Incidentally, I have had the view for some time that Kristina Keneally is a thoughtful and intelligent politician, whose talents are surely wasted in the abyss of NSW state Labor politics. You have to feel some empathy for her in face of the behaviour of the latest Minister to be forced to resign, the undistinguished scion of a mediocre Labor right dynasty.

Update: Just to clarify, in response to comments, the legislation is subject to a conscience vote, which explains why Keneally has discussed the relevance of her personal religious beliefs to her legislative judgement on this bill.

An exemplary case in point is the issue of asylum seekers, an issue on which the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has repeatedly asserted is now one on which there’s much common ground between Labor and the Coalition.

Questions about the merits of a regional processing centre for asylum seekers have largely focused on the feasibility of a regional processing centre, and the manner in which Julia Gillard laid the ground for her announcement in the second week of her incumbency, in a speech at the Lowy Institute.

The debate then moved on the idea that the policy was ‘unravelling’, and quickly got caught up in meta-debate about its capacity to do what it was designed to do – move the polls and neutralise a perceived electoral disadvantage for the ALP on an issue Kevin Rudd was said to have been weak on.

In all this febrile debate, very little attention has been paid to its actual merits.

Frank Brennan, writing in today’s Eureka Street, has now done precisely that. I’d recommend you read his piece in full.

As obituaries for the 13 year reign of New Labour are already being written (and they’re not all entirely gloomy), Gordon Brown’s task is to rally the Labour faithful, and to sharpen the contrast with the Tories in 100 or so Tory-Labour marginals where the current electoral system would facilitate tactical voting by Liberal Democrat supporters. Brown’s mind might also be concentrated by the rumours that Peter Mandelson is orchestrating his replacement post haste after Thursday’s election. But it’s surely interesting that he articulates a good reason to vote Labour at the end of an era.

NB: Previous LP discussion of the UK election here.

Elsewhere: Jonathan Freedland.

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The article Tony Abbott penned for the Weekend Australian colour magazine is still online at his website, accompanied by an intriguing justification of the circumstances which prompted him to write it:

I was initially quite hesitant about accepting The Weekend Australian Magazine’s invitation to write about the Pope’s visit to Australia for World Youth Day. For one thing, a “Captain Catholic” reputation is supposed to be bad for my political prospects. For another, as revealed by a well-publicised youthful romance, I’m more than capable of breaking the church’s rules. But on reflection, this papal visit seemed a rare chance to have Australians focus on the things that really count.

I doubt Abbott would pose today so piously holding a picture of Pope Benedict, his head apparently haloed, with eyes uplifted to heaven, and not just because the Pontiff is in the news for all the same wrong reasons that marked his Australian visit [see LP's coverage here]. Similarly, I wouldn’t expect Abbott to rush into print in 2010 to defend Benedict on the question of his responsibility for the victims of clerics who commit crimes of child sexual abuse.

He’s probably more aware now that “a ‘Captain Catholic’ reputation is supposed to be bad for [his] political prospects”. Despite his allegedly spontaneous outbursts about his daughters’ virginity, homosexuality, and all the rest, he’s sought to downplay his religion, arguing that the questions put to him ought also to be put to Kevin Rudd. He suggests he has civic or public reasons for interventions such as his veto on RU486, or his musings as Health Minister over the number of abortions, or the characterisation of some of his initiatives as designed to prevent terminations of pregnancy.

I’m not so sure, though, that Abbott’s ‘Captain Catholic’ persona as a rising politician was all that unwelcome, or indeed, unplanned. It was, whatever you think about his sincerity and his intentions, undoubtedly part of the way he crafted a distinctive political image. His faith, along with his equally publicised devotion to John Howard and The Queen, assisted him to distinguish himself from the pack of junior Liberal ministers in the late 1990s. It may be, now, that he’d prefer that back story to remain just there, in the background, able to be summoned up with a hint or two so as to play to conservative Catholic (and Protestant) voters. But this takes us full circle to the questions Warhurst raises over the Liberal Party and political Catholicism.

