporary relevance in No Set Agenda: Australia’s Catholic Church Faces an Uncertain Future, a new book by Paul Collins, a Sydney priest and ABC broadcaster on religion.

Collins declares that when a Nicaraguan priest, Father Fernando Cardenal, accepted expulsion from the Jesuit order in 1984, rather than resign — on the Pope’s instruction — as minister for education in the Sandinista government, he was “seeking to obey the loyalty which is most fundamental”.

Many Australian Catholics hold similar views to Father Cardenal’s — that is, one assumes, predominantly Sandinistan ones — on matters of social justice “feel the Vatican has become an albatross around the neck of the Catholic community. It seems intent on maintaining its own power, often at the expense of those people who are most committed to the church.”

(Sigh.) What a disappointment the church is to those who count so much on its contemporary relevance and competitive power as an organisation.

Here in Australia, according to Collins, the church is seen as a “dull and lifeless organisation, bereft of leadership, committed to caution and socially conservative … not seriously engaged or even considered when our society debates fundamental questions of meaning, ethics and social morality …”

In particular, the church has “become lethargic and passionless, it has lost its sense of direction” when it comes to the “myth of development” and protecting the environment.

The Catholic church, Collins points out, is now our largest religious group (the sheer power locked up in those membership lists!) and also the most youthful, with more than a million adherents under 14 and about three-quarters of a million between 15 and 24.

But what a slack bunch we are. Only about a fifth of us attend weekly Mass, and only about 37 per cent go monthly or bi-monthly. Why this backsliding? According to Collins: “Catholics simply do not accept the official position of the hierarchy on a whole range of issues, such as contraception, divorce, homosexuality, euthanasia and even tax cheating …”

That’s too bad. But nobody is perfect. Some of the church’s teachers have found cause for rejoicing in an individual managing even “a nod in God’s direction”.

The source of Paul Collins’s disappointment with us — and the disappointment of all who value the church primarily as an organisation — is suggested by the fact that God is seldom mentioned in the 220 pages of his book.

The commonest word — used scores, if not hundreds, of times — is “reactionary”, applied to those in the church who accept its custodianship of immutable truths and insoluble mysteries.

No set agenda? (Sigh.) Leonard Cheshire, founder of the Ryder Cheshire homes for the disabled, silently says the following prayer in moments when his mind is more or less in neutral — going to answer the phone, for example, or putting coffee on — “Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on us.”

“That says it all, doesn’t it?” Cheshire remarks. Certainly it contains assertions and implications that leave little room for other business on the church’s agenda.

***
13.
Frank Devine, “How Horatius united Left and Right,”
The Australian, May 11, 1992, p. 9.

In the past few weeks, my colleague B.A. Santamaria (whose column appears regularly in The Weekend Australian) has written about: the excessive power of banks; Portuguese oil interests financing a “protest” ship that attempted to sail to East Timor; Australia’s surrendering national sovereignty by incurring a gigantic national debt; the ordination of women (“If the feminists are right, the church has been wrong for 2000 years. It wouldn’t be much of a church to belong to.”); and John Hewson’s union policy (“With one million unemployed, what hope has an ordinary worker of bargaining fairly with the boss without union protection?”).

The unifying theme of Santamaria’s columns is that human problems can only be solved by individuals through personal relationships. He relentlessly assaults apologists for economic systems and political ideologies who claim human qualities for them — compassion, for instance.

Santamaria writes as one who considers all systems, ideologies and institutions to be grossly flawed, and he karate-chops the political parties without mercy or evident prejudice. He is especially harsh about the short-term outlook of our politicians, and recently quoted Confucius as an ominous warning against ad hoc, “pragmatic” policies: “If a man takes no thought about the distant future, he will find sorrow near at hand.”

The 76-year-old Melbourne sensei (as the Japanese would respectfully call him) is also given to referring to men as “breadwinners” and women as “guardians of the home”.

No wonder B.A. Santamaria pisses people off. (Forgive the expression, but none of the alternative phrases considered really had the right resonance.)

We are entering a season of Santamaria re-examination. Although there is some dispute about it, many people hold that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Social Studies Movement, the famous/notorious movement through which Santamaria directed a campaign against communist influence in the unions, split the Labor Party and stirred up passionate dissension in the Australian Catholic Church.

There will be no shortage of people ready to speak their minds during the Movement’s semi-centennial year. No Australian man of ideas has ever got so deeply under our skin as B.A. Santamaria.

At a seminar on Santamaria-ism, organised by predominantly pissed-off intellectuals and held at the State Library of NSW the other day, violent contention and overt expressions of rage were, for the most part, curtailed in the interests of civility. But there would have been vast gaps between blood pressure measurements made in the morning and repeated in the afternoon.

Sydney Institute director Gerard Henderson accused Santamaria of being an opponent of “the modern, liberal, democratic, secular State”.

Anne Daniel, doctor of philosophy and mother of 10, declared that the demise of the Santamaria social movement (as well as the political movement he led) was due to the way it stifled and finally suffocated the potential of women during its period of peak influence, from the 1940s to the early ’60s. She derided Santamaria’s evident conviction that the only women who needed jobs were those “unfortunate enough not to have found the haven of marriage”.

Pru Gordon, a 20-year-old student, declared that Dr Daniel was hopelessly out of touch, and that a true choice between home and the workplace was exactly what women of the present day wanted.

Bob Gould, an affable Trotskyist bookseller, mocked Santamaria’s “manic private passion about the collapse of the family”.

Andy Murphy, a 70-year-old retired carpenter and Movement veteran, crossly asked how many people had heard snickering in the library auditorium imagined that their ideas would be considered worth talking about in 50 years time.

I have to confess that my heart warmed towards Santamaria as the day progressed. It gave a little jump of sheer exhilaration when Dr Daniel described my distinguished colleague as “still standing against the tide”.

What a classically heroic posture! Horatius at the bridge. The Spartans at Thermopylae.

It seemed ironic that standing against the tide was accepted as a pejorative description of Santamaria’s position by an audience heavily peopled with tide-resisters, many of them by no means without honour.

Santamaria’s obvious capacity to hold his footing as the tides turned, driving neo-conservatives to the same high fury as Marxists, was also a turn-on.

Modernity, liberalism, democracy, secularism and feminism are notions that merit their season, but to declare them immutable is surely to nourish the evil of “correct” thinking. It is not entirely clear to what extent Santamaria is the opponent of all or any of these theories, but I would have expected him, as a potent critic, to be revered by proponents for saving them from rigid orthodoxy. Well, “expected” might be going a bit far.

Mind you, it wasn’t hard to understand how Santamaria got people’s goat in his heyday. His methods of running the Movement were hardly consultative. At one two-day Movement conference, participants were handed “draft conclusions” along with the agenda before the conference began.

At another, the keynote (and only) speeches for all five sessions were delivered by Santamaria. “He spoke,” recalled Henderson painfully, “all day Saturday and on, on into Sunday afternoon.”

The Movement’s community census-taking methods in the ’50s have mildly sinister overtones in the more worldly ’90s. There were all those file-cards, marked M-1 for active Movement member, M-2 semi-active, M-3 inactive; C-1 for practising Catholic “onside”, C-2 uncommitted Catholic, C-3 offside one; N-1, 2 and 3 for categories of “non-Catholic”.

