From a friend:
I think
this article from The Australian suggests there was a decisive
vote for the ALP from members of various denominations
and groups. Recently I heard from a political insider
that there is strong sup****t from such people for
Kevin Rudd personally as opposed to the ALP. Christian
lobbyists are expecting Rudd to steer government
policy in directions that keep the conservative
Christian vote. His capacity to do this will depend on
how long he can maintain and trade on the credit
earned by winning the election. Should his popularity
decline, others within the government may gain more
leverage for their so-called "socially progressive
policies". It will be interesting to see how this
plays out over the next few years.
***
On a swing and a prayer
Print Christopher Pearson | March 08, 2008
JOHN Black is a former Labor senator from Queensland.
These days he leads a demographic research and
marketing group called Australian Development
Strategies.
Across the political class he's regarded as one of the
most astute observers of electoral politics and his
analyses of federal elections are awaited with keen
interest by the secretariats of the main parties.
He's just produced his profile of the 2007 Australian
Election. The most surprising of his findings is that
the religious affiliation of swinging voters played a
more decisive role in determining the outcome than any
other single factor. This cannot conceivably have been
true in any other federal election since the Menzies
era and the heyday of the Democratic Labor Party in
campaigns fought over state aid to church schools and
communist infiltration of the trade union movement and
the ALP. Plainly commentators who've blithely assumed
that religion is an increasing irrelevance in
Australian politics will have to think again.
Black says: "The strongest correlate of the swing to
Kevin Rudd's new Labor Party was Pentecostal
churchgoers, alongside Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses,
Mormons, Lutherans, Salvos, Seventh-Day Adventists and
the Uniting Church.
"With the Uniting Church included, these activist
religions represent 10per cent of Australians in total
and they were located in the best possible areas for
Labor. In fact, 12 out of the top 20 Pentecostal seats
in Australia are located in Rudd's home state of
Queensland and (he) won five of them.
"While the blue-collar workers provided the grunt with
the national swing, the religious activists provided
the leverage and the key seats ... Where former Howard
battlers overlapped with churchgoers, the Liberals
were blasted out. The pro-Labor swing went up to 14.4
per cent in Forde, one of the many Queensland seats
with high concentrations of former Howard battlers and
churchgoers."
Commenting on a graph showing male affiliation to
evangelical denominations and swings to the ALP, Black
goes one step further. "The regression analysis
confirms the (explanatory) power of these variables in
2007, to the extent that the Labor win would have been
problematic without them."
If, as I expect, Black's analysis is accepted pretty
much at face value by the factional warlords in
caucus, it will have a markedly restraining influence
on government policy. We have already seen Rudd flirt
with the idea of breaking his word to the Australian
Christian Lobby over allowing gay marriage in the ACT.
At the first sign that ACL head Jim Wallace was
prepared to tax him with betrayal of a pre-election
undertaking, Rudd climbed down very fast indeed.
That particular lesson won't be lost on the cabinet or
any of the groups Black calls religious activists.
That Labor is riding high in the polls at the moment
is no guarantee of victory in three years. This is a
Government with a small majority of seats.
Unless Wayne Swan's management of the economy is
unusually deft, its survival at the next election may
well depend on how assiduously Rudd cultivates the
Christian vote in the meantime.
Contentious questions such as cloning, the law
governing stem cell research generally, euthanasia,
the elements that constitute a properly informed
decision to abort or children's unrestricted access to
internet ****ography are all likely to be revisited in
debate in federal parliament, via government
legislation or private members' bills. In each case
the outcome will probably be an affirmation of the
status quo or a more conservative position. Although
the Coalition is flirting with adopting more liberal
stances on some of these social issues, it would be
better advised to form a unity ticket with Rudd.
