By Jim Wallace, ACL Managing Director

Following a frenetic federal election campaign, the results are still uncertain, with the lead changing as final counting is completed and our heading for the first hung parliament Australia has experienced in 70 years.

Tony Abbott is to be congratulated on his achievement in bringing the Coalition to such a competitive position, but there will be many days of vote counting and negotiations ahead before either he or Julia Gillard will know who will lead the nation. For Christians it is an important time to pray and ask that a Godly influence be brought to bear on whichever side of politics is ultimately in a position to claim victory.

As commentators are saying, we may have to wait up to 10 days to learn whether Labor or Coalition will be able to form government with the support of independent and Greens MPs.

The outcome is certainly not predictable, even though three of the independents are in seats formerly held by the National Party and ideologically these MPs tend towards the conservative side. But all three (who in the past have had some divisions with the National Party) are making it clear that their allegiance is up in the air, and the broadband policy of both parties is sure to be a feature in negotiations with these rural independents. The new Greens MP for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, has made clear his support for Labor. The ‘knife-edge’ result of voting in the West Australian seat of Hasluck could also greatly influence the outcome.

One factor that will greatly impact the character of the new parliament , although not unexpected, is what Greens’ leader Bob Brown is calling a ‘Greenslide’. The Greens will clearly hold the balance of power in the Senate from July next year, with Mr Brown claiming his party will end up holding nine seats in the Senate in total – this includes the lead candidate in NSW Lee Rhiannon (who proudly hails from a communist family) taking a Senate seat with the help of Sex Party preferences.

By Jim Wallace, ACL Managing Director

Do you know where your Senate preferences will go this election?

One of the hottest battles in this year’s federal election is in the Senate, where the Greens are well-placed to hold the balance of power in their own right for the first time in their history, when newly-elected state Senators take up their seats from July 1 next year.

Unlike for the House of Representatives, voters have a choice of two ways in which to complete their ballot papers for the Senate – above or below the line. ACL has produced short videos on how to vote in both houses for people who are unsure of the process or otherwise interested. You can view the videos by clicking here. The Australian Electoral Commission describes the Senate voting process here.

The majority of people cast their Senate vote above the line because it is quicker and easier, and you are less likely to cast an informal vote – it takes quite a bit of time and concentration to correctly number 80-odd boxes below the line for voters in New South Wales!

When voting above the line you simply write the number ‘1’ in the box for the political party or group of your choice. Voting this way means that you agree to your preferred party or group distributing preferences in the order they have determined. The way each party or group will direct its preferences is outlined in Group Voting Tickets.

A quick analysis of the Group Voting Tickets for the five parties whose questionnaire responses are featured in the Australia Votes Election Summary Booklet – Greens, Labor, Coalition, Family First and the Christian Democratic Party (CDP) – has thrown up some interesting results that might cause some people to carefully consider their voting intentions.

ACL has produced a summary document of the five featured parties and how they will distribute preferences in each state and territory (where fielding candidates). Under each party name are listed the other parties in the order of where the featured parties will send their preferences. (Note that independent and ungrouped candidates have not been listed.)

By Jim Wallace, ACL Managing Director

The much anticipated ‘town hall meeting’ in Brisbane between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott has again confirmed that Saturday will be a tough contest, with honours going, in most commentators view, pretty evenly.

For us the most disappointing aspect of it was to see Tony Abbott saying that the ISP filter would slow the internet down, something that trials prove is not right. It has been proven to slow it by only 1/70th of the blink of an eye.

However the purpose of today’s blog is to discuss the Senate, where it seems that the Greens are on track to hold the balance of power, something we believe is no more in the Christian interest than having parties from the far right of politics holding it like One Nation or the Citizens Electoral Council.

We have pursued this issue of the Greens’ suitability to hold the balance of power on the basis of what we believe has been a deceptive attempt to attract Christian votes, and a conviction that our non-party partisan principles do not extend to ignoring lack of truth in politics.

By Jim Wallace, ACL Managing Director

As the final election week draws to a close and the need to place an informed vote for more Godly government draws closer, my main aim in these blogs is to highlight more recent announcements that we think might influence your decision and also on Thursday, to discuss the Senate.