Finally, there was the really exciting part of the Movement files — Y for “a sectarian”, Z for “definite communist”, ZS for “suspected communist”. Zs had red cards, ZSs pink.

But there is no doubting the attraction of the Movement’s anti-communist cause, nor the brilliance of Santamaria’s leadership. Daniel aptly named the “bureaucratisation of charisma” as a factor in the political decline of Santamaria-ism.

John Cotter, one of the Movement’s few full-time organisers and a loser of his deposit on 12 of the 13 occasions he ran as a candidate for the DLP — stepchild of the Movement — recalled a diffident colleague who “vomited and said a Hail Mary” before he went door-knocking but never squibbed an assignment.

“After more than 40 years, I am happy to this day about having been in the Movement,” Cotter said. “We beat the coms.”

Last time Cotter and Santamaria spoke, some years ago, Cotter terminated the conversation with extreme prejudice and a sharp, two-word, unprintable expression. And yet …

And yet, Cotter was at pains to challenge attempts to portray Santamaria as a cold and secretive plotter. He recalled being told by an old family friend of Santamaria: “You’ve only got to play cards with him. When he got a rotten hand, his jaw was on the floor. If he got a good hand, he would be half on the table asking, ‘Whose lead is it?'”

Oddly enough, some of the kindest words said about the Movement during the semi-centenary year may be heard from ex-communists — largely as a way of shafting Santamaria the critic. Mark Aarons gave it a go at the Sydney colloquy.

“We communists and members of the Movement knew they stood for something,” Aarons said ingratiatingly. “We stood for great principles, entirely lacking in the labour movement today. Despite duplicitous and dishonest leaders, both sides were decent, hard-working people.”

Ah, revisionism. Aaron’s objective, I guess, is to portray Australian communism as the equal in intellectual strength and moral force as Santamaria-ism. Some hope!

***
14.
Frank Devine, “Marxist mirage mars truth and justice the Catholic way,” The Australian, September 21, 1992, p. 13.

Paul Keating says the Roman Catholic bishops, in issuing a statement last week on the distribution of wealth in Australia, were trying to send a message “to the hard hearts — to the likes of the Leader of the Opposition and his colleagues. They are trying to tell them that greed is not good.”

What a headline! BISHOPS SAY GREED NOT GOOD. Before you know it, they’ll be putting the boot into hatred, envy, lust etc.

One hopes the Prime Minister was being disingenuous when he claimed a revelation from the bishops’ words. Otherwise the Christian Brothers did a rotten job of informing him, while he was at school, about the practices and attributes the Church has considered not good for the past 2000 years.

Regrettably, the bishops have left themselves open to political exploitation, as well as to general criticism, by the publication of Common Wealth for the Common Good, a 198-page paperback that summarises a five-year study by their conference’s Committee for Justice, Development and Peace.

This rather pedantic explanation of the book’s provenance is necessary to put its importance into perspective. A bishop has supreme spiritual and moral authority within his diocese, and commands the diocesan clergy as absolutely as a ship’s captain does its crew. The main job of a cardinal is being a bishop among bishops.

A bishop gains no additional authority by joining in conference with other bishops, and the Australian Bishops Conference, of itself, does not possess authority to match that of even one bishop, let along the authority of them all. In fact, it has no authority as an organisation and does not put out authoritative statements.

Catholics like Paul Keating and me are reasonably respectful of its intermittent publications because they are commended to our attention by our bishops. But we have no obligation to heed the opinions expressed, nor to refrain from rubbishing them.

To me, Common Wealth for the Common Good reflects the Church Sociological at its superficial Australian worst. Its authors demand government action on virtually all social ills (sometimes tacitly abdicating the Church’s own responsibilities), and encourage State authoritarianism as a means of reshaping society.

It is flooded with the kind of wish-washy, oxymoronic Christian Marxist or secularist Christian sentiments expressed in the first draft issues last year, and promoted in somewhat more radical form when the committee instigated its study under different management.

Either by calculation or confusion, it is implied that Catholic action — that is, action undertaken or recommended in the name of the Church as an organisation, and relying on the organisation’s weight of numbers for effectiveness or influence — is identical with action by Catholics, the social behaviour of individuals.

The report makes many recommendations, most of them calling for collectivist action by abstract entities.

Thus, in regard to employment, it proposes that Australian governments: give adequate income and other support to those for whom there are no jobs; legislate against policies or practices that lead to the exploitation of workers; develop national guidelines concerning redundancy management, including adequate compensation, counselling, retraining and mortgage relief; pursue policies that will lead to the creation of jobs; and “show awareness” of the immediate effects on employment of the lowering of tariffs.

All of these proposals have desirable objectives. But how can a government “give” something when it produces nothing? How can a government be — and why should we want it to be — so all-seeing that it can monitor even a majority of transactions which might be judged exploitative?

What does a government do to show awareness? How does this help? Surely all democratic governments are expected as a matter of course to be aware of the consequences of their actions, if only from fear of voter retribution.

Substantial, standardised redundancy compensation is, indeed, a fine objective. But employees become redundant in a myriad of circumstances, from which it is surely impossible to establish a uniform standard in a free economy.

“Policies that create jobs” has a worthy sound to it. But we work in order to create. Even as a stop-gap, government action to create work is arid and wasteful.

The statement shimmers with fantasies of “benevolent” State and “compassionate” government. Yet the Catholic bishops are the last source from which one would expect attribution of individual human qualities to institutions and abstractions.

Such a concept appears, however, to motivate the framers of the report particularly strongly when they call upon government for the grand sweep: to guarantee “all Australians … equal access to employment, housing, health care, education, transport, legal aid and other social services”.

What do these demanders of guarantee imagine individuals in society have been struggling to achieve over the centuries? And where has the grand sweep approach got Sweden, must cited in this report?

Also demanded is a major national investigation by the Commonwealth government, to be completed by 1994-95, into the distribution of wealth in Australia. Then we can make it more equitable — and witness the first miracle to come out of a government inquiry.

In places, the report is naïvely patronising: “Wealth creation and economic growth are not, in themselves, either socially good or evil.” (They are, however, essential for governments to be in a position to give anything.)

There are elements of self-righteousness: “Many Australians still believe passionately in a fair society.” The implication is that more used to believe but don’t any more, that others (maybe the majority) believe in an unfair society. Come on. This is correct thinking sprinkled with holy water. What the sentence really says is: You are a good Australian if you accept my definition of a fair society.

Even when it addresses Catholics specifically, the bishops’ report often has a collectivist tone. It recommends that “social justice teaching” be given a more prominent place in Catholic education. Just good teaching would suit many Catholic parents, with religious teaching a marvellous bonus.

Collectivism intrudes even on spiritual and theological issues. A passage arguing an economic/political point begins: “If you believe that human beings reflect God’s image …”

Well, I don’t. I believe a human being reflects the divine image, and welcome the counsel I receive from the bishops and clergy on this proposition.

***
15.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Churches lose the plot on political stage,” The Australian, October 16, 1992, p. 13.

It is understandable why the mainstream churches get involved in common political and economic policy issues. Attacks on government or opposition policy proposals are about the only topics apart from abortion and ordination of women which are these days assured path to publicity.

Apart from these topics, the churches are treated by the vast majority of media personnel as a bit of a joke. When they pronounce on faith and morals they are likely to be ridiculed, or simply dismissed as out of date. Their affairs are only of interest when there seems a bit of scandal in the offing — apart from that the churches, which were once essential to the lives of most people, are hardly reported on at all; and when they are reported it is usually only to draw attention to those who wish to “modernise” them even further into decline.

