It’s nearly two years since the last election, when the Democrats lost all their seats, and over sixteen months since I finally left the Senate, as did the Democrats as a party. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided to get back into party politics and contest a seat at next year’s federal election. It was formally announced yesterday day that I’ll be running in the seat of Brisbane, which is where I live.

I’ve actually run in that seat once before, back in 1996. That was the election the Keating government got wiped out. Labor’s Arch Bevis, the incumbent in Brisbane at the time (as he still is), was 6.5% behind the Liberal candidate on primary votes, but at the end of the count he managed to get 559 votes in front, thanks to a very strong flow of preferences from Democrat and Green voters.

I had to weigh up a lot of things before deciding to dive back into party politics. There are aspects of politics that I could live without – some of which I’ve already been reminded of - and in the last year or so I’ve been enjoying engaging with a range of issues through a variety of different roles without having to worry about having a party label put on me.

But eventually I decided there are too many important and urgent issues that need to be addressed far more effectively than they currently are, and I felt I was in a position to help provide some of the extra political pressure to bring the necessary changes about.

Climate change is the most obvious and urgent matter. I can’t see any likelihood of either major party doing what is needed on climate change unless they feel it will cost them votes if they don’t. There are plenty of other issues that also need more attention between now and the next election.

Housing affordability remains a big and growing problem despite the recent economic downturn and tax reform will be on the agenda again and will need to be done right. It is also very important for Queensland to regain a voice in the federal Parliament from outside the major parties. This has been absent since the last election, when I lost my seat to Labor.

With the Democrats basically out of the picture as a viable party, the Greens are the only real political option available to push these issues and provide a different perspective. It is interesting being in a new environment and discovering what things work differently, although it feels a bit strange sometimes too, after having been in the Democrats for twenty years.

However, I know plenty of the people – there are quite a few former Democrats in the Greens – and it will be interesting to have a go at campaigning focused at a more local level than before.

The first time I ever ran as a candidate was in the Brisbane City Council elections in 1991. I stood as a Democrat, but it was also as part of a wider team of candidates who ran under the overall banner of the Green Alliance, with Drew Hutton as the Lord Mayoral candidate.

Around that time, talks were going on at a national level to explore the possibility of the Greens and the Democrats merging, rather than the Greens moving towards setting up their own national party. I was in favour of a merger happening, rather than having the two parties competing for the same seats.

However, for a whole bunch of reasons, it didn’t happen. All this time later, the Democrats have lost all their seats, but many of them didn’t go to the Greens, leaving Queensland without any minor party representation.

I believe diversity of views and perspectives in highly desirable in politics. However, it is sadly lacking at the moment. So assisting the Greens to get a Senate seat is important. Over the past couple of years, the Greens have been moving into the gap left by the Democrats in the Senate, and with Senate balance of power up for grabs at the next election, it is crucial than Queenslanders have a voice on balance of power issues. I think I can help make that happen, and provide an extra voice on some of the important issues, by running as a candidate.

The seat of Brisbane has changed a bit in the recent redistribution, losing some Labor areas and picking up some died in the wool Liberal suburbs. This has brought Labor’s margin down from 6.8% to 3.8%. This time around, the Liberal National Party candidate will be Teresa Gambaro, who was the Liberal member for the seat of Petrie from 1996 until the last election. There will be plenty of experience between the candidates for Labor, LNP and the Greens, which will hopefully make it a more interesting contest to follow.

Who knows, there might even be some genuine discussion of issues and policy solutions, rather than just an endless parade sound bites and sloganeering – all that’s probably being a bit too hopeful, even for an optimistic person like me.

With a difficult and emotive issue like refugees, sometimes it is helpful to look at the experiences of individual people – taking it out of the realm of political sloganeering and into the grounded reality of individual human beings.

This piece on Derek Barry’s blog tells the story of one young Rohingyan man who is now living and working in Brisbane. It’s well worth reading.

They marked World Environment Day in Brisbane by labelling the offices of the Premier, the Environment Minister and the Resources Minister as “global warning crime scenes.”

Friends of the Earth declare the Premier's electorate office in West End a "global warming crime scene"

I fear that if the Copenhagen conference on climate change at the end of this year does not bear much fruit, and no strategies start to appear in Australia to reduce the reliance on coal, we will start to see direct action much stronger than a few photo opportunities.

Those who believe there is no threat from climate change are less of a barrier to effective action that those who believe there is a threat, but are either not willing or not able to confront the changes necessary to credibly meet the threat.

The St Mary’s parish community also has a website, which contains a lot of the background to this dispute, including some of the letters from the Archbishop and responses from Fr Kennedy.  There’s also Facebook and MySpace pages in support of the parish and its priests. It’s gained coverage in the British Catholic periodical The Tablet (some coverage not online), featured in the local Gay press and Green Left Weekly, and been the subject of Marxist assessment on Online Opnion.

As I’ve mentioned a numbers of times before, I’m an atheist. I was raised as a Catholic and also know plenty of people within the local Catholic community and bureaucracy around Brisbane – not least because many of them are active in social justice issues and welfare services in the region.  So I understand a fair bit of the context and background of different disputes.  I’ve been to a few forums at St Mary’s – even spoken at a couple of them – but I’ve never been to a church service there. I know plenty of people who have, included more than one federal MP.

