Christopher Pyne: Return of Family First is like a comfortable old neighbour getting back from a road trip

A recreated Christian political party should not come as a surprise to anyone with a modicum of political knowledge, writes Christopher Pyne.

Family First is back. But it isn’t the mythical monster from the Black Lagoon emerging to wreak havoc on the political landscape.

In many ways, it is like a comfortable old neighbour returning from an around Australia grey nomad caravanning trip after being gone for more than a year or so.

There has usually been a place in Australian politics for a conservative religious political party.

The Democratic Labor Party formed in the mid 1950s and stayed a serious political force for 20 years.

It had few adherents outside the Catholic faith but it had a major impact on the longevity of the coalition government of Robert Menzies.

The Christian Democrats existed for a time in a number of state parliaments and enjoy a longstanding presence in the NSW Legislative Council. They were preceded by the Call to Australia Party.

The re-emergence of Family First is the latest iteration of the phenomenon of conservative religious organisations seeking a political voice.

When Pastor Andrew Evans, from the Paradise Christian Church, won a seat in the Legislative Council in 2002, he won under the banner of the Family First Party. It was exactly as it seemed – a humble, decent man running for the state’s Upper House on a platform of Christian faith and values.

Family First continued to be represented in the Legislative Council until 2018, when the last Family First Member of Parliament joined the Liberal Party. Like many small political parties, as soon as Family First was successful, all sorts of people wanted to get on the bandwagon. Micro-parties often attract the politically naive.

Former Labor minister Jack Snelling has re-formed Family First with Tom Kenyon.

Former Labor minister Tom Kenyon.

It’s one of the reasons that as soon as a party like One Nation or the Nick Xenophon Team start announcing candidates for seats, the major parties thoroughly screen their social media presence and background.

Often it throws up some horror stories which, once the public become aware of their history, reminds them why they tend to vote Labor or Liberal. It’s generally safer.

Having stood on polling booths for decades, I can assure you, beside your co-workers, the easiest person to converse with is usually the Labor polling booth worker.

When you are standing out there from 8am to 6pm with only a couple of breaks, you tend to strike up a conversation with the other booth workers. It has been my experience that the minor party representatives can often be the most animated.

I remember in the 2016 Sturt campaign I had to call former senator Nick Xenophon about his volunteers removing my election signs.

Losing election signs from Stobie poles is part of the annoying cut and thrust of the campaign. I didn’t like it, but apart from driving around at 2am in the morning trying to catch the blighters, what could you do?

The problem on this occasion was that I had been called by my niece, who asked me if it was allowed for other party’s volunteers to take my poster down and put theirs up in its place? The answer, of course, is negative. It was so brazen that they were doing it on Glynburn Rd, Leabrook, in full view of passing motorists!

Xenophon and I had a perfectly pleasant conversation and it was sorted out. But you get my drift. People attracted to minor parties often don’t understand the boundaries.

A recreated Christian political party should not come as a surprise to anyone with a modicum of political knowledge.

There have been issues decided by our South Australian parliament in the past few months that have inflamed the passions of some people. Because they were on the subjects of abortion and euthanasia, they were, quite rightly, decided by conscience votes, not party votes, and the majority has prevailed.

To me, the changes to abortion seemed to represent an updating of outdated laws that neither reflected the realities of modern medicine nor in which part of the law abortion should sit. I would not have supported euthanasia, euphemistically called voluntary assisted dying.

The new Family First will seek to exploit feelings about these and other matters that impact on their natural voting base, such as religious schools and religious freedom. I have always been a conservative on attempts to enshrine in statute matters like religious freedom.

History shows that the more freedoms are tabulated, the more they can be constrained by those who would seek to impose their own narrow view of right and wrong on others. The question is, what impact will the new Family First have on political outcomes in South Australia?

Jack Snelling and Tom Kenyon are both former Labor apparatchiks and were ministers in SA Labor Governments. However, if they seek to use their Family First party to funnel votes back to Labor, it will be more than obvious. They say that they will decide preferences on the merit of each individual candidate running for Labor or Liberal.

We shall see. In the end, the voter decides their own preference allocation. There is no doubt they will attract some of the cohort of former Family First voters.

But pundits would be wrong if they think that means only former Liberal voters. In my experience of closely observing such voters in my own seat, initially, the split of former Liberal and Labor voters represented among Family First voters was roughly 50/50. If anything, Family First voters moved previous Labor supporters across to the Liberal Party, which then became their habit because of the excessive secularisation, bordering on persecution of “people of faith” within the Labor movement who wouldn’t embrace issues such as marriage equality, embryonic stem cell research, the morning-after-drug RU486 and allowing euthanasia in the Northern Territory.

Another impact of breathing life into a conservative Christian party is that it will provide a political home and voice for the Pentecostal Christians and others who have been reported in recent media stories as feeling disenfranchised and unrepresented. That’s how Family First geared up in the first place and they were successful for a time.

With a South Australian election due in March 2022, we won’t have to wait long to find out.