The increasingly strong fundamentalist, charismatic and born-again movements of Christianity are perhaps one of the most active and significant forms of religion in Australia at present, unlike the conventional churches showing rapid growth instead of stagnation, and yet they are given almost no attention except for occasional mild ridicule, or an expression of surprise that they could take things so seriously. The recent mass wedding in Seoul of thousands of Moonie couples was treated as madness instead of the fascinating phenomenon that it was — clearly many people are finding arranged marriages to their liking.

As with republicans and monarchy, the only people in the media who seem these days to regard the mainstream churches, especially the of course the Catholic Church, with any passion are those who feel aggrieved against them for support past ill treatment. The ABC is giving this kind of approach to religion an extra special run.

There are of course some notable exceptions — regular writers for the dailies who are religious and who treat religion seriously as both a matter of faith and as an important social institution. (The Australian’s James Murray and Alan Gill, formerly of The Sydney Morning Herald, are serious journalists writing on and about religion.)

But it seems that the mainstream churches are all too inclined to set themselves up as political institutions and their leading figures as political and social activists rather than concentrate on their central religious concerns. Of course there is nothing wrong in churches concerning themselves with social and political matters — they always have — and of course they have always played a role in matters of individual and family welfare.

However, what strikes me as odd in all this is the apparent contempt for their own faithful which the churches display in the process. For example, in deciding to denounce the evil of taxes on food, one might have thought that the Catholic Social Welfare Commission would have taken the trouble to look around and talk to a reasonable sample of Catholic economists. It is statistically impossible that there is not a number of active church-going and believing Catholics who are also trained economists. Why doesn’t the church consult them?

When the Catholic Bishops’ Conference issues a pastoral statement on the distribution of wealth in Australia, the sentiments are fine but why on earth can they not go to the trouble of getting together a group of Catholic expert economists to save themselves from producing a lot of tendentious economic rubbish?

For a couple of decades now, the churches have become increasingly secularised and increasingly influenced by the political and ideological fashions of the 60s and 70s. In the process they seem to have abandoned to a large extent the stance they once took of looking to the long term — indeed, looking forward to the Last Things — and standing aside from or resisting modernism. The result has not been that they look modern or relevant but that they look quaint, silly and old-fashioned, just like an ageing hippy in beads and Indian shirt.

Liberation theology is the last refuse of Marxism, long since abandoned in eastern Europe (and for all practical purposes, in China) and being uneasily disowned even in the universities of the wealthy countries. Latin America is finally moving away from political theatre and the self-pitying and ill-based notions of dependency theory; only mainstream churches remain attached to this farrago of economic fallacies.

The Protestant churches are just as bad in all this as the Catholic Church. Again, too, there must be many adherents of these churches who actually know what they are talking about when it comes to taxation policy. Why on earth do the churches not draw on them, as surely they would draw on medical experts if they were arguing in favour of or against any medical procedure? (And of course the anti-abortion lobby in the churches does build, sometimes unwisely, on medical evidence.)

An economist who had studied taxation economics and policy would be able to inform them that the goods and services tax is not an invention of the devil nor a scourge of the poor but a perfectly sensible system of taxation which is adopted in most other western industrial countries — the United States now being the only major exception other than Australia. Like most tax systems, if it is applied properly it is neither good nor bad. It may be that it is not worth giving the central political importance that Dr Hewson is giving it, but that is another issue.

Somebody genuinely concerned about the impact of the price of food on the poor would, if he knew anything about the subject, surely have to start by considering the impact on food prices of the costs of inputs. That is, it would be necessary to look at the unit cost of labour (productivity and work practices) in the food production, procession, distribution and retailing industries. It would be a good idea to think about the effect of marketing boards in keeping up domestic food prices.

The sugar industry and the high domestic price of sugar for many years was taxing the poor heavily. If food prices are all important, no doubt we should also import more food (especially processed foods) and even encourage dumping of tinned tomatoes, fish and so on in Australia. It is clearly beneficial to the poor by lowering the food prices they face.

And of course the poor do not live by bread alone. What about the cost of tariff and quota protection of the textile, clothing and footwear industries? Protectionism is by far the most regressive and inequitable form of taxation in this country — perhaps the Catholic Social Welfare Commission might have a few words on the equity of taxing the poor and unemployed to maintain expensive subsidised jobs for people better off than they are?

It is not necessary for religion to be inimical to reason, especially when dealing with the things of this world. Nor does it follow that religion and industrial capitalism are incompatible — even though people who like to fantasise about bring about the kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or imposing a dictatorial theocracy, find individualism and the pursuit of profit somehow distasteful.

The true achievement of Protestantism in Europe was, of course, to have fostered the growth of capitalism and the accumulation of capital by savings and hard work, which, while it had its miseries, eventually improved the lot of the poorest immeasurably. With all its faults, democratic capitalism is still the system in which the poor do best.

***
16.
Frank Devine, “Thank the Lord for the vision of this free-market priest,” The Australian, May 24, 1993, p. 9.

Probably I should curb my enthusiasm about the imminent visit of Father Robert Sirico, for fear of creating scandal in the assembly. But it is not easy.

Sirico is an American Catholic priest of the Paulist order who has established a reputation as one of the Catholic Church’s most eloquent advocates of free markets and as a critic of the welfare State.

Such a point of view challenges the Left orthodoxy that has engulfed the Catholic Church in Australia and which causes the faithful … what? It would be more lovable to say “great sorrow”, but my experience is only of intense rage, for which I feel no sorrow.

The rage may simmer down if Sirico’s arguments gain a place in the church’s continuing discussion of social and economic matters, which at present crackle with political correctness. Sirico is to deliver two lectures, one in Sydney on May 31, and the other in Melbourne on June 2, under the auspices of the Centre for Independent Studies.

Defenders of correctness should be warned that Sirico has somewhat pre-empted analysis of the new Catholic Catechism, whose French and Italian editions were published last year, but whose English edition is not yet out (although circulating fairly widely in unofficial translation).

Reviews of the European editions have described the Catechism, a statement of the Catholic Church’s doctrines, as “theocentric,” meaning that God’s affairs are given more importance than man’s — itself something of a setback for the church’s liberation theologians and social justice secularists.

But one may anticipate a factional battle of interpretations of earthly relevance similar to what which accompanied the publication of Pope John Paul’s encyclical Centesimus Annus in 1991, a debate perhaps more intense elsewhere, since in Australia it was the correct who, on that occasion, did the pre-empting.

From his study of the Catechism, however, Sirico has already constructed a forceful argument, presented in recent articles in The Wall Street Journal and The Detroit News, that the centrally planned welfare State is inimical to Christian belief.

He contended in the Journal that while Catholics were not required to believe in the free enterprise system as an article of faith, “they must take account of their pastors’ belief that economic systems ordered around the idea of individual liberty and limited government also tend to promote the kind of moral virtues and social relationships that the church is interested in advancing”.

Sirico has drawn particularly on three passages in the Catechism on:

NATIONAL economies: “Regulation by means of centralised planning perverts the foundations of social bonds.”

ASSISTANCE to the poor: “The primary responsibility in this area belongs not to the State but to the individuals and to the various groups and associations which make up society.”

