Jacques Chester for Solomon

My next opportunity for an open forum with other candidates will come next week, when I will attend a “Meet Your Candidate” forum hosted by the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL). Previously I got to speak to the Women’s Network NT, which was an excellent event.

The forum will be held next Tuesday evening 20th November from 7.00pm in the Mal Nairn Auditorium, Charles Darwin University.

Several of my fellow candidates have already spoken at local fora organised by the ACL. John Humphreys reported that:

We only had a few minutes to talk and then answered a few questions. I was honest, so my answers weren’t popular. Yes, we support gay marriage. No, I don’t want the government to censor TV. No, I don’t want to give you more handouts. No, I don’t want a national campaign for chaplins in schools.

I mentioned the “right of Genghis, left of Cheech & Chong”, which got a laugh. I also mentioned that the size of government in the economy has risen from about 5% to 40% in the last 100 years and tax has increased by 34% under the Liberals. Other LDP positions mentioned were competitive federalism, pro-immigration & euthanasia. There were no votes to be gained at a meeting of the ACL, but it was all very friendly and a good chance to go out and do the “political thing”.

John’s forum had more candidates than I will be lining up with. I received an email today from the local organiser, Lois Fong, with this list:

Of interest to me is that the Greens aren’t bothering to show up. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, since they didn’t answer the ACL’s questionnaire when it was circulated to parties. Also missing from the Solomon list is Trudy Campbell from the CEC, though her Senate counterpart Peter Flynn will be there. Missing from the Senate list is Nigel Scullion, though Dave Tollner will be in evidence.

It should prove to be an interesting evening, not least because I like John Humphreys will not bring much in the way of soothing words or pork-barreling. I come as a blunt libertarian for whom the role of government is very limited — certainly I disagree with almost everything that the ACL lobbies for.

To their credit, the ACL have also spent a lot of time explaining the preferential system to church-goers. One thing that has struck me while campaigning is how few people understand how it works. All that people need to know is that they should order the boxes according to their actual preferences; and that no vote is a wasted vote. Yet I talk to people who are fretting about putting me 1 because they think it will get someone they don’t like into office.

Also of interest is how they shape the questions to local issues. These are the main questions sent to me by Lois:

1. The Christian Churches in the NT have learned that working in partnership with Indigenous Australians offers the best hope of attaining and sustaining shared goals. As the work of the NT Emergency Response Taskforce – the “intervention” in remote Indigenous communities – continues, will your party if it wins government establish partnerships with Indigenous people so as to better take into account their needs and priorities, and to sustain what good may be done by the “intervention”?
2. As of September 16, 2007 Australia became a partner in the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). Describe how this partnership will impact the Northern Territory?

An interesting pair of questions, actually. The intervention is a hot topic here in the NT for a number of reasons. The politics of race, land rights and disadvantage in the NT has decades of history. Most of that history has been one of deadlock; most of that deadlock due to the power of the Commonwealth over the Territory. The intervention was a seismic shift — it simply swept away the old political realities and everybody is still running about trying to work out where they stand.

As for the GNEP, it’s actually about the only vaguely smart thing to come out of the GW Bush administration. Whether we like it or not, the nuclear cat is well and truly out of the bag. The best thing we can do is to adopt policies which deter proliferation of nuclear weapons, reduce the potency of nuclear waste and amplify the efficiencies of nuclear power. The GNEP takes some pretty sensible steps in that direction.

The key to remember is that the LDP is not pro-nuclear power or anti-nuclear power. We think that nuclear power should prosper or perish in a free market for electricity. But even so, we are the largest supplier of uranium and we have enormous reserves of it. It’s in our own interest to have some leverage over where that uranium gets used.

Lois also supplied a list of questions to be answered in brief:

1. The wellbeing of Australian society and of Christian Church is built upon and strengthened by healthy family life, which is best supported by stable marriage. We live in a time where people actively seek to diminish the value of marriage and to redefine its meaning. While there may well be different expressions of family life, what commitment does your party have to promoting and supporting marriage, which is one of the foundations on which a stable society is built?
2. Australia is arguably a secular nation in which all citizens are entitled to their voice. Yet there seems to be increasing intolerance of the Christian voice when Church leaders and other prominent Christians speak out on matters concerning human life – abortion, birth technologies, cloning, euthanasia – and the values by which we live. What is your view about the place of the Christian voice and of the Churches in Australia today?
3. Would your party commit to: the reviewing of all materials made available to schools with the view to replacing them with those that have a stronger anti-drug message; and the retrospective removal of terms such as ‘recreational or party drugs’ in all government or government funded literature published in either print based or electronic format.

Well the LDP’s position on these is pretty simple to deduce — it’s not the government’s business. I agree that stable families are important, but I don’t believe that the government can magically wish them into existence.

Australia is a very secular nation, which I think is a great strength. I think that if churches wish to participate in politics, they need to understand that they will be political targets. I think that the role of churches is up to the churches, within the constraints of equality before the law. Want to preach against the government’s policies? Please do. Think the government is just peachy and wish to testify? I won’t stop you.

As for the third question, the answer is no. Indeed the LDP wishes to legalise certain drugs which are currently illegal for the simple reasons of personal choice and to stop rewarding organised crime.

More generally I feel that the ACL is perhaps missing the point of the Gospel preaching. There’s a lot of Jesus talking about knocking on doors, turning his cheek, “vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” etc etc. Very little of Jesus telling people that he will be kicking down doors or getting government to do it for him.