Christians who voted for the Rudd Government will be betrayed before long, argues Brian Peachey.The opinion piece, "Four factors that have shaped the new PM" by Jeffry Babb (News Weekly, December 22, 2007), was cobbled together from Kevin Rudd's parliamentary maiden speech and questionable promotional material distributed by Rudd himself and the spin-doctors of the Labor Party.I have read Rudd's maiden speech and much more. I have also questioned his veracity on many occasions and do so now regarding his claim - and therefore Jeffry Babb's claim - that, following his father's death in January 1969, his mother "was left to rely on bleak charity of the time to raise a family".
Embellished storyKevin was the last of the four Rudd children at home when his father died. On various occasions he has embellished the story by saying that they were evicted from the share-farm and were forced to live in a car. The truth is they were permitted to stay on the property until July when a new share-farmer would come to manage the 120 milking-cows.
During that period Margaret Rudd would have received a widow's pension and gratefully accepted the Marist Brothers' offer to waive the fees for Kevin to board at the prestigious college at Ashgrove, Brisbane. She returned to her former profession and worked as a live-in nurse at Mater Hospital. A short time later she purchased a house in Nambour using money from her husband's life insurance.
Babb states: "Four factors shaped Kevin Rudd's life" and "helped lift him from the obscurity of a Queensland farm to the Lodge". One of the factors was said to be "his religion". There is no doubt that the Christian persona he vigorously projected to the electorate would have gained many votes by softening the secular libertarian stance of the majority of Labor MPs and senators.
It is extremely rare to find a practising Catholic converting to Anglicanism for theological reasons. Some have said the reason Rudd preferred the Church of England was because it had fewer moral constraints. That may be so. But Rudd, being a politician with a driving ambition to become Prime Minister, could not resist using his church-going to great advantage with numerous media shots of his attending Anglican services. He also took communion at St Joseph's Catholic Church in Subiaco, Perth, during the requiem mass for the journalist Matt Price. One commentator said that he campaigned with a foot in both camps.
The recent election was in fact close, not a landslide, which illustrates how pivotal was Rudd's projected Christian image. Kevin Rudd and the ALP owe their election victory to just 0.1 per cent of the vote, after fewer than some 12,000 people across nine electorates decided the result. Only 12,000 people out of 13.6 million enrolled voters decided the outcome. The overall swing to Labor was an impressive 5.6 per cent, which was mainly gained in safe and marginal seats already held by the party.
Rudd's Christian convictions were brought into question during the debate on the Therapeutic Goods Amendment Bill 2005, related to the abortifacient drug RU-486. He did not participate in the debate but, on February 16, 2006, he voted for the bill.
He told ABC reporter Jennifer Macey: "For me, and for the reasons I have outlined, the life of the unborn is of great importance. And having tested these reasons with men and women of faith, and men and women of science, that I've decided not to oppose this [RU-486] bill".
It is important that
News Weekly readers know that 18 of the 20 members of Rudd's Cabinet voted for the RU-486 bill, and that the current deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, when Shadow Minister for Health, was the seconder of both the RU-486 bill and the November 2006 bill to overturn restrictions on stem-cell research.
RuthlessnessMy reading and close observing of the recent election incline me to agree with the Murdoch journalist, Piers Akerman, who wrote late last year: "My main concerns about his [Rudd's] character relate to what I perceive to be an unalloyed ruthlessness, a lack of his loyalty to anything but his own short-term political ambitions and his projection of a carefully constructed image that has little or nothing to do with Rudd the man." ("Rudd is not fit to rule",
The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, October 14, 2007).
My prediction is that Christians who voted for the Rudd Government will be betrayed three times before the cock crows by the end of its first term - with the enactment of legalised euthanasia, homosexual unions and a human rights charter.
- Brian Peachey was WA state secretary of the Democratic Labor Party 1957-1964, and author of The Burkes of Western Australia (1992).
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