SOCIAL reform: “It is not the role of the church to offer concrete programs but properly the vocation of the lay faithful working on their own initiative in co-operation with their fellow citizens.”

Sirico has concluded from these doctrinal statements that human needs “are best addressed at the most immediate level of concern — by a person’s family, friends, neighbours or church.”

In The Detroit News he argued that when government becomes “the resource of first resort … it disintegrates charity into entitlement and collapses love into justice”. He asked: “If all relations are based on State-enforced justice, what becomes of the virtue of love?”

Powerful stuff this, but diametrically opposed to the positions taken here by the church in, for example, Common Wealth for the Common Good, a statement published last year by the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference on “the distribution of wealth in Australia”. This is a document in which I have striven, as a Catholic, to find merit, without being able to credit it with more than goodwill.

The supremacy of State over individual is proclaimed constantly: “The primary social and spiritual value we as Catholics wish to affirm is community … in contrast to the growing emphasis on individualism in our secularist society.”

How did the poor countries of South-East Asia start their upward move? “Their phenomenal success has been due … to an active policy of State intervention.”

A free enterprise economy “while not sinful in itself, is a structure that can become the occasion for exploitation and injustice”.

Wow! Thank heaven we have unfree economics to protect us against such wrong.

For solutions to social problems, Common Wealth for the Common Good turns almost exclusively to government, calling over and over again for the Government to “regulate”, “legislate”, “ensure”, “develop”, “give”, “show awareness”, “take long-term measures”, “place increased emphasis”, “educate”, “encourage by policies and strategies”.

I could go on. And on. Common Wealth for the Common Good is a compendium of active verbs for government that would cause the most enthusiastic secular supporter of the welfare State to fall back exhausted. Theocentric is the last thing you would call it.

The document is also littered with tricky language. “Many Australians still believe passionately in a fair society,” it declares. What do other Australians believe in, huh?

“It is not suggested that those who are not poor are excluded from God’s love, but God’s love … does not extend to unjust action …” That is very reasonable of God, but what have unjust actions to do with those who are not poor?

Statements by the Australian Bishops’ Conference are curious enterprises, almost optional extras to the church’s teaching. To a considerable extent they are the creation of junior clergy and laymen in the conference’s secretariat.

Since a bishop’s authority is not enhanced by collegiality, it could even be argued that the conference has no authority. But a statement issued in its name has the appearance of authoritativeness which, I am sorry to say, some church politicians are keen to exploit.

This is not in any way to denigrate the church’s views on social issues. Indeed, I wish members of the hierarchy would speak out more. We could expect better sense, and much more goodwill, from them than from the pressure groups at present yapping at us.

But there is no point even listening if the church keeps pouring out the same dated ideological drivel. Let’s hope that Father Sirico’s visit provides refreshment.

***
17.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Faith and hope, but scant authority,” The Australian, June 23, 1994, p. 13.

What is religious authority worth these days? The authority of the traditional Christian churches, and that of the other great faiths, seems to be very much a movable feast.

Church authority seems to be accepted only when it suits the purpose of whatever alliance of political propagandists is in the ascendant. Then when the Reverend Harry Herbert, of the Uniting Church, spoke out about the proposed Aboriginal Land Fund the other day, this was taken as of some importance and there was even some acceptance of the strange notion that church opposition to the GST was what sank the Coalition at the last federal election.

I doubt that Herbert has any real authority to speak on behalf of all members of the Uniting Church and, even more, that he has any ability to sway the votes of his flock away from the positions their private consciences lead them to. Nor has he any right to commit members of the Uniting Church, Christians generally or the Australian community to any position on matters of politics, or to make any apologies for the past activities of missionaries as he proposes to do at the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress on July 10.

And even if he did call spirits from the vasty deep to impose his will on the adherents of the Uniting Church, would they come and would the faithful listen?

A figure of vastly more authority in religious matters than Herbert is Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, the head of the Catholic Church. There really is something peculiar going on when Wojtyla makes a statement on the impossibility of ordaining women as Catholic priests or on contraception, speaking with immense doctrinal authority, and his statements are generally ridiculed in the media and treated as of little significance; while when a local pooh-bah of no doctrinal authority speaks, his words are given great weight.

The real issue, of course, is that most of the adherents (nominal or actual) of the traditional churches these days no longer accept ex cathedra authority either in matters of faith or morals, or on social issues (like policy towards Aborigines). The response to the Wojtyla statements by Australian Catholics simply shows that the church is in an advanced state of doctrinal confusion and decay, and has no ability to instruct and hold to conformity most of those who call themselves Catholics. Nor even do many of the lesser minions of the Catholic Church, like some bishops, some religious orders (especially the Jesuits) and some principals of Catholic schools any longer accept papal authority.

Given the breakdown of authority in the Catholic Church, why on earth should we take any notice of what Catholic welfare or “social justice” groups say? They accept no authority and they have no authority.

The same goes even more strongly for the traditional Protestant churches like the Uniting Church or the Anglican Church. They have no authority — spiritual, moral or social — and those who pretend to speak for them are usually speaking only for themselves and for tiny cheer squads which surround them.

Certainly the days when any of the traditional churches could influence, let alone deliver, the way in which their adherents would vote or think in practical political issues, social issues or even, these days, moral issues are long gone.

Nor is it likely that the Aborigines accept the authority of the traditional churches. This is despite the fact that, according to census figures, a growing proportion of Aborigines consider themselves Christian — 74 per cent as at the last census. (This incidentally sheds a curious light on the growing emphasis of the traditional churches on supposed Aboriginal beliefs.)

Rather, it seems that the Aborigines have increasingly been turning to the non-traditional Christian religions — the evangelicals, the charismatics, the fundamentalists, the fringe churches like the Seventh-Day Adventists and others, all of which have been growing spectacularly in strength in recent years at the expense of the traditional churches.

Their relative strength is not accurately reflected in the census figures, since many people still seem to think that responses like RC or C of E are the same as “dunno” or “not telling”. Moreover, many who think themselves RC are not, since they reject the authority of the Pope and much of traditional Catholic doctrine. And of course C of E these days involves 39 articles, none of which seem even to require belief in God on the part of the clergy, let alone the “faithful”.

If someone now describes himself or herself as, say, a Mormon (though they would be more likely to use the term Latter-day Saints) you can be sure that there is a pretty clear act of beliefs and acceptance of lines of authority involved. Yet you never hear the heads of the non-traditional faiths taking political positions — if they do, they are not reported. But they are far more likely to be able to speak on behalf of their flocks than are the bishops and priests of the traditional Christian churches.

It is the evangelical non-traditionalists who seem to be attracting the most support from indigenous peoples everywhere. Even when they go under the name of traditional churches, they do not accept their authority. Far from the Aborigines being influenced by what figures of authority in the Catholic, Anglican or Uniting churches might say, they are turning away from those churches in droves.

Why, then, should either the media or the government take any notice when cardinals, archbishops, bishops, presidents, pastors, or whatever they are called, of the traditional churches purport to influence public policy?

The truth is that, far from the churches exercising authority, they are to a greater or lesser degree capitulating in the face of modern fads and fashions. Religion in any doctrinal or organisational sense is in retreat in the face of a community which no longer accepts, with the exception of the adherents of the “fringe” faiths, any religious authority.