Writing of Abbott’s associations with the continuing tradition of The Movement and B.A. Santamaria, Warhurst states:

Other current politicians have connections through their parents and through its residue in party and union politics. But no one else has ties as deep as Abbott, who stresses the closeness of his association with Santamaria, his personal inspiration and mentor from school days onwards.

Abbott joined the Sydney University Democratic Club, supported by Santamaria’s National Civic Council, before he moved on to the Liberals. Abbott often reflects on the consequences of this period, including the rise of Catholic Liberals. He has been known to observe enigmatically that the DLP is alive and well within his party.

Abbott has personified church ties with politics through his relationship with the man he has called his confessor, Cardinal George Pell. In the past the relationship of Catholics with their church authorities has contributed to Protestant distrust. And the Liberal Party has been deeply Protestant in its composition and beliefs.

As Malcolm Fraser recalls in his recent memoirs, when he asked his parents what was wrong with Catholics he was told ‘Well, they are different. They are not Australians; they owe their loyalty to the Pope.’

The transfer of Catholic allegiance from Labor to the Liberals at the parliamentary level has been the most dramatic shift in Australian politics over the past 50 years. The astounding numbers have attracted attention, but many questions have been left unanswered about the impact of their arrival on the party. Has the transfer shaped the Liberals, matters of life-and-death morality like euthanasia and abortion aside?

Warhurst goes on to discuss Abbott’s own answers to those questions, delivered as part of his Sir Philip Lynch Memorial Lecture, delivered in 2004. His notes for that speech are also still available on his website.

Despite gesturing in that speech to B.A. Santamaria’s legacy, Abbott’s desire to put some distance between himself and that interpretation of Catholic tradition is in evidence in the way yesterday’s address on the economy has been interpreted.

Warhurst concludes:

The second question is whether Abbott is a one-off or represents a larger group of Catholic Liberals. There are certainly enough other senior Catholic Liberals, like Joe Hockey, Kevin Andrews and Andrew Robb, to make a difference if they constitute a distinctive and coherent group. But in fact there are as many different types of Catholic Liberals as there are Labor sub-factions. They are on all sides of the party.

Nevertheless you can’t change the demographics of a political party as much as the Liberals have changed without ultimately questioning aspects of party philosophy.

He’s right there, or at least partly, because I wouldn’t want to jump so far down the track into what the actual sociological significance of such a “transfer of allegiance” means for both Liberal parliamentarians and voters, because a large part of the story of that same transfer is the decline in the significance of religion as a variable structuring voting behaviour and political cleavages.

What I think is important is that Abbott’s brand of political Catholicism is a distinct tradition, which by no means all Catholics in the Liberal Party (and Hockey and Turnbull are good examples) would have been socialised into, let alone been so inclined to pay so much tribute to over the course of their political lives.

In his ambiguous inheritance of the Santamaria heritage, Abbott is actually much closer to Bob Katter and Barnaby Joyce and others in or formerly in the Queensland Nationals (into which large elements of the DLP and the National Civic Council moved in the 1970s) than to those Liberals for whom Catholicism is largely a private faith. B.A. Santamaria, by contrast, was not – in any meaningful sense – an advocate of the separation of church and state. And he was certainly opposed to the secularisation of Australian culture, an opposition which has some resonances in Tony Abbott’s writing about Pope Benedict and his closeness to Cardinal George Pell. That’s where the real force behind the question about Abbott’s inability to distinguish between faith and politics lies; despite all the obfuscation about Rudd’s religiosity or Action Man’s ‘woman problem’. Rudd’s public evocation of a religious persona is a thoroughly modern (nay, postmodern) piece of symbolism. For Rudd, it’s much more about presenting himself as appealing to a sort of ideal type of trustworthiness and social solidity, rather than a pitch solely to religious or socially conservative voters.

Abbott’s Catholicism hearkens back to a much older tradition in Australian political culture, born of sectarian antagonisms, and an overweening ambition to impose a particular social and moral economy on the unwelcoming terrain of Anglo-Australian Protestant soil. There’s no direct line of apostolic succession, but his antecedents in the NCC and DLP milieu are hardly insignificant. To that degree, that’s why the fact that he is a Catholic matters, and why it doesn’t matter all that much that Andrew Robb or Malcolm Turnbull is (or that Kevin Rudd was).

