On The Palace Letters

It seemed inevitable that, after all the secrecy and all the court battles, the publication of The Palace Letters would renew calls for a republic in Australia. Our 29^th Prime Minister, and former Chair of the Australian Republican Movement (ARM), Malcolm Turnbull, described the letters as amounting to ‘an act of interference in Australian democracy’. Whitlam biographer, professor Jenny Hocking – the historian who tenaciously campaigned for the release of The Palace Letters – called the Letters a bombshell which damaged Queen Elizabeth’s reputation by proving she had breached her apolitical status in 1975 as Australia’s constitutional head of state. Turnbull’s successor at ARM, Peter Fitzsimmons, did not hold back the adjectives as he sought to re-energize Australia’s push towards a republic by describing himself as ‘gobsmacked’ by the letters.

However, the real bombshell of the Letters can be found in what they reveal did not take place during Australia’s political crisis of 1975. To be sure, many of the key actors who contested the political stage that year acted in bad faith. But there was no broad conspiracy to topple Australia’s most energetically reformist government. Buckingham Palace did not interfere or intervene as events unfolded; the swirl of letters and telegrams between the Queen’s Vice-Regal representative, Governor-General Sir John Kerr, and her private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, reveal the Palace’s main concern alongside Kerr’s health was for Kerr to act according to dictates of the Australian constitution. As a former Chief Justice of NSW, they expected Kerr would have a thorough grasp of the Australian constitutional requirements and conventions.

The most gobsmacking element about the dismissal is that when the system was placed under extraordinary stress by the blocking of supply, the system worked. The army remained in their barracks. Tanks did not roll down neither George Street nor Swanson Street. The courts continued to operate under the rule of law. Whatever we make of Kerr’s actions on November 11, the crisis was ultimately resolved with the ballot and not bullets. The Australian political system is by no means perfect. Since Federation we have seen the (re-)enfranchisement of people who were excluded by the political settlement of 1900: women, indigenous Australians, migrants from backgrounds other than Western Europe. Our greatest political achievements, such as the 1967 referendum or the rolling back of the White Australia Policy, also reveal our deepest political shames. But, for all the rage that was unleashed in 1975, our constitution weathered perhaps the greatest political storm it has faced, whilst maintaining the political freedoms our Commonwealth was both founded upon and aspires too.

That the constitution was put in this position in the first place was another matter.

Much could be (and has been) written about the Whitlam era of 1972-1975. Gough Whitlam is undoubtedly the most courageous reformer Australia has had as a Prime Minister. He presided over incredible, legacy-building, changes to the country: universal health care, free university education, initiating land right reform and the return of land to its traditional owners, the ending of military conscription, and the withdrawal of Australian troops in Vietnam.

At the same time, Whitlam presided over a troubled and ill-disciplined cabinet. Whitlam’s ministerial comrades plagued his government in crisis after crisis, risking their reformist agenda with charges of incompetency and corruption. Early in their time in office, Attorney-General Lionel Murphy had caused a scandal by personally leading a raid on the Melbourne ASIO office. To circumvent the issue of supply, and enable his vision to nationalize Australia’s energy market, Rex Connor pursued an unconstitutional loan of US$4 billion dollars from a foreign lender. The government was distracted during this time by the scandal of an affair by Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns, who exacerbated the crisis by misleading parliament about the Loans Affair.

Whitlam, for all his success in leading Labor out of opposition after 23 years, allowed the cabinet too much freedom to pursue their own interests and programs, often at the cost of the government’s reputation.

But Whitlam’s most fatal blunder lay in his appointment of the new Governor-General in 1974. For all of his legal and judicial background, Sir John Kerr was wholly unsuited for this high office. Admittedly, it is easy to both besmirch Kerr’s character and cast him as a tragic figure. As he acknowledges in the Letters, he became a man of few friends. Within six months of assuming office, Kerr was widowed when his first wife Alison died in September 1974.

However, as The Palace Letters testify, Kerr was destructively obsessed with his own position and reputation. He was paranoid that he would be removed from office – though that paranoia was fed by Whitlam's frequent jokes and remarks about 'a race to the palace' between the Governor-General and the Prime Minister to advise the Queen to fire the other.

In Kerr's mind, his actions to resolve the supply crisis were undertaken to avoid that very constitutional crisis where the Queen was sandwiched between her first minister and her Vice-Regal representative. But Kerr's action leading up to November 11 undermined that defence.

As Kerr drew a circle of advice on how to proceed with Whitlam, from Charteris, and from High Court justices Sir Garfield Barwick and Sir Anthony Mason, he began to negotiate with the Leader of the Opposition on how he might act. This is where Kerr acted in bad faith to the procedures and protocols his office is charged with preserving and protecting. Kerr essentially conspired with the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser, to preserve not so much the constitution or the government, but his own appointment as Governor-General.

That action was typified by Kerr’s action on the afternoon of November 11. After the Senate passed supply and Malcolm Fraser had revealed himself in the House of Representatives as caretake Prime Minister, the House voted a motion of no confidence in Fraser and voted a motion of confidence in Whitlam. The House dispatched the Speaker, Gordon Scholes, to Government House to advise the Governor-General to recall Whitlam as Prime Minister.