The Prime Minister's attempts to ingratiate the
evangelical vote will also have wider ramifications
affecting Labor's family and indigenous policy and the
way it deals with non-government schools. The
self-described progressives will cringe but they'll
have to put up with it, just as they did when Rudd
came out in sup****t of the Northern Territory
intervention in remote Aboriginal communities. Sacred
cows will be slain. For example, a bill of rights is
high on the Left's wish list. But it would impinge on
the existing rights of church schools to discriminate
in their employment policies and so it will never see
the light of day while Rudd continues to lead his
party. Although I daresay Black won't feel entirely
comfortable with the idea, his profile is little short
of what in the 1950s would have been called a
God-botherers' charter and no doubt the religious
activists will know just how to use it to maximum
effect.
So much for the evangelicals; what about the voting
patterns among members of the two largest churches,
the Anglicans and Catholics? There was no sign of a
swing to Labor among Anglicans, still fondly known in
some quarters as the Tory Party at prayer. Among
Catholics, who've tended increasingly to sup****t the
Coalition since the Keating years, there was a
marginal swing to Labor. According to Black, "in that
case, the driving factor was not religion but
blue-collar and clerical white-collar employment".
Black sounds a cautionary note about abstractions such
as the Catholic vote or the Greek vote, invoking the
difference between descriptive and explanatory
variables. "A member of the Greek Orthodox Church, for
example, is positively correlated with the Labor vote
and if you want to find Labor voters, look inside a
Greek Orthodox church any Sunday. But it's a
descriptive variable only. When you factor in job and
income, the religion factor here doesn't explain why
they vote Labor.
"The cultural factor becomes submerged by the economic
factors and you need to look at other factors that go
to make up that cultural group. However, with the
Pentecostals and Lutherans, their explaining power
stuck right through the regression analysis. So it was
a descriptive and an analytical variable. They
believed in Kevin Rudd and voted for him. This is not
a common thing to see in this sort of analysis, where
faith normally comes a distant second to economic
necessity."
Black also has some enlightening things to say about
Family First, which is the only party in Australian
politics directly linked to organised religion and is
regularly diabolised by the ABC and the Fairfax press
because of its Pentecostalist origins. While there was
no sign of a net loss of sup****t for Family First this
election compared with 2004, "Rudd got the lot in
2007: single parents, religious activists and
third-quartile skilled blue-collar workers. Where
their current base of sup****t comes from remains a
mystery to us and, we suspect, to Family First."
There are a few other turn-ups for the books, the most
surprising being the way teachers voted in 2007.
"The education sector has 40 per cent union member****p
and a lousy record of wage increases over 1994-2006
compared (with) national rises ... But they didn't
blame Howard and voted one Greens, two Liberal in big
numbers. We are looking here at about 1.5per cent of
the total electorate."
Another outcome that will strike many analysts as
perverse is the cream of the blue-collar workers
swinging back to Labor.
"We have to remember that in 2004 the average plumber
was more likely to vote Liberal than the average
doctor. In 2007 their allegiances swapped.
"The reality in modern Australia is that a young
plumber is paid more than a young doctor, has no HECS
debt like the doctor and can get paid through a small
incor****ated entity or, better still, by a mining
company and doesn't have to contend with the
Australian health bureaucracy or professional
indemnity insurance. In other words, the old-fa****oned
(socio-economic status) scores of income and social
status are a crock."
Black sees the Greens as a threat to Labor's hold on
several inner metropolitan seats that still look safe,
at least on paper. He also has a stern demographer's
take on the latte-sippers as a bloc of voters. He
notes, for example, that some of them exhibit
"downward envy of family tax benefits" and warns: "If
the ALP doesn't take this into account when planning
family tax benefits in their future budgets, they
could be in all manner of strife, especially from
inner-city professional Greens with high rents to pay
and no kids to minimise tax." As a group, they make
"extensive use of public trans****t and have few
religious convictions. Some of them still wear sandals
and long socks and hang around university refectories
but increasingly now this is a well-heeled
professional group and many of them are aged 70 plus
with worm farms and backyard chook pens, tending to
their raised vegetable beds every week according to
Peter Cundall's weekly guide. But doesn't everybody?"
--
Shalom/Salaam/Pax! Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/
(20,000 articles 4000 humor)
Blogs - http://rowlandsblogs.blogspot.com/
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