I am sorry that I am one blog behind at the moment!

The Coalition has announced an initiative that will raise the profile of aid within government with the intention to appoint an International Development Minister. This will be very much welcomed by NGOs and has been something they had wanted to see. It should bring some compensation for their efforts on the part of the world’s poor, given the failure of either major party to commit to a definite timetable for applying the MDG’s target of .7% of GNI to set aid budgets beyond 2015. World Vision’s CEO Tim Costello has welcomed the initiative.

In a federal election campaign which has been often sadly lacking in matters of substance, the issue of foreign aid has at last struggled its way to the fore in the past week, with the Federal Coalition announcing that, if elected, it will create a Minister for International Development – upgrading the status of a policy area which is currently looked after by a parliamentary secretary – and elevate AusAID to an independent government department. Click here for more details.

It is interesting to see the Coalition taking the initiative in foreign aid when traditionally it has been Labor which has tended to take the stronger position – such as being the first of the two major parties to commit to an aid target of 0.5% of Gross National Income (GNI). No doubt the strong lobbying efforts of organisations such as Micah Challenge Australia and World Vision Australia are paying off.

The Coalition’s announcement has been welcomed by aid agencies including the Make Poverty History coalition and World Vision Australia  which has urged the ALP to match the commitment.

“Elevating the International Development portfolio would bring a more direct line of accountability through parliament and build public confidence that aid and development money is being spent effectively,” World Vision’s Chief Executive Tim Costello said.

By Jim Wallace, ACL Managing Director

Despite the disillusionment by most people at the negativity of election advertising, both major parties have made announcements in the last 48 hours that benefit family and marriage.

Julia Gillard used her campaign launch to announce an increase in Family Tax Benefit Part A that is aimed at helping parents with the additional costs of teenage children living at home and still undergoing education. The change will effectively mean that families will receive an additional $4,000 per year for each teenager in education. She said that her aim was to encourage parents to be able to encourage teenagers to stay at school and improve their education, and is an initiative that should definitely help in that regard.

By Jim Wallace, ACL Managing Director

The acknowledgement by Julia Gillard that the general dissatisfaction with State Labor governments is hurting Federal Labor should send a strong message to all parties that they cannot afford to confuse their brand name.

While state party organisations are usually very autonomous, it is inevitable that voters will not make this distinction and perhaps even important that parties are made to show more consistency across the jurisdictions.

ACL has welcomed a commitment from the Coalition that, if elected, they will provide $200 vouchers for couples getting married to encourage them to use marriage education, counselling or parenting programs.

Speaking at an annual National Marriage Day celebration dinner last Thursday night (August 12) the Shadow Minister for Families, Kevin Andrews, announced a new policy to support and strengthen Australian marriages. Click here for more details.

In a media release about the new policy, Liberal Senator Guy Barnett, said the vouchers would be redeemable before or after the wedding, for an approved marriage education, counselling or parenting service.

By Jim Wallace, ACL Managing Director

Today’s revelation that the Coalition now trails Labor on a two party preferred basis may say more about the style of this campaign than anything else.

Modern politics has become a 24/7 media event and at no time is that more so than during an election campaign. The result is that party strategists adopt an approach that minimises the risk of losing, rather than strategising to win – the concern always being that a media gaff might derail their candidate’s campaign.

By Jim Wallace, ACL Managing Director

Friday was bit of a slow day on the campaign trail from the Christian perspective.

For us the candidate video segments continued to stream in and Rob Ward, our Victorian State Director, alone reported having received some seven to upload. It is good to see this catching on and hopefully this new initiative for the website for this election will gain even more momentum over the next week.

By Jim Wallace, ACL Managing Director

I am back in Canberra after time on the trail from Melbourne to Wellington (NSW ) and Perth over the last week and with a computer down!  However I now plan to blog this page at least once a day in the lead up to the election.

I feel it is necessary to reaffirm the purpose of ACL in this election and something of how we seek to go about that – a purpose consistent with our vision and mission.

