1st May, 2003

DAVID ADAMS spoke with Jim Wallace, a former brigadier in the Australian army and now the executive chairman of the Australian Christian Lobby...

What is the Australian Christian Lobby?
It’s not a political party as many people automatically think but instead it’s a lobby. The people who had the vision to found it saw that there was a real void in the area of a permanent professional lobby into the parliament trying to influence the parliamentary domain for Christian values. Now we have Christian parties there - they do a great job because we need to be able to register the size of the Christian vote but we need also to have a permanent lobby in there.

Who is involved?
In terms of the supporters now, we have pretty well all denominations involved and the supporter base is equally distributed really between the Baptist-Anglican or evangelical side of the church and the charismatic - Pentecostal side of the church as well.

How did you come to be involved?
I came to be involved right at the beginning when I happened to go along to the launch of the thing in Canberra in 1996. I became involved on a part-time basis then and later I just really felt God’s call to come out and be involved in it full-time.

The ACL promotes a return to the “good solid foundations” upon which Australia was founded, such as mateship and giving people a “fair go”. What does being an Australian mean to you?
Well, I think for the average Australian, they have forgotten that the values we hold dear actually come out of our Christian heritage. I do believe that our Christian heritage is an integral part of being Australian - it’s something we just can’t put aside.

It’s not something that many people think of - Australia as having a Christian heritage.
No, but it does. The fact that we are different from any other culture and any other country - that we do enjoy peace and a democratic government and this sort of thing - is essentially because we come out of a Christian tradition. I think particularly our welfare system and our desire as a community and a government to look after the people who are less fortunate all comes out of our Christian values.

What are some of the issues the ACL are currently concerned about?
Every now and then we have people who try to play around with what might be called the “artefacts” of our nation - things like having prayers open the parliament each day. Some people see that as a bit of an anachronism but it isn’t. It’s very important in reinforcing who we’re placing our parliaments under and who we’re calling upon for guidance in our parliament. We’re concerned that there are increasing moves to remove the prayers from parliament or to have them alternate between various religions.
We’re (also) concerned at a lot of the agendas of the homosexual lobby which is very aggressively pushing to have homosexual marriage approved or legislated for in the Federal parliament. They’re doing that through a number of agendas like adoption and IVF through the state parliaments.
We are concerned too about the plight of those who are less well-off in our society. When we have got CEOs and board members running off with very high payouts - even when they sat over the demise of a company - it’s very hard to see how we can justify that in terms of the incomes a very large part of the population on. So we hope to increasingly get involved in that side of Christian concern as well.
At the moment, I suppose, given our small size and also, at this very point in time, the very aggressive nature of people such as the homosexual lobby and the pornographic industry, you could be excused for thinking we’re only worried about sex and homosexuality, but that’s not the case. Our concerns are much broader than that.

Prior to the state election in Victoria last year, the ACL conducted a series of “meet your candidate” forums. What were the purpose of these and were they a success?
We do these right throughout the country...and they are a really important tool for us because our objective is not to tell people to vote for Labor or Liberal or whatever but our objective is to get the Christian constituency to identify themselves as a constituency which is deciding on who they’re going to vote for from a Christian perspective...
We don’t see that we need to politicise the pulpit and we know that people from their own faith perspective will vote for different parties and that’s fine. What we want them to do, though, is to say ‘We’re voting from a Christian perspective’ and by doing that to cause the parties to come back to the Christian constituency; to win its vote with policies which Christians will warm to and also with candidates that Christians will warm to...
The constituency itself is really warming to this idea. I find that when I go to a church or talk to a pastor or church group at first people are worried, particularly the pastors, that you might be wanting them to politicise the pulpit. Christians are worried because out there in the congregation there are invariably people who vote for every party and (they’re worried) that we’re going to come out and tell them that they’re wrong. But the reality is that when they realise what we really want them to do is to have them influence their party, whatever party it is...they’re really warming to that and responding to that.
I think it is increasingly important because in the past - certainly the last 15, maybe even 20 years - it’s got to be said that political parties have generally considered that they could do what they liked with the Christian constituency because they just haven’t identified themselves as a Christian constituency as such. That’s why we’ve seen the political parties ignore Christian concerns.

That brings me to the next question which is whether you believe Christians in this country are generally vocal enough with regard to Government policy?
No, they’re not. I mean that’s the whole problem. That’s why no-one listens to us. I heard a person who has been a former senator and he was someone who has been a minister of religion as well and he said ‘Well, look the Christian constituency is always one that’s promising backlash but never delivers it.’ We have to start delivering and I mean that in the sense that we consider - we really consider - who we’re going to vote for from a Christian perspective.

You’ve spent 31 years in the army, including command of the SAS Regiment and the Army’s 1st Brigade, before retiring as a brigadier. How did you come to be in the army?
I joined the army before I was a Christian - although I don’t think that would have changed my direction - to go to Vietnam actually. But the war stopped while I was in Duntroon. I became a Christian during my second year in Duntroon and I was confirmed in God’s calling into the army and so I stayed with it.

Can you recall one of the greatest moments in your Christian walk?
People wouldn’t generally think that they would find a lot of spirituality in the SAS Regiment...but certainly the greatest spiritual experience for me was to have the chaplain conduct, on my orders, a healing service for a fellow who had been very badly injured and looked like dying and at best being left a quadriplegic. To have all the blokes in the gym and to explain to them the meaning of a healing service; to know that they weren’t directed to be there but they were there because they wanted to help their mate and they’d run out of the personal resources to do that; and to feel the spirituality in that gym that date was quite an amazing experience. I don’t think I’ll ever equal it.

And one of the hardest?
I was in a Palestinian refugee camp (as an unarmed United Nations observer in 1980) and some shells had landed and killed some people. The Palestinians understandably held us accountable for that because we were stopping them attacking into Israel but weren’t stopping them being bombed and shelled everyday. They were a bit angry about that and thrust my hand into the blood that was on a car where a women and daughter had been killed by one of the shells. (They) were considering executing us and I suppose that’s a time when you’ve really just got to trust God, and remember that you’ve got a big God which, drawing on images out of Isaiah 40, I was able to do. God changed the situation by changing hearts - they just let us go for some reason. It was quite amazing.

Given the recent situation in Iraq, is there anything in particular you’re praying for at the moment?
Having lived in the Middle East, I’m very much praying for all the people in the Middle East. They’re all God’s children and I’m praying particularly for the Iraqi church...and of course, I’m personally praying for the safety of our servicemen and indeed all the Coalition servicemen because having been a soldier, I know that...there because they believe that what they’re doing is serving their country. I might say that in doing that, there’s an incredible cost in saying goodbye to their loved ones and knowing that they may not come back.