13th November, 2004

JIM WALLACE

Both the US and Australian elections have seen a reassertion of majority opinion over the minority ones that have so dominated our social and political agenda for so long.

In the US it was Christians coming out to vote for a man and a party which affirmed traditional marriage and family and were committed to the preservation of life. Despite the war on terror, Iraq and a precarious US economy, exit polls showed that the issue most people voted on was values and morality.

In Australia there is no doubt that unless the political machinery is in full denial, it must concede that values were again one of the most important issues. Our compulsory voting system makes it more difficult to attribute this directly in the way you more easily can in America, but it is undeniable, and has been very much confirmed by post election media analysis.

For the Australian Christian Lobby this is a most encouraging development. While we would not begin to claim the largest part of the outcome, we had held as our intention for the last four years that our measure of success would be the degree to which the influence of the Christian vote was recognised in the 2004 election outcome.

Over the election period we held 36 meet your candidate forums in 39 electorates which were attended by almost 6000 people. Eighteen of the electorates in which they were held had a margin of 5 per cent or less, and 60 per cent of the 39 experienced a swing to the clearly more Christian candidate above the national average.

While it will always be difficult to disentangle the effect of forests, leadership, interest rates and values as determinants of the election outcome, even the most amateurish political analyst should be able to define a trend here!

The important thing for the Christian constituency both here and in America is not to sit on its laurels, but to push on to turn these outcomes into real political influence, influence that will positively affect both nations.

We need to pursue the issue of abortion as it has been presented to us, to stand firm against gay marriage and other attempts by this lobby to erode our traditional family and its status as a community ideal. The negligence of our state governments in allowing anti-vilification laws that limit the freedom of religious speech needs to be challenged.

However we also have to move beyond the purely moral issues to put more time and energy into the plight of the disadvantaged in our society. To uphold as Christ would those who tend to be disenfranchised through media disinterest and political impotence. It is indeed time for the church to be seen again in all areas of national life.

Jim Wallace is the executive chairman of the Australian Christian Lobby.

IMAGE ON INDEX PAGE: Laura Wile (iStockphoto.com)