We see our mission at ACL as to bring Christ’s influence into Government and work at both federal and state level to do that and even sometimes into councils.

Wanting to influence government we are non-party partisan, because a consistent Christian influence cannot be achieved if we, or the church, allows itself to be captured by one side or the other, or worse still decides that God is a card carrying member of any particular party.

The Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) today welcomed and accepted an apology from ACT Greens Senate Candidate Lin Hatfield Dodds for her reaction to ACL in a WIN News story last night.

However, ACL is concerned that other comments she made misrepresented ACL, the size of its supporter base and the way it works with the constituency.

In an interview on WIN News last night Ms Hatfield Dodds challenged the size of ACL’s claimed supporter base and said that our election questionnaire had been put together by only 10 people.

“The Greens appear to be trying to deflect criticism from their failure to answer questions on some key issues for the Christian constituency by trying to brand us irrelevant through misrepresenting our level of support,” ACL Managing Director Jim Wallace said today.

“In actual fact, ACL not only has around 10,000 supporters but we have built up wide networks among Christian churches and organisations, as evidenced by our ability to mobilise tens of thousands of Christians for our election leaders’ webcasts in 2007 and 2010. Just recently we did an election mail-out of one million pieces of literature to around 6000 churches – hardly a small number!

Claims made by Opposition frontbencher George Brandis yesterday that ISP-level filtering would “slow down internet speed significantly” and could catch “completely anodyne references to children...no element of pornography whatsoever” are completely inaccurate and reflect a disturbing level of misinformation on the issue, the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) said today.

Senator Brandis made the claims during a debate with Federal Minister Craig Emerson yesterday on Madonna King’s Brisbane ABC radio program (click here for a transcript).

ACL Managing Director Jim Wallace today said it had clearly been shown that ISP-level filtering would not affect internet speeds and that the Government has restricted filtering to Refused Classification material – meaning it wouldn’t capture the wide range of innocuous material Senator Brandis alluded to.

He said it is disappointing that the Opposition has decided to oppose ISP filtering and that in trying to justify their position they needed to stick with the facts.

MEDIA RELEASE

For release: August 10, 2010

The Greens’ claims that their values are Christian have promoted the Australian Christian Lobby to release a list of publicly available Greens policies which the party sought to hide from the Christian constituency.

The Australian Greens refused to respond to 18 out of 24 questions put to all parties on issues of concern to most Christians.

Who do I vote for? How do I make my vote count for Christian values? This is what many are asking with just two-and-a-half weeks until polling day.

For the past 10 years, ACL has worked hard to ensure Christians know as much as possible about the Parties and Candidates standing in elections.

In a non-party partisan way (but critical where necessary), we have sought to help Christians cast an informed vote for those who best support Christian values.

We are pleased to be taking this service to new levels in the 2010 Federal Election.

In late June we contacted all the Parties contesting the election with 24 questions of key concern to Christians.

All of the well-known Parties have responded, along with some of the less well known.

We have posted their answers on the Australiavotes.org.au site and hope you might take some time between now and August 21 to consider their responses. For busy people who don’t have time to go through 24 questions and answers, we have an easy link to Touchstone Issues and Points of Difference between the major Parties.

Disappointingly the Greens, who most pundits say are cruising to control the Senate, declined to answer many of the questions we put.

This site contains information about ACL’s local Candidate Forums and we are in the process of up-loading short video messages from participating House of Representatives and Senate Candidates.

If your local candidate has not submitted a video, you might like to ask them to consider this.

Australiavotes.org.au also contains information on conscience votes held in the 2004-2007 Parliament.

Whilst there were no conscience votes in the last Parliament, many of the politicians who voted on abortion and cloning in 2006 are again contesting this election. It is important to know where your candidate stands on protecting human life at its most vulnerable.

Under Election Resources you will see some short video clips which are designed to de-mystify the preferential voting system for the House of Representatives and the Senate. Please take a moment to view these.

We’ll be seeking to update this blog daily with comment on the remainder of the campaign as it affects Christians.

God bless,

Jim Wallace AM

ACL Managing Director