Instead, Kerr refused to see Scholes. He kept him waiting at the gate for an hour. Instead, he had parliament prorogued by proclamation by his official secretary David Smith, leading to the now famous scene on the steps of Old Parliament House where Whitlam, responding to Smith’s proclamation “God save the Queen”, emerged from behind Smith and said:

“Well may we say "God save the Queen", because nothing will save the Governor-General! The Proclamation which you have just heard read by the Governor-General's Official Secretary was countersigned Malcolm Fraser, who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr's cur. They won't silence the outskirts of Parliament House, even if the inside has been silenced for a few weeks. ... Maintain your rage and enthusiasm for the campaign for the election now to be held and until polling day.”

It’s hard to imagine a more miserable or despised figure in Australian public life. The mental image of Kerr which is lodged in my mind is his appearance at the 1977 Melbourne Cup where he was appeared inebriated, and was his speech was drowned under the boos of the crowd. The son of a boilmaker, Kerr has risen to the highest offices in his state and his country. And he knew it. When you read or listen to Kerr, he was well aware of his own self-importance. And recent revelations about his behaviour would not only today make his position untenable, but point towards his lack of qualification for the office he assumed in 1974.

Because of his faults, and the ease with which he could be portrayed as a drunken toft, Kerr provided an easy scapegoat for those who were enraged by Whitlam’s dismissal. Yet it is important to distinguish between personal dislike of the man, the constitutional action he took. Driven by improper motive, Kerr’s actions were neither unprecedented or illegal. While the powers he exercised had long remained dormant, they were not extinguished. And while me wish that a different, wiser Governor-General had chosen a different path, or been more careful in their use of reserve power, dismissing the Prime Minister remained a valid and open option for Kerr.

While Kerr’s legacy is seemingly irredeemable, Malcolm Fraser’s reputation underwent a renaissance after leaving politics.

I grew up knowing Malcolm Fraser as a reformer and advocate of human rights. He became known as the great humanitarian, unafraid to critique his own party and former colleagues, and even forming an unlikely partnership with Gough Whitlam.

The Malcolm Fraser of 1975 was far more impetuous. We forget that Fraser had already ended the Prime Ministership of WWII hero John Gorton in 1971. According to Fraser, Gorton was "unfit to hold the great office of Prime Minister".

(At least in 1971 MPs had the decency to resign from cabinet before assassinating their leader.)

Become coming to power, Fraser’s tactic was an all-or-nothing, scorched earth approach. Arguably, he was an Opposition Leader in the same vein as Tony Abbot – a wrecker.

And it worked.

After only seven months of becoming Opposition Leader, Fraser found himself in The Lodge.

Fraser used the numbers of the Liberal and Country parties in the Senate to block supply to Whitlam’s government. Whitlam could not pass his budget, and the government was at risk of running out of money. Hence some of the crazier schemes like the Loans Scandal that Labor frontbenchers employed to keep their political agenda afloat.

However, it was Fraser’s temperament which caused the 1975 constitutional crisis. Assuming the mantle of Opposition Leader in March, by September Fraser had triggered the Supply Crisis. He did so because he was impatient; Fraser wanted to dam the flow of money to the government in an effort to force an early election in the hope of winning power. While the Senate had the power under the constitution to do so, there was an unwritten constitutional convention that an opposition would not try to use the Senate to block supply.

Other conventions were breached to bring about the Supply Crisis. Despite winning a double-dissolution election in 1974 and therefore arguably having a mandate to pursue his policies, Labor never held a working majority in the Senate. Whilst the government and opposition were initially forced to work with the cross-bench to pass or block legislation, things changed dramatically in 1975.

In February one of the two independents joined the Liberal Party, living the Senate with a makeup of 30 Coalition Senators, 29 Labor Senators, and 1 independent Senator. This changed again when two-Labor held senate seats needed to be replaced by their respective state parliaments, in this case NSW and QLD. Both states were governed at the time by Coalition parties; both states broke long standing convention and did not appoint replacements chosen by the party who had won the seats at the last election. NSW selected an independent, whilst QLD selected a Labor member who opposed Whitlam and was prepared to vote against supply. With these two appointments, the Coalition was given control over the upper house.

(It is worth noting that under Fraser’s premiership, the constitution was amended via the 1977 referendum which required state parliaments to replace a senator with a member of the same political party).

Able to take advantage of these changes in the senate, Fraser pushed Australian federal politics to the brink. It may have been expected that Whitlam, unable to secure supply, would call for an election. But having won an election less than 24 months prior, refused to play Fraser’s game. Parliament was deadlocked.

In breaching the longstanding convention over supply, Fraser played a destructive form of politics which created fault lines and rage in Australian politics that continue to run deep. The Palace Papers reveal that seeing the deadlock coming, Kerr had been searching for months for a way to end the deadlock without compromising the constitution. Hr consulted widely – and this would give the Opposition the opportunity it needed to end the deadlock in their favour. 

Arguably the most insidious action Fraser took during the crisis was, when Kerr turned to hi m for advice, Fraser entered into consultation and negotiation with a Governor-General who was frightened over their own position of power. In a breach of protocol, Fraser was even ensconced inside Government House without Whitlam’s knowledge while Kerr withdrew the commission of the government.

In offering Kerr his ongoing support to remain in Yarralumla, Fraser conspired and exploited the tension between Whitlam and Kerr to his own advantage. Where Whitlam lost office, and Kerr lost his reputation and legacy, it was Fraser – the instigator behind the Supply Crisis and its resolution – who became the chief beneficiary of the dismissal.

And yet...though bruised and manipulated, constitutional democracy in the Commonwealth of Australia continued unabated.