And that’s what Tony Abbott would have us forget.

Update: Now crossposted at the ABC’s The Drum Unleashed.

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The image of the paper’s Sunday cover comes courtesy of Crikey:

Over the weekend Brisbane’s Sunday Mail dispatched its snapper to Toombul shopping centre north of the city to pap its front-page target. But this wasn’t a celebrity. It wasn’t a crook on the run. This was a mother and her two daughters — “suspected immigration detainees” as the paper captioned them.

We don’t know their names, but thanks to the paper’s sleuths we do know what they purchased while “enjoying” their tour through Coles — “home brand Hawaiian pizza, Smith’s potato crisps and cartons of Coca-Cola.”

The Sunday Mail splashed the supermarket scoop across their front page — headlined “THEY’RE HERE” (surely not a nod to Poltergeist?) — in a story that ran prominently in all of Rupert’s rags yesterday.

And if you somehow missed the implication, Piers Akerman filled in the blanks in the Daily Telegraph this morning: this “happy Afghan women” (Piers has the inside word on her mental state and nationality) and her fellow “fast-tracked” asylum seekers with their “overflowing shopping trolleys, courtesy of the Australian taxpayer” send a “strong message” that Australia’s doors are open.

Yet, when I went to the aforesaid Toombul shopping centre today, it was still standing, the sky hadn’t fallen in, and the social fabric appeared intact.

Last week, emboldened or embiggened by his defeat in the Great Health Debate, Tony Abbott challenged Kevin Rudd to a debate on asylum seekers [h/t tigtog].

As a number of commenters on this morning’s thread about the latest Newspoll noted, any time the Coalition’s kooky plans go hay wire, the first thing they can think of to do is to shout “Brown people in boats!”.

(To be fair to Abbott, it’s not the only thing they can think of; he gave an anodyne speech on economic policy today short on any actual policy and long on warnings about the evils of Labor debt.)

Yet, what would have happened had Rudd taken up Abbott’s gauntlet? The only two things we know about the Coalition’s ‘border protection’ policy is that they’d reintroduce TPVs (or, in other words, deprive people lawfully in this country of civil rights) and that it’s all teh government’s fault!!!

Although Rudd would never have taken up the invitation, for a whole range of reasons, I think it’s a bit of a pity that he didn’t. Crikey‘s editorial bemoans the damage the sort of story the News Limited Sundays ran as destroying the possibility of a reasoned debate.

Between 2001, when John Howard started the whole ‘people on boats’ scare, and 2007, when his government came to a well deserved end, Australia granted 78 475 humanitarian visas. You can see the whole gamut of statistics at this page maintained by the Refugee Council of Australia.

For a number of those years, a massive rhetorical onslaught was launched by the Howardistas – terrorism, Australian values, “we will determine”, etc, etc., madly dehumanising its objects as it went.

Yet, the urgency of the shock tactic, and its emotional force, appeared to diminish over time. Labor’s policy on asylum seekers can still, and should be still, criticised as imperfect on humanitarian grounds, but I think the emphasis on the Coalition’s detention of children, and then Kevin Rudd’s emphasis on people smuggling, contributed to a reframing of the issue in public opinion.

While no doubt there are some hardcore xenophobes in the electorate who respond on cue every time the dog whistle blows, I’m not at all sure that other shoppers buying home brand Hawaiian pizzas at the Toombul Woolies (in Wayne Swan’s seat of Lilley, incidentally) are as amenable to these sort of scare campaigns as once may have been the case.

So, then, a reasoned debate on asylum seekers might be just the ticket in this election year.

Turnbull tore apart the proposed plan as economically inefficient, environmentally ineffective and unable to meet the task of reducing Australia’s emissions by 5% by 2020.

Update: Peter Martin reproduces the text of Turnbull’s speech.

Somehow I can’t imagine George W. Bush saying this:

The Holy Quran tells us, “O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.” The Talmud tells us: “The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.”

The Holy Bible tells us, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God’s vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth.