The departure of Senator Fatima Peyman from Labor over Labor’s policy on Palestinian statehood has sparked a wider debate about the written and unspoken rules of Australian politics, one of which is the thorny issue of the role of religious belief.
This issue inevitably came up during Scott Morrison’s term as prime minister. Morrison made no secret of his evangelical Christianity. His bizarre memoir raised the issue again because it showed that Morrison’s faith was not incidental to his politics. It was, at least by Morrison’s own account, a fundamental principle of his politics.
As far as I can tell, Morrison’s Christianity has not been understood as a threat to social cohesion. It is strange, to be sure, but not dangerous in that sense. Those who do claim it is dangerous are often seen as exaggerating, or even hypocritical. Kevin Rudd’s Christianity has not received the same level of scrutiny or criticism.
Mr Albanese’s comments come in the wake of Mr Peyman’s departure from the party, and reports that he had been in contact with an organisation called “Muslim Boat” which aims to organise candidates in Labor seats with large Muslim voters.
I do not believe, and do not want, Australia to go down the path of religious parties, because all it would do is weaken social cohesion. It seems only too clear to me that the isolation of small, minority groups that a religious party system would bring would not be in their interest.
Even a cursory look at the historical record reveals that there are many minor Australian parties with strong Christian overtones, all of which Albanese likely disliked, but which he generally did not disparage. The parties used by Fred Nile and his wife Elaine to get elected to the New South Wales Parliament – Call for Australia and the Christian Democrats – are the best known, but there were many others.
In the 1920s, the Protestant Independent Labor Party, active mainly in New South Wales, was founded by Walter Skelton, who used a brief experiment with constituency and proportional representation to win seats in the Legislative Assembly. Skelton was elected at a time when religious sectarianism was often violent and often spilled over into mainstream political debate.
Centre-right politicians, then concentrated in the Nationalist Party, used the issue to garner votes, the most notorious of whom was Thomas Rae, a New South Wales government minister and later a member of Federal Parliament, who turned to crime after a career of parliamentary politics and attacking Catholics. Rae was widely suspected of murdering a political opponent in 1925 and was later convicted of murder in England.
Religious sectarianism, or the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, has been a source of undermining social cohesion in Australia in the past. When the Australian political party system was born, the Labor Party was heavily Catholic, while its rival parties, which operated under a variety of names before settling on the Liberal Party in 1944, were overwhelmingly Protestant, although their electoral support was not always consistent.
“Look out, boys. Here come the Catholics,” Robert Menzies used to joke in front of John Kramer, a rare Catholic in the Liberal fold. It is only in recent decades that some Catholics have been able to find a more comfortable home within the Liberal party.
Two of the three major splits in the Labour Party in the 20th century were heavily influenced by religious sectarianism: in 1916 over conscription for overseas service, and in 1955 over the involvement of the Catholic Church in Communist policies and labour issues. The breakaway party that emerged from the latter split, the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), was ostensibly secular but Catholic in substance and not just in name.
Albanese is undoubtedly and sincerely opposed to a faith-based political party. He is a mainstream politician with secular leanings and a strong commitment to existing social and political institutions. Yet it is hard to shake the impression that the biggest alarm for critics is that a party would not only be religiously based, but would also express a Muslim political identity. That would call into question the officially recognised ways of imagining political identity in Australia.
Lukas Koch/AAP
Australian multiculturalism is concerned with the place of Muslims in Australian society, a country that describes itself as secular but retains a culturally ambiguous, yet tangible, Christian identity.
Muslims are praised for conforming to the role of exemplary minority in such societies. Muslims are regularly asked to demonstrate explicit adherence to “Australian values” in a way that Christian immigrant groups have never experienced. A key measure of community integration is understood to be absorption into the country’s existing political institutions, which for Albanese includes his beloved Labor Party.
Talk of Islamic parties and political movements is seen as a threat to social cohesion. It does not coincide with the main demand made of people of Islamic faith, namely, accepting the existing rules of political participation. As scholars such as Ghassan Hage have argued, this is the conservative side of multiculturalism: the rules that immigrant communities must follow are overwhelmingly the work of the host society, not the immigrants.
The most serious challenge to Australia’s political system and social cohesion is not the potential emergence of an Islamic party or movement, which could follow the same path as the many smaller Christian parties of the past.
Rather, it is about how to build political institutions that can effectively accommodate the cultural diversity of society while retaining the most truly democratic parts – which is simply not possible if we insist on giving only a few a say in shaping the rules.