When tested in 1975, our constitutional monarchy worked. It wasn't pretty. Many Australians then and since have had visceral reactions to how it happened. We may rightly question some of the judgments and tactics. But the strength of the Australian political system was to rest the most incredible of powers in the hands, not of politicians, but independent guardians entrusted to use them sparingly. And when they were used, the means for breaking the deadlock was given back to the Australian people in the 1975 election.

Of course, there is a cautionary tale in all of this. The outcome may have been different with other actors in the lead roles on November 12. Though it now appears from The Palace Letters that Whitlam contacted Buckingham Palace to briefly encourage their persuasion of Kerr to reinstate a Whitlam government, Whitlam was otherwise the constitutionalist. He called for rage, but rage to be expressed at the ballot box, and not the barricade.

So many of our traditions and conventions rest on having people of character in office. What would have happened if Whitlam had no such integrity? In an age where ministerial responsibility and political indiscretion carry less responsibility than they once did, have we forgone character, integrity, and virtue in our political representatives?



I claim no ownership of the photos on this page. Click on each image for the owner.

Dispatches from Australia 3

The headline in the Sydney Morning Herald (somewhat provactly) read:

Demolish St Matthias church, build massive Oxford Street car park, says property tycoon (21 July 2014). 

Responding to the decline of occupied shops along Sydney's Oxford Street strip, Max Raine of Raine & Horne suggested that an 'underutilised' church in Paddington should be demolished in an effort to revive the historic shopping precinct. According to the SMH article:

St Matthias Anglican Church was “hardly attended” yet occupies a “glorious spot” near the corner of Oxford Street and Moore Park Road, which [Raine] claimed was ripe for conversion into a parking station.

Raine's suggestion came somewhat of a surprise not only to the congregations of St Matthias, but also many Christians in Sydney and further afield - St Matthias being a vibrant inner-city parish.

However, Raine's suggestion fits neatly into a narrative that Australian's are increasingly telling each other: Christianity is on the decline, and church attendance numbers are insignificant. (Despite this narrative, Australians are more likely to attend a church service during the year than a sporting event or the cinema).

I encountered the full force of this narrative in 2013 during a D.A. process with my previous church. We wanted to build a ministry centre adjacent to the Victorian church building to provide much needed space for milling around, disabled access, and toilets accessible during church services. The D.A. proposal sparked opposition from a segment of the community who set themselves up as the Save the Church lobby group. During two council hearings about the DA, the opposition group repeatedly ran the line that the Ministry Centre was unneccesary because less than 20 people attended the church on Sundays (at the time the reality was closer to 200 - there were at least 50 church members in the council chambers audience at the time).

Instead, the D.A. was obviously the work of corporate greed, and these fairminded citizens where the last line of defence for the the sandstone building and four acres of land their suburbs founders had left 'for the people of this suburb'. Never mind the fact that the four acres of land had been purchased by the church for divine worship. Never mind the fact that it was the church community driving the D.A. so that the church could be more hospitable.

Their incongruity at the church's need was fueled by the narrative that Christianity is on the decline, etc. The fact that the church was sizeable, and full of people in their 20s (and not just grannies) didn't fit in their plausability structure, and therefore couldn't be true.

They knew best what the church needed.

Dispatches from Australia 2

In their famous 1989 book Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon describe the end of a world - the capitulation of Christendom to secularism - in 1963 when a local cinema opened on a Sunday.

I started school in 1990. It was a state school on the urban fringe of Sydney. About half the buildings at the time were demountables. In between learning to tie my shoes and get through the day without a nap, there was a whole new "liturgy" that I had to learn. In particular, there were two sets of words the student body was expected to know.

• The first was a song that was sung every few weeks at the school's formal assembly. It turned out this song was God Save the Queen, which had only been relegated from Australia's national anthem to Australia's royal anthem several years earlier when the graduating year of 1990 had started school  (i.e. 1984). Looking back on it now, and the painting of Queen Elizabeth II from the late 1960s which hung in the office, my primary school feels like sometimes it would be at home on The Crown.
• The second, I would come to learn, was The Lord's Prayer, which was said at least once per week during school assembly. As we stood in straight-ish lines on the asphalt quad, the older years would recite the prayer from memory - Protestant bit and all.

That world has long since past. For me, it disappeared almost in the twinkle of an eye, and had vanished by the time I started my second year at primary school. With the weight of globalization as the cold war ended, along with a rising sense of an Australian identity, republicanism, multiculturalism, and an increased awareness of our indigenous heritage, it's surprising that I even encountered these two sets of words regularly at school in the first place.

It would be tempting though to ascribe their disappearance to the irreversible tide of secularism, which seems to sweep Australia with increasing ferocity every five years as census results are announced. According to popular assumption, religion is occupying a declining space in public ad private life, and eventually will all but vanish from Australian life (except for indigenous religion apparently, because that can explained away as "cultural").

It might just be that Christendom took longer to root out from Australia's Blue Mountains than it did to the American South. Admittedly, Australia has a long and complicated relationship between faith and society. But amidst those complications, Australia has been, by and large, accommodating (e.g. not antagonistic) towards religion. And the truth of the matter is that secularism is not a new phenomenon in Australia; it has been with European Australia since 1786 when Richard Johnson was appointed Chaplain to the First Fleet.

Although it may come to a surprise, secularism is a thoroughly Christian achievement. The word “secular” has come to mean “non-religious”; drop by any P&C meeting these days and when the world "secular" is used, it is understood to be in opposition to faith and organised religion. But it was never meant to mean that. “Secular” comes from the Latin word saeculum, which means “age.” It was  developed by Augustine of Hippo to account for the now and not yet eschatological tension Christians find themselves in. By definition, the opposite of “secular” is not “sacred” but “eternal”.  So “secular ” means “of this age” rather than the eternal.

