Easter Rudd resurrects social vision

RENEWAL and hope are the great themes of Easter. For Catholics the truths of the greatest feast of the year are brought home dramatically in the Tridium, the three days of re-enactment and celebration from the Last Supper on Holy Thursday to the death of Jesus on Good Friday and finally, his resurrection on Easter Sunday.

Kevin Rudd, as a former Catholic and still a believing Christian who sees himself in the original Keir Hardie socialist mould, may be expected at this time to be contemplating the radical implications of Christian teaching for his prime ministership. However, given that most of the new Labor ministers took the affirmation and not the oath, how real is the Christian influence on social thinking in the Rudd Government?

There is no doubt the Prime Minister is a committed Christian. In an address to the StThomas More forum in Canberra on November 28, 2005, Rudd had this to say about his favoured model of Christian engagement in politics: "The gospel is both a spiritual gospel and a social gospel. And if it is a social gospel then it is in part a political gospel because politics is the means by which society chooses to exercise its collective power.

"In other words the gospel is as much about the decisions I make about my own life as it is about how I act in society and how in turn I should act in relation to the exercise of the co-ordinated power of society through the state."

I think the last sentence is a convoluted way of saying that his private life and his public life are morally inseparable, a refreshing change for a politician in the age of Eliot Spitzer.

But sometimes it seems that the more things should change, the more they stay the same. I am not the first commentator to note that the essentially conservative nature of Rudd's Government means that despite what Rudd has to say about the radical nature of the Christian impetus, his Government lacks a true social vision.

Look at Rudd's foray into social policy: gambling, booze and quarantining the baby bonus for bad welfare mums. These are all real problems deeply entrenched in the culture. Yet somehow the Prime Minister's anxiety about such social malaise and his pat solutions, such as $53 million for a war on binge drinking, strike me as naive and even a bit puritanically Wesleyan, which I suppose is what you get when you have a prime minister who calls himself a Keir Hardie socialist. I am reminded of my great-grandfather, a lifelong Labor man, who once remarked, "If God is a Methodist, darling, I'm going to Fiddler's Green!"

In the same More forum, Rudd referred to his rejection of the various models of most Christian politicians, none of whom came up to his exacting standards, being too preoccupied with what he regarded as matters of private sexual morality - although why sexual morality was private was not explained, and this seemed to contradict his statement about his own life - or with phony "family values". These politicians are not worried enough about the economic implications of the gospel for working families, he said.

A good point. But it is a pity that while he was announcing $53 million to figure out why teenagers do what seems to come naturally to them, the Government cut the carer's allowance, not a good look forsomeone who embraces the caring, sharing gospel.

Aside from the anti-booze and gambling gestures, Rudd has shown no signs of changing the basic thrust of the Howard government's social policies, particularly those related to the family. Of course there is no reason to; they were popular. Labor did not win government to radically change Australia. It won government because of Work Choices, which was seen as radically unjust. But Rudd should consider even better ways to put the family and the care given through the family at the economic centre stage. Instead he has fallen back on a couple of old Howard policies. John Howard put forward the move to quarantine the baby bonus last year before the election and the previous government also made some serious noises about gambling.

But imagine if Howard's government had allocated $53 million to combat teenage binge drinking? The scrutinising brigade would have had a field day, and rightly so. As it was, the responses from regular punters to Rudd's "war on binge drinking" were pretty sceptical. Responses ranged from "A fine thing for a politician to say who got drunk and went to a strip joint" and "Where are the parents? They're the ones who are supposed to do something." Then there was the obvious response, "We already have laws against underage drinking but they are not enforced", as should be realised by a politician who comes from Queensland, where they invented the annual bacchanalia called schoolies week.

A lot of other laws indicating great social malaise are not enforced in Australia, either. Abortion, for example, is still against the law in most states. But there are 100,000 a year and Medicare pays for more than 70,000. Will Rudd, like the previous health minister, Tony Abbott, be radically Christian enough to tackle that one? I really hope so, but given the historically lukewarm attitude of Labor, I doubt it.

The same applies to the widespread push to change the concept of the natural family. On these issues, in the words of one prominent Christian leader, Rudd is not so much a socialist in the mould of those tough old Methodists, but rather "just a bit too soft Uniting Church".