Not only are the traditional churches without any real authority, those in them who try to maintain tradition are on the receiving end of a mass-media campaign of intolerance as well as ridicule and abuse. Religious freedom is in greater danger in our community than ever before in our history.

By all means let Harry Herbert apologise on his own behalf for acts done by past missionaries. But he has no right or authority to apologise on behalf of the adherents of the Uniting Church today, let alone on behalf of earlier Methodist or Presbyterian missionaries, or on behalf of Christians generally, past or present. Least of all has he any real political clout.

***
18.
Frank Devine, “Impossible to overlook the power of church authority,” The Australian, June 27, 1994, p. 11.

Not until he wrote recently that the churches no longer had any authority did I realise how seldom I am at odds with my colleague P. P. McGuinness. This complaisancy is probably bad for me. Who knows how good it is for him?

Christian authority (to name but one religious variety) has been, during my adult life, the instrument for (1) righting a profoundly entrenched injustice and (2) undoing one of history’s grimmest tyrannies.

Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference led the successful non-violent crusade for civil rights for blacks in the United States in the 1960s and 70s. When King was assassinated, his devout Christian deputy, the Reverend Ralph Abernethy, was an effective successor.

The hymns of non-violent resistance that define a generation still stir my soul:

O freedom, O freedom
Before I am a slave
I’ll lie buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free

Christian authority, and specifically the authority — invoked by King and Abernethy — of the Southern Baptist Church, imposed a steely discipline on black Americans. Many were tempted to violence, but few succumbed.

The abandonment — almost overnight, it seemed — by white Americans of a century of unjust practices was an astonishing event. To a significant degree, whites bowed to the moral authority of their churches in responding to the Christian plea of the blacks. I can think of no other instance of reforms so great being undertaken as an act of national conscience.

As well as that, McGuinness, how about your mate, Khrushchev? He realised from the beginning that the Stalinists had become, if not soft, extremely slovenly about religious persecution, and that religious authority presented the most dangerous challenge to the authority of the party.

Khrushchev’s five years as Soviet premier saw what Philip Walters describes in Religious Policy in the Soviet Union (Cambridge University Press) as “an anti-religious campaign of a ferocity unprecedented since the 1930s”. Krushchev closed Orthodox churches — the number fell from about 22,000 to 7000 between 1959 and 1964. Priestly numbers were reduced from 30,000 to 6000. Repression of various kinds carved an “official”, party-controlled congregation from the Baptist Church.

Brezhnev, says Walters, “accepted with weary cynicism that religion was probably not going to die out” and eased up. Andropov attempted to reimpose restrictions, but died before he got going. It is far from improbable that Andropov ordered the bumping off of the first Slavic pope. Had that sound act of policy succeeded, one envisages a world so different today that it is surely futile to deny the existence of church authority.

No, McGuinness? God, the Irish are stubborn.

So Solidarity burgeoned in Poland under Catholic church patronage, and General Jaruzelski regained a temporary flicker of authority because Pope John Paul II agreed to receive him in audience.

“Throughout Eastern Europe,” writes J. F. Brown in Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe (Duke University Press), “the less dialectical materialism appealed, the more youth turned to creeds teaching other things in life …”

In Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, the famous poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko published an article in which he argued that, since church and State were separate, it was improper to espouse atheism as the official ideology. Religion, he wrote, was the ultimate source of morality and culture.

After spending time with Gorbachev at a summit meeting in Iceland, Ronald Reagan said, “I think he believes in God.” In 1990, the Supreme Soviet passed laws guaranteeing freedom of worship — the final surrender, in my opinion, of communism to church authority.

McGuinness might argue, in his pig-headed way, that not religion but the eternal verities of economics brought down communism.

However, the authority of economists proved a feeble defence against Lenin and his successors for 70 years. It is true that, inside the Soviet Union, the long line of dictators had to murder people to make Marxist economics appear to work. But in many other parts of the world, the Marxist heresy permeated economic theory and practice with little or no bloodshed.

Religious beliefs remained intact and, within the Soviet Union, religious authority — of Islam as well as Christianity, as it is becoming clear to all — held unbending sway, despite enormous efforts to crush it.

McGuinness’s problem is that he has spent too much time observing the Christian churches in Australia, which have, on numerous occasions, asserted authority they cannot legitimately claim, and been timid in exercising the true authority with which Christ entrusted them.

What right, indeed, does the Reverend Harry Herbert, of the Uniting Church, have to threaten the federal Opposition with doom at the polls unless it supports the proposed Aboriginal land fund? Who says Herbert can speak out with any authority other than that of an individual expressing his opinion?

McGuinness is justified in scorning this use of institutional rank to press personal, fashionable points of view.

The social-justice ratbags who betrayed episcopal patronage in Perth, in order the mount a carefully timed attack on the GST during the last federal election, are equally inconsequential.

My anger still simmers about Catholic parish priests (and a nun) who took up the cause of Australian media ownership, especially in Fairfax, and sent me fleeing into the civilised embrace of St Patrick’s, Church Hill. a celebrated Sydney hide-out for fugitive parishioners.

By engaging in an escapist concentration on social work at the political fringe, Australian Christian churches — especially the Catholics, in my opinion — have understandably exposed themselves to McGuinness’s scorn. They have also led the poor man into hubris, encouraging him to think the Christian churches are permanently committed to the social engineering mirage.

This is not so. In his introduction to the just published English translation of the new Catholic catechism, John Paul II directs the church to provide “a better knowledge of the Christian mystery” and to “enliven the faith of the people of God”.

Where else, my dear McGuinness, lies authority greater than that of the churches? Where else might it be more beneficially established?

***
19.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Religious analysts fail to grasp the scriptures of economics,” The Weekend Australian, July 23-24, 1994, p. 2.

I have a great deal of respect for religion and for religious people who are genuinely good as distinct from religious, despite the fact that I am an unbeliever.

Once upon a time when I was throwing off the indoctrination of my youth I found it amusing and easy to ridicule religion and religious people; but I have seen too much of the importance of religion and the goodness of many religious to do so any more. Perhaps the most profound remark I heard on the subject was from the highly intelligent son of a friend, who sings in a church choir. I asked him whether he was religious. “Well,” he said, “I’m not sure. But when I sing I am.”

This captures the sense of religious reverence which inheres in much art; when I listen to Bach or look at the great religious painting, sculpture and architecture, or read William Blake, or indeed Les Murray’s anthology of Australian religious poetry, it is impossible to ignore the importance of the religious impulse in humanity.

There are many things about religion — the artistic element, the reverence for the universe and its mystery, the impulse to service and benevolence, the absolute nature of morality — which are worthy of respect.

But this is not the same as a belief in religion. This has, to my mind, to be compelled by logic and evidence. Just because one feels religious is not a proof of religion, or the existence of a deity or some kind of divine essence. Equally, if one is genuinely convinced of the truth of any religion, one cannot pick and choose, or treat religion as a kind of smorgasbord of convenient beliefs as is the current fashion.

Still less does it allow religion to be turned into a political movement, as seems to be the fashion among many in the traditional churches.

This cropped up again this week with a report (in The Australian of July 21) of yet another batch of political priests demonstrating their affection for religious nincompoopery. One of them, Anglican Bishop Michael Challen, was quoted as declaring: “I believe governments should care for the community, not devolve responsibility.” Well, so does any fascist or communist dictator like Hitler or Stalin. But how this has anything to do with religion in any real sense it is difficult to say.

Unless of course there is some doctrine in revealed religion which dictates a particular form of social organisation, or a particular manner in which any economy or community should operate. The notion that there is any superior virtue in collectivist dictatorships is, it seems, still dear to the heart of many organisational religions. And one thing which ought to be as clear to us as the fact that in Galileo’s day the Catholic Church did not know what it was talking about when it came to the structure of the universe or the laws of physics, is that religions generally do not have anything of value to contribute to the scientific study or economics and society.

Of course religion has much to say as to how people should behave; but that is a different matter; and even then there are many modes of human behaviour which have social value even though particular religions do not approve of them.

The trouble with most religious pronouncements on social and economic policy is that the bishops, priests, imams or bonzes simply do not know what they are talking about. And however God operates, it is not as an economics adviser.

A recent survey of a group of Christian media personnel illustrates this nicely. This was conducted by Malcolm Anderson and is reported in the latest issue of the IPA Review, published by the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs. (Usually described in the cliché “a right-wing thinktank”. It could as accurately be described as an independent Christian thinktank.)

He asked a sample of “editors, producers, media administrators, journalists, regular writers and reporters who work in both electronic and print media in either denominational, inter-denominational or non-denominational Christian organisations … (including) individuals who served as ‘religious correspondents’ for the major (‘secular’) daily newspapers and the ABC” their views on a number of economic issues.

(I am glad to say that The Australian’s own religious correspondent, Father James Murray, for whom I have the greatest respect both as a priest and as a really good man, as well as a friend, had the commonsense to answer “don’t know” to all the questions.)

It turned out that the ignorance of all these, which is not a bad guide to the opinions of the bishops, etc, of the traditional Christian churches, was profound. In other words, they haven’t got a clue about any economic issue.

The first proposition they were asked about was that, “In the long term, Australia would be better off if the government protected home industries by imposing tariffs and quotas on foreign imports”. While 44 per cent agreed with this piece of economic nonsense, I am glad to say that a third disagreed. However, only 4.7 per cent strongly disagreed, as any properly trained economist would.

The churches are good at agreeing with the nonsense about Third World victimisation, so not surprisingly almost 70 per cent agreed with the statement that “Because of the economic power of Western nations, poverty-stricken Third World countries don’t stand a chance competing against them on open world markets”. This too is nonsense, contrary to all the serious evidence of the past 40 years. The examples of once-poor countries like Singapore, Taiwan and even Japan provide ample demonstration.

Similarly with the statement that “Rent controls (that is, setting the maximum rent levels that landlords can charge) are an effective method of ensuring adequate housing at a price the poor can afford”. Again, the overwhelming weight of evidence is that rent control does immense harm to the poor by discouraging investment in rental housing, and so reduces the availability of rental housing; moreover it tends to favour privileged groups. Yet more than 40 per cent subscribed to this nonsense.

And nearly 60 per cent knew so little about economics that they supported the statement that “Economic analysis assumes people act only out of selfish motives, it doesn’t take into account the humanitarian side of mankind.” (Admittedly, they are only following the old depiction of economics as the “dismal science”, since it tends to point out inconvenient facts.)

There is some cause for hope, however. It has taken many years to convince unions, the Labor Party, even many Liberals, that minimum wages are a cause of unemployment. So it was reassuring that more than 60 per cent of the religious writers did at least accept that it is true that “The existence of legislation which ensures minimum wages is a significant reason why young and unskilled workers cannot find jobs”.

It seems that the nearer the issue is to home and direct observation, the more reality overcomes wishful thinking. Unfortunately, this does not seem to have happened to many of the men of God who think they share the divine wisdom when it comes to social and economic policy.

***
20.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Greatness born of faith and fantasies,” The Sydney Morning Herald, February 28, 1998, p. 40.

Bob Santamaria, who died this week aged 82, was indeed one of the great Australians of this century. That this is now recognised by all sides in politics is one of the many ironies of his career. For many years he was vilified by Labor and the Left, and treated with suspicion and dislike by the Coalition parties, especially those who saw themselves as aristocratic conservatives and shared the anti-Catholic sectarianism of yore.

The greatest irony of his career is that in his later years there was a kind of intellectual rapprochement between him and the Left, who used to be his greatest opponents. Not that he showed any great flexibility in his ideas — rather, he remained wedded to the soft nationalistic syndicalist fascism which is now the dominant ideology of the remains of the Left.

After communism collapsed, this seemed the next best thing. Thus we see the same crude slogans being repeated on all sides, from Pauline Hanson to Gareth Evans — developmentalism, funny money, “think big” projects, communitarianism, nation building, bank bashing, fear of globalisation and international conspiracies of capital, protectionism and economic and cultural autarky.

Since Santamaria subscribed to all of these from the beginning, as well as to many of the “back to the land” fantasies of the hippies and their environmentalist children, he at least cannot be accused of inconsistency.

He believed in small-scale family farming, and expounded his ideas in a 1945 book, The Earth Our Mother, which was years ahead of its time.

After the Labor Split, his ideas on farming were derided by the pre-environmentalist Left as being about “three acres and a goat”.

The origins of his beliefs are clear — he was a loyal Catholic of the pre-Vatican II era, strongly influenced by the doctrines enunciated by the popes reacting against the cruelties of industrial-revolution capitalism and the threat of rising socialist, later communist, movement.

The famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum had immense influence all over the world, as it sought a third way between capitalism and socialism, an authoritarian religious state in which class conflicts would be dissolved. It was essentially a reactionary proposal for a return to a church-dominated feudalism, but it became the first sketch for fascist syndicalism. True fascism had other non-religious roots, of course, and as it developed in Italy under Mussolini (who started out life on the Left, as a revolutionary socialist) it began to develop the monstrous tendencies that flowered in Germany and the Soviet Union. (It is only now being realised, as the fog of Stalinist propaganda dissipates, how Nazism and communism fed upon each other’s methods and ideas.)

The soft corporate fascism of Rerum Novarum quickly found its way to Australia and formed the basis for Henry Bourne Higgin’s conception of the arbitration system, a “new province for law and order”. Santamaria’s great mentor, Archbishop Mannix, mixed the ideology of Rerum Novarum with his own Irish-derived anti-British nationalism and protectionism. It is no accident that for many years while the “policy” departments of the federal bureaucracy, such as Treasury, were dominated by Anglo Protestants who favoured economic openness, the “hands on” departments such as Customs and the Postmaster General tended to have a strong Celtic Catholic presence, with their own clandestine forms of protectionism.

The sinister “Movement” denounced by Dr H. V. Evatt in October 1954 (showing early signs of the mental illness that was to destroy him) had deeper and firmer working-class roots in Australia than did communism or socialism. Santamaria, following the edicts of his church, saw communism as the great enemy internationally and nationally, and the history of how he and Dr Mannix conceived the Catholic opposition to the communist infiltration of the unions and the Labor Party, and built upon that the Industrial Groups, is well known. Like all such epic struggles it was complicated by mixed motives — the anti-communist Australian Workers Union, notoriously corrupt, lined up against the Groups because they challenged corrupt as well as communist union leaders. And many of the Left, particularly in Victoria, were more sectarian anti-Catholic than socialist.