Secularism actually is a consequence of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which announces that all earthly governments have been relegated to penultimate status. The Australian government is not eternal. Each and every government is secular because there will come a time when the governments of the world cast their crowns before the lamb who was slain. As Oliver O’Donovan has helpfully written:

“The most truly Christian state understands itself most thoroughly as “secular”. It makes the confession of Christ’s victory and accepts the relegation of its own authority… The essential element in the conversion of the ruling power is the change in its self-understanding and its manner of government to suit the dawning age of Christ’s own rule.”

With the ascension of Jesus Christ, secularism is the stripping of governments of their pretensions to command our absolute and whole-hearted obeisance.

Rather than the rise of secularism then, I wonder perhaps what we have witnessed in Australia over recent decades is the loosening of our common bonds. The traditions and institutions which have served our society have gradually been weakened and become unintelligible to us. Philosophically, concepts such as secularism and representation have become gibberish to us, unmoored as they are to their original intent and purpose. Whatever the case, we may have reached a point expected by several cultural commentators, who foresaw it with a sense of joy (Nietzsche), sadness (Tolkien), or despair (TS Eliot).

For O'Donovan, it actually is an occasion for chastened optimism for gospel opportunities in a society like ours. He writes that "Western civilization finds itself the heir of political institutions and traditions which it values without any clear idea why, or to what extent, it values them." Christian witness and theology has an opportunity to shed light on institutions and traditions whose intelligibility is seriously threatened. There is an apologetic value for Christians to think theologically about politics during a crisis of confidence in our politics. This is unlikely to result in a return to the situation of my primary school in 1990. That may not even be desirable. However, what is needed from Australian Christians is a commitment to our institutions and society at large for the sake of the common good because we know Jesus' lordship over all things. To do so would be to swim against the current and buck the trend that has dominate western societies at large since the 1960s (at least). But perhaps Christians are at their best in society when their swimming against the general trends.

Dispatches from Australia 1

"Everything in this country is socialist!"
"Everything?"
"Everything. Your health care system. The ABC. Your university admissions. The fact that you have a minimum wage. It's all socialist!"

I dined late last year with a visitor to Australia's shores, who, as you might tell from the brief exchange above, had reached (in his mind) a damning conclusion about Australia. Its institutions, its people, its very DNA all smelt of socialism.

Admittedly, compared to the homeland of my fellow dinner, Australia is in a unique position. Many of our institutions are in public hands (and when I was a kid many were publicly owned, such as the Commonwealth Bank, Telstra, The State Bank in NSW, etc.), and many aspects of our welfare system, such as Medicare, have taken on the status of an institution, such that it would be close to politically impossible for a government to dismantle them.

However, rather than socialism, I suspect that these aspects of Australian society bear witness to an older political tradition. We are called ‘the Commonwealth of Australia’, which oddly at first only looks as if we share riches, as in ‘common wealth’. This is, of course, partially true: we do share riches in terms of participating in an economy, and using common infrastructures. But that economic truth is only one aspect of a deeper truth that was once being expressed by this term. ‘Wealth’ comes from an older word for what is good, ‘weal’, hence a ‘commonwealth’ was always meant to be about a society of people committed to a ‘common good’.

Just pointing out the name of the country does not nothing on its own. However, Andrew Cameron has argued that 'The fact that we were called a ‘Commonwealth’ indicates that there has been an alternative tradition at work in Australia: the concept of a community who seeks together for a good life, in quality relationships with one another.'

[There is a long Christian history of the common good drawing on the significant New Testament word koinonia, which can traced, among other places, in Oliver O'Donovan's short book Common Objects of Love.]

Arguably, it is this concept of society which drove the introduction of the pension in NSW. One of the significant forces behind the introduction of old-aged and infirm pensions in NSW was the Ven. Francis 'Bertie  Boyce and the now defunct the parish of St Paul's Redfern. Boyce was hardly a socialist; as the founder of the British Empire League, he tirelessly campaigned for the observance of Empire Day in NSW - it helped that the Premier of NSW was a member of St Paul's. Boyce also founded the Anglican Church League, the conservative evangelical lobby group in the Sydney Diocese.

It may come as a surprise to you then that Boyce was the leading social reform advocate in NSW at the turn of the 20th century, covering issues such as woman's suffrage, slum clearance, and temperance. Boyce has advocated for years on the issue of an old aged pension. The introduction of the pension was a significant moment in NSW, as it had by and large been the responsibility of the church to provide relief for the aged.  Yet Boyce did not see this as a straight handing over to the state the relief work which had traditionally been the purview of the churches. Preaching at St Paul’s Redfern just after the introduction of the pensions into NSW, Boyce described the expected £60,000 p.a. cost of the pension as ‘a Christian contribution to suffering humanity.’

Whereas the church had previously been limited by its connections with those in need and its own fundraising, for Boyce the government's new found responsibility to provide the pension would move beyond the limited connections any one church might have and enable as many people to be cared for in their twilight years. Reflecting on Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2, Boyce argued that this would give the Christian all the more reason to pay their tax, and to see their tax used in the service of those in need by God's own ministers.

At a time when we read about individuals and corporations peddling their money through overseas tax havens, Boyce's approach to tax and welfare seems entirely foreign. And yet, it's beautiful, and  based on a generous ecclessiology - that the church exists as the pillar and bulwark of truth to extend God's blessing to all people in society.

