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Christian values and Kevin Rudd's wedge: Kevin Rudd has placed ethical concern at the heart of his politics. Can Rudd's ethics survive the day-to-day demands of politics?

Article Excerpt
In a manner that is a little unusual in politics, Kevin Rudd has accented the ethical quality with which he intends to define his leadership by stressing the way Christian values will lend purpose and direction to his proposed tactics. In political terms he is drawing upon religiously based ethics to mark out a change in established assumptions about the relation between church and state.

These assumptions are secular humanist. On a day-to-day basis, with not too many questions asked about religious influences upon their formation, humanist values define the working ethic of political life. Linked to a diffuse concern for the common good they have served to keep religion out of Australian politics. That allows our representatives to stick to practical matters, as our limited democracy contributes to the general direction of affairs. There may be a quick prayer in the morning, a swearing in or so on the Bible, or the odd genuflection in the direction of the Queen, as formal Head of State and Defender of the Faith, but not much else by way of religious reference is active in representative democracy except in times of acute crisis.

Half a century ago, Bob Santamaria sensed a crisis affecting his own faith. A clandestine organisation, the National Civic Council, allowed him to bypass the secular humanist barrier. Fifty years on, with the release of his personal papers, the record is clearer than ever on just how effectively he infiltrated the political process in pursuit of his own undeclared objectives. Which crisis is Kevin Rudd responding to when now, in a completely open fashion, he places his own Christian values at the centre of his aspiration to lead the Australian people? Does he sense a hollowness, as secular humanist values are broken down by the neo-liberal push? Or is his vision more unresolved, a confusion of genuinely ethical impulses and the driving careerism rampant within political life?

Clearly Rudd's ethical standpoint is far more explicit than that suggested by the Coalition's alliance with Family First or the Hillsong revival. Privately, Kevin Rudd's religious beliefs have been long-standing. In joining them now to his public persona and the electoral hopes of Labor, it would appear that, whatever his careerist motives, he has two concerns. First, to make a statement about the ethical grounding of public life. Beyond that, to lend the commitment implicit in that statement to driving a wedge at a more and more obvious point of weakness in the standpoint of the Liberal-National Coalition.

Wedging. John Howard has developed a reputation as a past master of this particular version of tapping into the underlying values of an opposition party to redefine them as integral with one's own agenda. As Barry Jones notes: It is essentially the old technique of 'divide and rule', persuading the poor and defenceless to defer to the interests of the rich and powerful rather than making common cause with each other ... The essence of 'wedge politics' is finding a natural fault-line in society, then driving a wedge into it widening the gap between the larger and smaller segments (Res Publica, 15, 1, 2006).

The obvious examples are Howard's attempt to relocate the idea of 'the battler', or the personal bond to one's mate of the Labor tradition, by reworking them as characteristics of the aspirational climber as shaped by the new individualism. As if drawing a leaf from John Howard's own operational handbook, Rudd...

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