The Split was muddled by Evatt’s mental problems, too — it has been firmly established (by James Griffin, a Canberra historian) that Evatt sought support from and curried favour with Santamaria’s Movement, and turned against it in desperation when it became clear that Santamaria would never support him. Naturally the communists of the time produced their own interpretation, exploiting sectarian anti-Catholicism, memories of the war, and fear of clerical-fascist conspiracies, to their utmost. Many on the Left preferred to swallow this and turned a blind eye to the horrors being perpetrated by Stalin and his successors. There is a legacy of such lying still encrusted on much Australian political legend. The reality is that Evatt, not Santamaria, engineered the Split.

The last 30 years or so of Santamaria’s life were marred by the degeneration of the church he loved, following the final triumph of Luther’s Reformation at the second Vatican Council of 1962-63. But he lived to see the collapse of communism, partly as a result of the influence of the traditionalist Polish Pope, John Paul II. And in recent days he may have been conscious enough to see John Paul II stack the College of Cardinals to ensure a traditionalist succession in the papacy.

Nevertheless the blow of the neo-Reformation to his faith was clearly the greatest hurt of his life.

But he sought refuge in reaffirmation of his corporatist and anti-capitalist fantasies (faithfully reflected in News Weekly), which are now shared by so many of his former critics and opponents.

***
21.
Frank Devine,
“Remember him as an intellectual:
Farewell B. A. Santamaria — rigorous Catholic thinker,”
The Australian, March 2, 1998, p. 11.

By what designation will we honour B.A. Santamaria at his State funeral? Since his death, people have had no end of trouble trying to file him away.

“An influential political figure” is an especially lame but commonplace stab at it. You can’t call Santa a politician — which would bring orthodoxy to a national act of homage. He never ran for election, never joined any political party, never held appointed public office and, I think, never wanted to.

But “a political figure” sounds shady. Political figures don’t get State funerals.

Some have tried, maladroitly, to sum Santa up as “a lay bishop”.

Thousands of people mourn his death personally, because a few close encounters with Santa lit up your life. Hundreds of thousands mourn for their own lives without him, made less secure and hopeful by his passing. However, some Australian Catholic clergy and hierarchy undoubtedly accept with good cheer God’s decision on Santa’s longevity.

In the greatest crusade of his life, Santa has relentlessly, if not mercilessly, chivvied bishops, priests and religious who bend the knee to “new” church demands for contemporary relevancy at the expense of essential Catholic beliefs and teachings.

It is incongruous, anyway, to associate bishophood with Santa, the great layman of the Australian church.

When he started The Catholic Worker in 1935, at the age of 20, he asked his mentor, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, to appoint a priest as religious adviser to the paper, but Mannix replied, “I do not want a priest taking control of your work.” Rare among devout Catholic men, Santa appears to have experienced no call to priesthood or monastery.

It would be quite appropriate to bury Santa with full panoply as a journalist. Before even The Catholic Weekly he was editor of one of the two newspapers published at his high school, entering into such vigorous polemical warfare with the other that the principal closed both of them down.

Santa founded and edited a full stable of publications after that, wrote millions of words, some in a column for The Australian that endured for more than 20 years, and spoke thousands more on radio and television. As a writing journalist he developed a polished style reminiscent of that taught by the best American journalism schools — each sentence packed with content, but lucid above all, momentum rarely abating and important statements of fact clearly attributed to their sources.

Professionally, Santa was exemplary, and no Australian journalist has come close to him in lasting influence.

But a State funeral for a journalist? Unthinkable, no? Santa rattled the vertebrae of social convention throughout his life but for him to exit with such a trivial shake-up would be a waste.

It would be good to see him farewelled as simply an intellectual. To its great credit, Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph actually did it, adorning a valedictory article about Santa by the Liberal MP, Tony Abbott, with a panel that read: “B.A. Santamaria, 1915-1998, Intellectual.”

“Intellectual” gives definition to memory of Santa in a superb pose, face glowing, right hand held up with thumb and forefinger lightly touching, as if holding a thought that had suddenly assumed delicate material form.

But Australia’s cultural preference — not unreasonably nor uncommonly in newish countries — is for men of action rather than of ideas. I guess that is why recollections of Santa’s life have concentrated disproportionately on him as organiser of Catholic infiltration of unions threatened during the 40s and 50s with Communist takeover. As well, he got as close as he ever came to being classifiable as a politician, and therefore State funeral worthy, when Dr H. V. Evatt became alarmed about the possible takeover of the Labor Party by Catholics, and created the Split by trying to drive out Santa’s guerillas.

What it comes down to, I think, is that we have to be bold and bury B.A. Santamaria as a Catholic intellectual. It is what he was, and how he fits into Australian history.

A Mediterranean Catholic, Santa carried the practice of his religion with less angst than the Irish majority in Australia and felt intellectually freer than they to apply study and critical reasoning to its basic tenets — the divinity of Christ, the Resurrection, the Real Presence, the forgiveness of sins. With a daring not easily accessible to the Irish, he came to accept these precepts “on the balance of probability”.

Santa shared with many Irish Catholics the experience of being launched out of humble beginnings by parents dedicated to education as a way of making life better for their children than it had been for them. Santa’s mother had only one year of formal education, his father four. By working ferociously, at least 100 hours a week, his father, immigrant like his wife from a small island near Sicily, saw his eldest son graduate from Melbourne University. Santa was never able to contain his pride about the multitude of degrees, some from Oxford, earned by his eight children.

Nor did he ever lose his awareness of being a child of the Depression. When he talked of classmates at high school — perhaps as many as half — having no lunch, he did so, as an old man, with a catch in his voice.

Approaching 30, Santa wrote down a 20-point outline for a just community, with a now unfashionably high level of State intervention. It involved part ownership of industry by workers, guaranteed adequate income for all, including fair wages to be paid ahead of dividends and profits, subsidies to support family life and sustain farmers and their families, a national education system based in religion.

Such declarations led sometimes to portrayal of Santa as a fascist utopian. In fact, they expressed Christian principles unenforceable by any political party or ideology, fascist or communist, socialist or capitalist, and capable of being put into practice only by a society almost universally embracing them — great concepts providing suitable preoccupation for a Catholic intellectual.

***
22.
Frank Devine, “Message to the PM from on high: leave Me out,”
The Australian, February 25, 1999, p. 13.

“God thanks Mr Howard for his kind invitation to appear in a new preamble to the Australian Constitution but regrets that, because of other commitments, He is unable to accept.”

The Prime Minister will not expect these words to be delivered to him on graven stone tablets. But he should have no reason to suspect that God has changed His mind since He authorised St Luke to issue the policy statement: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

I share with my colleague Father James Murray, who wrote on the subject on this page on Monday, discomfort with the idea of State and Church being joined, however loosely, by the inclusion of God’s name in a new preamble to the Constitution. God has usually fared better with church.

I fear the idea is a product of John Howard’s personal weakness of wishing to appear conspicuously virtuous, rather than of careful consideration.

The woosiness of the proposal is an affront to believers, along with those non-believers and doubters who don’t like being patronised.

The intention is not to invoke God, that is, call upon him in prayer. This would be too radical, giving offence to many voters, and difficult to execute nationally.

The idea is to “refer” to God noncommittally, give him a “mention”, along, probably, with the multicultural nature of the population and the special standing of Aborigines.

This way you get God into the preamble as a good thing, but not bossily godly, and as a patron of official State positions. It offers the alternative of taking God seriously, which is the critical church position, or lightly.