Far from socialist, the bedrock for Australia's great institutions rest upon a Christian concept of of community.

Sober Words

"The English evangelicals who arranged for Richard Johnson to be chaplain to the first fleet had envisaged the distant new settlement as a place from which the Christian gospel would emanate. Such a thought was hardly likely to have occupied the attention of the first settlers with the exception, perhaps of Johnson himself. It was no doubt far from the mind of the Christians among the convicts, transported across the world against their will.

Yet, however unwittingly, however imperfectly, however inadequately, they did carry the knowledge of Christ to these shores. But the Christian settlers were few and their light was feeble. It is one of the great tragedies of the recent history if Australia that true Christianity was for so long so very difficult to discern in the life of this outpost of a distant nation which called itself Christan." - John Harris, One Blood.

A Clear and Present Faith

The old man looked the missionary in the eye: “You keep telling us about how sinful we are and how we need to change, but no one ever says this to the white people who steal our land, our wives and our daughters. No one says this to the men who are killing us..."

I’ve been on holidays for the past fortnight, which has given me the opportunity to read One Blood: John Harris’ seminal work on the history between Indigenous Australians and Christianity. Even twenty years after publication, this is still a magnificent book. I’m not finished yet, but already there has already been a lot to give thanks for, as well as a lot of stories that have made me want to weep and pray for Jesus’ return.

Here is Harris’ assessment of the first 100 years of Christian witness in Australia:

1. The missionaries often confused conversion to European civilisation with conversion to the gospel of Jesus Christ. They attempted to conform Indigenous Australians to a life of European-style peasant farming and other symbols of European civilisation. This made them slow to recognise signs of genuine regeneration and maturity.
2. The rhetoric of the Europeans and the Colonial Government made it difficult to distinguish Christianity from the culture around it. It was hard for Indigenous Australians to discern the Christianity preached by the missionaries in the lives of the Europeans who brought death, disease, dispossession, prostitution and alcoholism to their land.
3. The church forgot to preach the whole gospel. They were very strong on preaching sin and judgment to a people seen by the wider colonial society to be savage and barbaric. But it was rarely accompanied by the hope the gospel of Jesus Christ brings. After the shock being disposed from the land and seeing their culture break down under the European invasion, this message of hope and justice may have been what they needed to hear. It was actually when missionaries in Victoria started to preach the whole gospel that they saw fruit from their labour.
4. These were accompanied with a lack of interest for Christian work amongst Indigenous Australians that swept through the wider church in Australia and Europe.
   

The church also played a positive role during this time. Harris points out that it was almost exclusively only the Christians in colonial society who saw Indigenous Australians as humans. Harris recounts some moving testimonies from some Aboriginals in eastern Victoria who said that without the church missions, their people wouldn’t exist today. But overall this all contributes to tragedy of Australia since 1788.

Reading One Blood has reminded me of the need for the church to stand out from its culture and be distinguished and shaped by the gospel of Jesus. Harris writes:

“It is one of the tragedies of the recent history of Australia that true Christianity was for so long so very difficult to discern in the life of this outpost of a distant nation which called itself Christian.”

This reminded me of a quote from Tim Foster that I’ve used before on hebel. I heard it again a few days before I started reading One Blood. Reflecting on the challenge of the Sermon on the Mount for the church, Foster argues:

"The expression of these values (the Sermon on the Mount) by the church is essential to its successful engagement in mission. Just as Torah-obedience was essential for the success of Israel’s mission to the nations, ‘the church’s oddness is essential to its faithfulness.’ The logic of the Sermon on the Mount is that the disciples serve the world by demonstrating that a new society is breaking-in which offers an alternative communal existence shaped by the character and purposes of God.

Because the world is so deeply immerse in the prevailing order "the only way for the world to know it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people." The anticipated outcome is that others will ‘See your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven’ (Matt.5.16). Just as apostasy destroyed Israel’s capacity to mission, accommodation to the values of them world poses the greatest of dangers to the church, diluting its capacity to bear witness to radical nature of the new order." - Tim Foster, A Vision for the Mission and the Message of the Australian Church After Christendom.

The challenge, now as always, is for the church to be the church. I hope to post again soon with some stories from One Blood.

Peter Adam: When Sorry Isn't Sorry

Here a short interview calling Melbourne Anglicans to be a prophetic voice to Australia and why sorry isn't sorry without restitution. H/T Stephen Gardner.

What Australian Politics Looks Like

Make sure you turn the translator on...

A Regional Refugee Processing Centre in...?

For the past fortnight public discourse in Australia has been dominated by the location of a potential regional processing centre for refugees. The Federal Government proposed Timor-Leste as their preferred location (a somewhat surprising move, least of all to the Timorese Government); the Opposition has promoted Nauru, home of the Howard Government's Pacific Solution.

But I would like to propose a third location for a regional processing centre: Canberra.

As one of the G20 nations, Australia is uniquely placed within our region to host a facility like this, much more so than either Timor-Leste or Nauru. Canberra is also an attractive location because of the Federal Government's executive power in the ACT.

Building a regional processing centre in Canberra would make an excellent contribution to other Government policies. Particularly what I have in mind is the Nation Building program that is currently underway. Canberra's refugee centre would clearly fulfill the goal of the economic stimulus plan: boost local infrastructure and support jobs. This is a win for Australia and the Federal Government. By building in Canberra, we would be supporting the local economy and saving "Aussie jobs" from being moved overseas.