The term ‘broad church’ is used a lot to describe large political parties, but it is even more apt for large religions. As with many other creeds, there is a massive variance in local practices amongst Catholic parishes around the world.

Reading many of the media reports on this matter, and also the letters and responses on the St Mary’s website, it seems to me that some of the media coverage is a bit unclear on why Fr Kennedy and his parish have got into so much strife.  The majority of the media coverage suggests that the Archbishop’s concerns centre on the use of women as preachers and being involved in handing out communion, and the priest blessing homosexual couples and not using the right formula of words in Baptisms (i.e. saying “Creator, Sustainer and  Liberator instead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit).

These indications in the media seem quite odd to me, as I’ve known plenty of occasions where women have been involved in services and delivered the sermon during a mass. I recall my mother doing this at least a couple of decades ago and seen plenty of occasions of women being involved in handing out the Eucharist at communion time.  And whilst there’s no doubt the Catholic Church would be seriously unhappy with a priest performing a marriage service for a gay couple, I’ve certainly known occasions where openly gay couples have been involved in parish activities and had priests play a part in commitment ceremonies.

The letters from the Archbishop to St Mary’s and their responses don’t make it very clear to me what precisely needed to be done by the local Parish to avoid the action now taken by the Archbishop. There’s been a lot of talk about a Buddhist statue being present in the church at one time. Even though some have disputed the accuracy of this, even if true it hardly seems a sackable offence, unless it was used a central part of worship, which I’m sure wasn’t. The fact that the priest doesn’t wear the usual garments hardly seems to warrant a sacking either.

From the outside, it looks more like both sides have just dug themselves deeper and deeper into opposing trenches over the last few years. Certainly the last few exchanges of correspondence read to me like two people who are simply talking past each other and not really engaging with what the other is saying.  It does look rather like there’s a fair bit of pride (one of the so-called ‘deadly sins’) impacting on peoples’ actions on both sides here, although it’s not really for me to judge such things. In any case, the dispute is now so public and so entrenched that it’s hard to any resolution which will satisfy both sides. In such a circumstance, the one with the greater power usually wins, although in this instance it looks like a ‘win’ for the Archbishop will be a Pyrrhic one.

Even if I did believe in a God, the church’s open attacks on gay people and repeated failures to tackle many cases of serious sexual assault by their clergy, not to mention their ban on women being clergy, would make it impossible for me to sign up to this particular brand of faith – despite the considerable amount of good done by many church members and organisations at local level in assisting poorer people and speaking out on issues of justice. Of course, the Catholic church is far from the only religion which is intrinscially patriachal, treats gay people as second-class or protects its institutional interest rather than those of their followers when allegations of sexual abuse and breach of trust arise. But it has the most adherents of any religion in Australia, which does create some wider relevance in the local context.

One of the potential problems from the St Mary’s dispute which may well have a big effect on the wider community is what might happen to their very effective social services arm - Micah Services. This is a sizeable and important body which generates a lot of good supports to many of the poorer and disadvantaged people of the area, which developed out of the strong and active social justice principles that St Mary’s has focused on.  Some of the key people involved in Micah are also involved in the local parish, and while I’m sure they won’t pull out of helping Micah to continue to deliver vital support services, there is a risk in the long run that some of the passion and support for Micah might be diminished if the attendance and energy put into the local parish declines.

Whilst disputes within religions can raise some interesting issues on an intellectual level, I feel that if they solely concern internal matters then it’s a matter for people who ascribe to that religion to work out.  If you choose to be part of a group then, while you can still push for change from within, you sign up to their rules, processes and beliefs. I’m not part of it, so I don’t see it as something for me to get involved.  I stay out of such things, unless they involve statements or activities that impact on the wider community, such as when the Pope attacks all homosexual people as being ‘disordered’.

A person who considers themself to be a Catholic is not forced to adopt 100 per cent of every single view ever expressed by the Pope or other senior church leaders. A good example of this is the prohibition on the use of contraceptives. Every survey I’ve ever seen shows that a clear majority of Catholics – at least in the developed world – do not agree with or follow this teaching.  There is still room within Catholicism for a person to use an informed conscience to come to a view on various matters – although the precise meaning and effect of that teaching is often disputed.  In a case from the early 1980s which has a few echoes of the current dispute, a local Brisbane priest, Father Bill O’Shea, got into some serious strife with the powers-that-be when some local people reported him to the Vatican for the views he expressed in the local paper about the role of an informed conscience in coming to decisions about matters such as contraception.

As many other outsiders have pointed out, it is hard to reconcile the image of a Church hierarchy so doggedly determined to dismiss a priest because he doesn’t wear the right garments or use the required formula of words in some of his liturgies and ceremonies, with the recent willingness of the Church to allow a clergyman to remain in the church despite denying the Jewish Holocaust of the 1940s and openly anti-semitic groups to retain church recognition or the many instances where priests who have sexual assaulted children have been protected by the Church or have been allowed to keep practicing as priests even after having been found guilty of such offences.

The local dispute here all seems rather unnecessary and destructive. However, even though it may have some flow impacts on the wider community, disputes like these are matters for members of the relevant church to sort out.

ELSEWHERE:

• A contrary view on some of the local issues here and here.
• John Pssant at En Passant blog provides his take.