I find echoes of this effort by Howard to have it both ways in the 1924 constitution of the Soviet Union: “Freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-religious worship propaganda is recognised for all citizens.”

We have these freedoms here, and there is absolutely no benefit to be had from official State promotion of them, even by implication.

As well, the idea of God’s being rallied to a national cause is rather repellent.

This feeling on my part may have been exacerbated by the experience of growing up with a national anthem beginning, “God of Nations, at Thy feet”, a misfortune visited upon New Zealanders as punishment for importing and preserving a while Anglicanism as the established religion.

(Advance Australia Fair is, by contrast, a stirring and admirable expression of self-reliance.)

It is hard to believe there is a god of nations. God, as a metaphysical being, informs and inspired individuals. When they gather voluntarily together for the purpose of worshipping Him, it is not hard to believe that inspiration is enhanced.

But it is hard to believe a collective, concerned mainly with other things, would have much luck attracting God’s attention, or much genuine interest in doing so.

However, the main reason for objecting to a reference to God in a constitutional preamble — or, for that matter, in the 99-year-old Constitution itself — is that it is a temptation further to secularise religion.

In both the Catholic archdiocese of Sydney and the Anglican archdiocese of Melbourne, parishes and dioceses are at present being exhorted to produce “mission statements”. The brain reverberates with the discordant introduction of this management school cant to religion.

The long-established mission of Christian clergy is to preach the gospel and celebrate the sacraments, of the faithful to save their souls through adherence to Christ’s teaching and by receiving the sacraments.

The superfluous quest for “mission statements” is certain to produce a babble of political pieties, pop psychology and fashionable prejudice. Probably these statements will attract the attention of opinion pollsters, reporting that 53 per cent of Melbourne Anglicans think Australia should have a national sorry day and 62 per cent of Sydney Catholics believe the ABC should have its funding increased.

Underlying the “mission statements” will be the pretence that they have God’s blessing, and that those who criticise or oppose them are godless ratbags.

Already, religious denominations are afflicted with clergy and members of religious orders who shamelessly use their positions to give a semblance of authority to expressions of personal opinion about secular matters such as taxation policy and childcare policies, not to mention the foreign policy of Israel.

A constitutional preamble claiming a special association of the Australian State with God will encourage concentration on affairs of State rather than on the more demanding and currently less fashionable pursuit of God’s purposes.

The State’s seductive power can be seen exemplarily in most Catholic schools, where acceptance of government subsidies has caused a progressive decline in religious education, pushed aside without much of a struggle by secular curriculums.

Yet for most Australians, for most Christians at least, a mention of God in the Constitution and its proposed preamble appears to be welcome in a mild sort of way. Unobjectionable, anyway.

Churches should care greatly about this.

The proposed preamble takes the heat off people. If Australia is God’s mate, individual effort isn’t really required. The late Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s proposition — Christian principles are fine without Christ or God — may become an easier option.

In the interests of survival, the churches should leave Caesar to look after himself and direct a lot more effort and concentration to giving God the things that are His.

***
23.
Frank Devine, “Do-gooder priests should stay out of the asylum debate,” The Australian, December 12, 2003, p. 9.

Father Frank Brennan, SJ, has too many gongs for comfort. “Father” and “SJ” would have done me. They indicate useful steps taken on the road to personal sanctity and good work done in the cure of souls.

But the author’s note in his new book, Tampering with Asylum, shows Brennan is also an Officer of the Order of Australia, recipient of the Australian Council for Overseas Aid’s Human Rights Award, the Humanitarian Overseas Service Medal and the Australian Centenary Medal. Caesar has rendered him his due.

This is not to denigrate Brennan’s intention of improving the lives of Aborigines, for which his AO was awarded, and refugees, especially in East Timor, but it is my intention to speculate, probably ungenerously, about the asymmetry of the communion of priests and politics.

It would be going too far, I suppose, to draw a parallel with actors, who seem as a rule to have surrendered cognitive areas of their brain in return for their glorious gifts and reveal their Faustian bargain whenever they venture into political activism.

However, I think the priest in politics has a good deal in common with the creative writer addressing the issues of the day — as depicted in The Australian last Friday by Frank Moorhouse.

“I sometimes wonder,” Moorhouse wrote, “whether storytellers of high profile are, if anything, disqualified from public statement because we are often falsely (but seductively) trusted to have special insights which we do not necessarily have.”

Consciously or not, the public priest invokes the prestige and power of his religious office when he involves himself in politics — unless he explicitly discards the biretta, so to speak. When he indulges in political campaigning in full Jesuit regalia, as Brennan does in his homily on the injustice, illegality and immorality of Australia’s treatment of boatpeople, I feel ambushed.

Broadly, Brennan’s thesis is that Australia should have embraced recent asylum-seekers, including those picked up by the Tampa. “If a return to moral decency means we will be viewed as ‘just an easy touch for illegal immigrants’ [quoting John Howard], so be it.”

Brennan’s tone is censorious, his main objective, it often seems, being to castigate Australia and its Government for their lack of decency. Nearly a quarter of Tampering with Asylum is devoted to accusatory, legalistic (Brennan is also a lawyer) analysis of the ways Australia’s treatment of boatpeople breaches provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various UN conventions.

Only once while plodding through Tampering with Asylum was I touched by the human plight of the boatpeople, and that was when I read something else, a review by Roger Ebert of a new movie, In America, which is about immigrants. “I am astonished,” Ebert wrote, “by the will and the faith of recent immigrants I meet. Think what it takes to leave home, family and even language to try for a better life in another country.”

Brennan has apparently had an unusual freedom of access to boatpeople in detention camps. Yet he tells us little about them as human beings. Sparse anecdotes are used to belabour the Government for its harsh treatment of them. We learn next to nothing about their experiences, their values, their aspirations.

Similarly, the word moral is used more than 100 times, often as a qualifier in phrases such as “the moral calculus” and “moral discourse”, but largely to highlight the wickedness of Australia’s conduct.

I’m not sure Brennan would concede his book is political. Yet he reproduces 17 belligerently political newspaper cartoons, 16 of them antagonistic to the Government and several amounting to muggings of the Prime Minister.

He dabbles recklessly in moral equivalency. In the context of detention centres, he writes: “On a visit to the Changi war prison I realised that the abuses of detention are always more aggravated when the jailers are people of another race.” And in a curious, superficially non sequitur anecdote, Brennan inadvertently reveals an overarching political credo.

Meeting them both by chance at Sydney airport, Brennan introduced a Palestinian refugee named Wahid to the suspended chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Geoff Clark.

“We’ve got the same minister,” Clark tells Wahid. (Philip Ruddock was then the minister for immigration and multicultural and indigenous affairs.) Brennan realises “suddenly” that Ruddock was “minister for everyone who is ‘other’ in contemporary Australia”. Clark goes on: “I tell our minister, ‘I don’t mind you making tough laws for boatpeople providing they are retrospective.'” He points to Brennan, “This mob are all boatpeople. But now they think they can run the show.”

So there it is. Poisoned by the original sin of stealing the continent from the Aborigines, Australian society is intrinsically corrupt and immoral. It can be redeemed only by radical social and political change.

Well, everybody’s entitled to their opinion.
___
Further reading for Economics.org.au readers:
See https://economics.org.au/events/the-separation-of-church-and-state/.