And as a temporary site until the centre is constructed, the Government could use The Lodge. I've heard that's going to be empty until after the next election...

Where did this rank Australia amongst the world's nations taking in refugees?

Here is an extract from Clarke and Dawe 's take on asylum seekers. You can read the transcript or watch it here.

BRYAN DAWE: Well we might leave that one and move on I think. What percentage of the world's asylum seekers applications were made last year to Australia?

JOHN CLARKE: 98 per cent.

BRYAN DAWE: No that is incorrect.

JOHN CLARKE: 87 per cent?

BRYAN DAWE: No it was 0.5 of one per cent, Iggy.

JOHN CLARKE: Gee

BRYAN DAWE: Where did this rank Australia amongst the world's nations taking in refugees?

JOHN CLARKE: First!

BRYAN DAWE: No, think about this Iggy, half of one per cent of the applications made in the world were made in applications to come Australia. So where did that rank us amongst world nations?

JOHN CLARKE: Yeah, Second!

BRYAN DAWE: No, 33rd

JOHN CLARKE: Oh well a lot of countries are richer, you know, the rich countries can take lots of migrants.

BRYAN DAWE: No, no, Iggy if you take the GDP into account we're actually 70th. OK, what percentage of Australia's immigrants come by boat?


JOHN CLARKE: Oh about 98 per cent

BRYAN DAWE: No, down a bit

JOHN CLARKE: 83 per cent

BRYAN DAWE: Down a fair bit.

JOHN CLARKE: 66 per cent.

BRYAN DAWE: No down from 2 per cent

JOHN CLARKE: About 50 per cent.

BRYAN DAWE: No. I think this next question could help you Iggy. How do most people who emigrate to Australia arrive?

JOHN CLARKE: Oh they come in boats, sort of really small boats with a quite a high front.

BRYAN DAWE: No, the vast majority arrive by plane.

JOHN CLARKE: No they don't they come in boats I've seen them on television they're in little boats with quite a high front, they're sort of low in the water.

BRYAN DAWE: Hey Iggy have you ever seen an aeroplane on television?

JOHN CLARKE: Well, yeah I've been on an aeroplane.

BRYAN DAWE: And when was that Iggy?

JOHN CLARKE: When I came to Australia.

BRYAN DAWE: Correct!

JOHN CLARKE: Oh good I've got one right.

BRYAN DAWE: Which group has the highest rate of success in establishing that they are genuine immigrants: the ones who come on planes or the ones who come in boats?

JOHN CLARKE: The ones who come in planes.

BRYAN DAWE: No the ones who come here on boats.

JOHN CLARKE: Oh do they? I did well then.

BRYAN DAWE: You did very well. Final question Iggy. What's the point of moving the big processing centre for the boatpeople from Christmas Island to East Timor?

JOHN CLARKE: I've got no idea.

BRYAN DAWE: Correct and after that round you are still living in a country which was invaded in the first place and in which you've overstayed your visa.

JOHN CLARKE: Yeah well we won't be having any more of that will we?

BRYAN DAWE: No.

JOHN CLARKE: Not now I'm here.

H/T Byron Pictures: (1) From the ABC 7.30 report website; (2) www.syndesmos.net

A Letter to Kevin

Dear Kevin,

It was a surreal experience to watch you in tears on television today. It reminded of a day in '91, when another Labor PM cried at press conference having being ousted by his party.

You came to my attention a few months before you toppled 'Bomber' Beazley when you wrote about Faith in Politics. You lauded Dietrich Bonhoeffer for resisting totalitarian power and offered a vision of Australia that matched his integrity:

'The time has well and truly come for a vision for Australia not limited by the narrowest of definitions of our national self-interest. Instead, we need to be guided by a new principle that encompasses not only what Australia can do for itself, but also what Australia can do for the world.'

Little did we know that you would soon be in a position to make Australia the light on a hill you dreamed it should be. I was in Parliament House the day you became the Opposition Leader, and started you meteoric rise to power. Your high numbers in the polls was matched by the higher moral authority you took in the campaign, annihilating The Coalition.

Your election on my 23rd birthday seemed to offer Australia a fresh start, as we emerged from several long years under the Howard Government. Kevin07 very quickly turned into Kevin 24/7, as your punishing workload delivered: an apology to the stolen generation; ratifying Kyoto; workplace reform; a briefly more humane response to refugees; leading the nation through the GFC; attempted tax and health reform; an 'education revolution'; withdrawing troops from Iraq; social inclusion; an increased regard in the community of nations...all in two and a half years.

But it all started to unravel when your rhetoric - well actually when your rhetoric became incomprehensible and bore no resemblance to the visionary oratory of 2007. Your government backed down on core election promises like climate change and refugees and that new federalism you once promised. You had seemed so unassailable, but with a rabid new leader on the other side of the treasury benches the polls turned against you. And so did your party. Out-flanked by the factions you had banished on your accession to the top-job, your were whacked by your deputy and a fellow Nambour boy; a wasted PM.

It happened very suddenly didn't it? I'm sure you feel it was sudden. How is it that the outrage over 1975 hasn't prevented the backroom party hacks from removing the elected PM?

So it is that I sit here tonight with a familiar melancholy feeling looking over a letter a received when I was seven. I hope you too enjoy spending more time with your family.

Sincerely,

Matt

Welcome to Australia...

By Adrian Lane.

Asylum

Four friends on the illegal refugee situation in Australia:

Michael Jensen - Sink or swim? What to do with boat people

Meredith Lake -A home for the persecuted and the poor? and Boat people: a challenge to Australian sovereignty?

