ACL’s Martyn Iles on mission to put traditional values at heart of political process

Bolstered by the No campaign, Australian Christian Lobby head Martyn Iles is on a quest to influence the major parties.

Martyn Iles aims to transform the ACL. Picture: Kym Smith

Martyn Iles, the youthful head of Australia’s peak Christian lobby group, is charged with a daunting task at a time of rapid change and growing uncertainty for Australia’s communities of faith.

The 29-year-old lawyer and former small-business owner is on a mission to ensure Australian politics is not unanchored from its Judeo-Christian foundations and a new political potency is invested in the views of religious groups and believers he warns are being pushed to the margins.

He takes over as managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby at a time of profound upheaval, when traditional notions of gender, family and sexuality are being overturned and the church is threatened by the rise of a sweeping rights-based agenda appealing to the mantras of equality, diversity and identity. The 2016 census showed an accelerating trend towards atheism, with 30 per cent of Australians indicating they had no religion. That’s up from 19 per cent in 2006 and exceeds the number of Catholics, who now account for just under a quarter of the population at 22.6 per cent.

Iles concedes the “church is slowly diminishing in terms of absolute numbers” but says there is a highly galvanised base of voters who increasingly are “looking for a home or looking for someone who represents their values”.

His message for Christians is stark but powerful, warning they are being deserted by the two major parties but promising to represent their views and enshrine them at the heart of a reinvigorated political engagement to influence policy and elections.

In his first interview since taking over as managing director last month, Iles tells Inquirer his vision is to transform the ACL into a genuine grassroots movement, increase the membership and mimic the tactics of progressive activists by shifting to a permanent campaign footing in defence of traditional values. “There are a lot of people who have felt alienated,” he says. “The forces of political correctness have prevented them from confidently stating their views. Because there is less and less mainstream representa­tion of their beliefs, they’ve felt mar­ginalised and alone in their views.

“When they see a voice like the ACL that speaks their values with conviction, they are so enormously encouraged that their tendency to get involved and stay involved is very high.”

While Iles articulates a broad agenda for the ACL to pursue, his defining objective — forged in the ashes of the No campaign’s defeat in the same-sex marriage postal survey — is to strengthen religious freedom and elevate it as an election issue. He is well placed for the task. A practising Christian who is single but affectionately known as “Uncle Marty” to 10 nieces and nephews, Iles grew up as the youngest of five children in Brisbane’s south side, and studied law at the University of Queensland before running a small business in the tech sector. After moving to Canberra in 2014 to take over as the ACL’s chief-of-staff, he helped to establish the Human Rights Law Alliance, created to run religious freedom cases. Iles says he grew increasingly worried at the use of the law to target believers. “I witnessed an emerging trend of soft persecution against people of faith through what I’d call lawfare, which is using the law as a weapon to try to punish people for their beliefs and expression of their beliefs in public,” he says.

“Through that experience I became increasingly concerned about the upstream policy issues which are driving that, especially to do with religious freedoms.”

It was this encroachment on religious freedom that motivated him to take over as ACL chief following the departure of Lyle Shelton, with Iles identifying the review of religious freedoms led by former attorney-general Philip Ruddock as a critical moment. “If the solution proposed by the government is a quick-fix solution or is inadequate, then ACL and other groups stand ready to campaign vigorously in strategic seats that could change the outcome of the federal election in 2019,” Iles says.

Malcolm Turnbull commissioned the review following concerns during the same-sex mar­riage campaign that churches and faith-based organisations, including charities, could be targeted for continuing to uphold traditional marriage and amid warnings that parents would have no control over school sex education programs taught to their children.

The report — initially due at the end of this month — has been deferred until after the budget is delivered in May following a request for more time by Ruddock after receiving more than 16,000 public submissions.

Iles says he will push the Prime Minister to honour his pledge to protect religious freedoms, following the legalisation of same-sex marriage, for the nearly five million No voters, noting the ACL had increased its supporters by more than 100,000 in the past four years to about 120,000 (of which about 20 per cent are financial donors).

Iles hopes to push the ACL’s support base to about a quarter of million within the next few years and highlighted Turnbull’s statement in September that he believed in religious freedom “even more strongly” than gay marriage.

“The Prime Minister is under an obligation because this is the government that brought us the postal vote and the government that promised religious freedom,” Iles says. “He is under an obligation to make a clear and robust policy commitment as to precisely how he will protect religious freedom going into the next election.”

Iles says the No campaign shifted roughly 1.6 million votes in 90 days in what was an “incredible achievement”. He says it re-engaged many disenfranchised believers with the political system and sharpened the ACL’s campaign experience.

“The ACL is stronger than it has ever been for those reasons, the campaign infrastructure, the financial resources and just the brand recognition that we have,” Iles says. “The challenge now is to move from that one-off campaign into an enduring grassroots movement. So, that will mean an ACL that is a grassroots movement of like-minded people seeking to influence the outcome of elections at a grassroots level and also the polic­y discussions that take place at elections, state and federal.”

The aim for the ACL is to learn from its progressive rivals who had succeeded in changing the marriage law, with Iles saying they had been “proactive” and “constant” in lobbying for change.

“The mood now for ACL and similar groups is towards exactly the same model. It’s almost easier now because we’re in an environment where the power of numbers in any given electorate over the voting intentions of a parliamentarian is stronger than ever.” More than 12.7 million Australians and nearly 80 per cent of eligible voters took part in the same-sex marriage survey. Of those, 7.8 million voted Yes and 4.9 million said No.

Iles makes clear the ACL will remain a non-party partisan player and campaign on its core issues, seeking to influence outcomes by working with both major parties. But a key factor will be securing Labor agreement for any commitment to bolster religious freedom, with Iles saying the ALP platform should be changed at July’s national conference to reflect this.

Of the 17 electorates that returned No votes in the postal survey in November last year, 12 were in western Sydney; of these, nine were held by Labor MPs.

“It’s very simple for Labor. They’re in serious trouble in their heartland in western Sydney if they don’t make a serious commitment on religious freedom. The communities — they are tight-knit communities in those seats — stand ready to vote on this issue,” Iles says. “The problem I think for Labor is it will be very difficult for them to have robust religious freedom protections when that is not in their current policy platform, whereas a lot of so-called ‘rainbow agenda’ items are in their policy platform. They are going to be very much hamstrung or they will make promises they can’t keep.”

Iles is cautious when pressed on whether his predecessor exploited his position at ACL as a platform to enter politics by leaving to work for Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives following the postal survey. “To pursue politics, Lyle has cut all ties with the ACL and has left the organisation, which is proper,” he says. “We continue, as we always have, to actively engage all sides of politics, and many of the issues that we engage on find support in both major parties. So our mission … remains the same and is very much business as usual.”

While not ruling out a future tilt at parliament, Iles says he is focused on navigating the ACL through the present phase of Australian politics, which he says is exacerbated by the “desertion of major parties from Judeo-Christian social and cultural values”.

“The conviction politician is a dying breed. It seems the political process is governed much more now by expedience, by survival, by focus groups and by polls. As a result, politicians don’t speak with the language of voters of faith, who are people of conviction.”