Alison Moffitt - Two cents on Asylum Seekers

Jeremy Smith -Christmas Island – have a read!

Guest Post: Foray Into Media-Land

A syndicated guest post by Alison Moffitt

My department has been working on a report for the last couple of months that was released to the media on Tuesday (November 10) as part of Anglicare's Christmas appeal launch. It's the first time that I have ever written something for the public, and even though very few people outside of the industry will read it, it was still kind of cool to have something out there that was covered in the news for a fleeting moment.

The report was an update on a larger report my co-workers put together in June. It was an analysis of trends among people who access emergency relief services from Anglicare - the kind of help that comes in the form of emergency financial assistance for people who are really struggling to pay bills and buy food. The previous report identified that

- single mothers
- indigenous people
- people in public housing
- people who lived alone

were massively overrepresented.

It also called for a better emergency relief model. Many single mothers, indigenous people, single person households and people in public housing struggle with many other social and financial issues that can't be addressed by giving them a food hamper or paying off an occasional electricity bill. The government currently only funds organisations like Anglicare for this kind of assistance. When emergency relief staff spend time helping people negotiate centrelink or helping people access counselling services, parenting classes, drug and alcohol programs, budgeting classes or anything that isn't a financial transaction, the organisation has to subsidise it themselves.

Our update happened because we got an extra 5 months of data which helped us see how the global financial crisis impacted on these people. Firstly, there were more of them. The demand for services increased, although we couldn't actually help many more people because we were already operating at capacity. The same sorts of people were accessing services but, they were coming with different problems. Many many more people were coming because they were having trouble securing housing, and many many more were presenting with unemployment.

If you want to check out the report, you can find it here.

If you are more of a visual person, you can look at the wordle instead:


So on Tuesday, the report was made public, there were media releases and the report was covered by both Fairfax and News Limited with an identical story, although different headlines (having taken the story from AAP). I'm not sure how that works. This is my first experience like this, but somehow I wasn't surprised when the reports were dramatically incorrect. I am never complaining about poor journalism in the Sydney Anglican newspaper ever again. It has nothing on this. They just copied and pasted extracts of the Anglicare media release, and then got creative. They changed 'increased' to 'rocketed' and pulled out the biggest stats they could find from the media release. They also made up something about increasing requests for counselling and family services, even though (as I just mentioned) the only data we had was for people coming to financial assistance, and the media release was pretty straightforward about that. It's making me suspicious of most of what I have ever read in the newspapers.

This post is also available here.

Karl Barth on Refugees

Commenting in October 1942 on the refugee crisis facing Switzerland, Karl Barth had this to say:

"The refugees are our concern: not because they are good and valuable people, but because they are today the lowest, the most wretched people in the whole world and as such they knock on our doors, [and because their] inseparable companion is the Saviour. They are our concern: not although they are Jews, but precisely because they are Jews and as such are the Saviour's physical brothers...The refugees (whether they know it or not) are honouring us by seeing our land as a last refuge of justice and mercy, and by coming to it...We see in the refugees that which we have been miraculously spared of. It is certainly true today we are not doing all that well either. But again, it is also true that we are at least taken pretty good care of, and are taken such good care of that we are rich in comparison to these unhappy people. Can we bear this without wanting to help them with all our might."

This was at a time when the Swiss border was completely sealed off from Jewish refugees. Although many made it into Switzerland, over 100,000 refugees were rejected by the Swiss authorities during the Second World War. I won't comment on the current refugee situation in Australia, except to point to two excellent posts by Meredith Lake here and here.

Wealth

"Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts." - James 5:1-4

In 2007 Australians gave $487 million to foreign aid.

In 2007 Australians spent $487 million on plasma screen TVs.

Oh boy.

Where's the Coverage?

I attended the the John Saunders Lecture in August where Dr Peter Adam discussed Aboriginal land claims, the history of injustice against Indigenous Australians, and appropriate Christian responses including the question of recompense. I followed the resulting media coverage with interest (including the SMH, The Age, and Melbourne Anglicans).

And so I was somewhat disturbed and surprised by the relative lack of coverage of the lecture in the Sydney Anglican media. Besides this quick mention in Russell Powell's weekly column and 26 words in September Southern Cross (see the picture), the lecture might well never of happened.

Despite Southern Cross reporting the lecture under the Anglican Communion Wrap: Melbourne, this landmark lecture actually took place in Sydney. I was there, along with several members of the Moore College Faculty.

Although the lecture was organized by Morling College and the Baptist Union of NSW & ACT, it had several Anglican connections. Peter Adam is Anglican, and the principal of an important Anglican theological college. The Aboriginal elder who helped organize the evening is an Anglican from Queensland. Several members of the Sydney Diocese Indigenous committee and Social Issues Executive where present. I think on the night that mention was made of support the lecture had received from the Sydney Diocese. And a collection was taken at the end of the night to fund indigenous theological training through the Baptist and Anglican churches. I thought that all this would make the lecture worth reporting in September's Southern Cross (particularity given page two caries a feature article on the bicentenary of William Cowper's arrival in Australia).

What really disturbs me is that the lecture received national coverage across the media spectrum and yet it has been virtually ignored in the Sydney Anglican mouthpiece. Peter Adam offered a Christian call for recompense that received national attention and we (Sydney Anglicanism) failed to engage with it. I know Sydney Anglican Media are facing major staff reductions, but I expected more from them. The 2009 John Saunders Lecture was of significant interest to Sydney Anglicans, and I'm disappointed that it wasn't reported to them.

The Colony: A History Of Early Sydney

With recently renewed discussion about the history and occupation of Australia Grace Karskens' newly released "The Colony: A History Of Early Sydney" is a fresh and timely account of the origins of Sydney. Grace Karskens brings a personal touch to the book that I also found to be helpful.

Karskens, who worked as the Project Historian for the Cumberland Gloucester Street Archaeological Project, has produced a multidisciplinary book. This is one of the strengths of The Colony - besides using traditional historical and political accounts, Karskens addresses social history (including the history of women and convicts), environmental concerns, Aboriginal history and archaeology. It also sets Sydney Town in its context of being the center of surrounding settlements spread out across the Cumberland Plains. Drawing on Inga Clendinnen's earlier research, Karskens account of the indigenous experience of the British invasion and continued settlement is especially worth reading. Karskens herself is well aware that what she offers isn't the Aboriginal history of 1788, but it does go along way towards that.

The Colony also some way towards busting several myths that have arisen about the foundation of Sydney. The narrative presented by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore is well and truly in her sights. Karskens also spends sometime dealing with the 'foundational orgy' story and also the continued presence of Eora people in Sydney for several decades after 1788. Of particular note is Karskens reconstruction of the Minto massacre in 1816 of Aboriginal, elderly men, women and children.

My main gripe with it is the absence of religion in The Colony. Neither the religious beliefs of the Eora or the British were adequately dealt with. This doesn't mean that it isn't mentioned. On one occasion Karskens point to the Evangelical motives some officers had in educating Aboriginal children. But that's about it. Religion floats across the pages, but for a multidisciplinary work religion remains ungrounded. The Church of England clergy are presented only as farmers and country squires. As Meredith Lake has pointed out elsewhere, "there are...important questions about how post-christian Australians try to make sense (or not) of our Christian past."

Overall, I found the The Colony to be an insightful and read. It left me wanting to know more about Sydney's past, and was for me an extremely useful introduction to the Eora's experience of the invasion. If you only read one historical book each year, you should strongly consider this one.

Restitution

"Then it is at once our duty, and our wisdom to humble ourselves in penitence before God. But repentance supposes reformation, and where injuries have been inflicted it involves recompense….But the next step to reformation is restitution. And do we start at this word? It is one an honest man need never shrink from; it is one a noble mind will never discard; it is one which religious man will cheerfully adopt. It is our duty to recompense the Aborigines to the extent we have injured them." - John Saunders, ‘Claims of the Aborigines,’ a sermon preached at Bathurst Street Baptist Church, Sydney, 14 October 1838.

Peter Adam, in Monday night's Second Annual John Saunders lecture (available here) called for Australia (those who have arrived since 1788) to make recompense to Indigenous Australians. Following Richard Baxter, Adam argued that this needs to come through either through restitution (returning what was taken) or satisfaction (returning something of equivalent value where restitution isn’t possible). Adam then offered a practical proposal for recompense:

1. We would recognize that recompense is a duty and responsibility, that we owe it to the indigenous peoples of this land, out of respect for them as our brothers and sisters made in God’s image [see Acts 17:26] and out of awareness of the vileness of the crimes which have been committed against them and their ancestors.
2. We would recognize that recompense is based on our duty, not the needs of indigenous people. I am not saying that we should not care, but that we must act with integrity and justice [rather than being condescending].
3. We would recognize that no recompense could ever be satisfactory, because what was done was so vile, so immense, so universal, so pervasive, so destructive, so devastating, and so irreparable.
4. We would ask the indigenous people if they wanted those of us who have arrived since 1788 to leave (Baxter’s ‘Restitution’), or to provide an equivalent recompense (Baxter’s ‘Satisfaction’). Leaving would be a drastic and complicated action, but, as I have pointed out, it has happened in India, Africa, and Indonesia in the last sixty years.
5. If we do not leave, then we would need to ask each of the indigenous peoples of this land what kind of recompense would be appropriate for them. This would be an extremely complicated and extensive task, but must be done.
6. We would need to be prepared to give costly recompense, lest it trivialize what has happened.
7. We would then need to adopt a national recompense policy, in the form of a Treaty. It would need to be implemented locally, according to the wishes of each indigenous tribe.
8. By negotiation, it could be a one-off act of recompense, or it could be a constant and long-term series of acts of recompense.
9. We could also implement voluntary recompense by churches in a coordinated way, and should include support of indigenous Christian ministry and training, as negotiated by the leaders of Christ’s indigenous people. Christian churches should lead the way in this, not least in supporting indigenous Christians and their ministries. For churches too have benefited from the land they use, and from income from those who have usurped the land.

Are Adam's propositions an appropriate way forward? How would you make it happen?The apology from the Commonwealth Government took an incredibly long time - how long can we wait for the government to make any moves on this issue?

Quoting Paul in Romans 13:8-10, Peter Adam finished with these words:

Love involves duty, as well as charity. We have wronged our neighbours. It is now time to pay our debts, to confess our sins, to give the recompense that we owe. We who know God’s great love in Christ should be the most active in loving others. May God strengthen us to love the Lord our God, and so to love our neighbours.

The Time Has Come To Say Fair's Fair...

The Herald has an article on last night's lecture by Peter Adam: 'Australia - Whose Land?'

I'll blog about this later, but for now, check out the Herald's report and Chris Swann's far more helpful analysis.

UPDATE: Peter Adam has used parts of his lecture for an editorial in today's Herald.