There are several wars going on in Australia and around here.
But they’re not wars fought the old-fashioned way with weapons and armies like the wars our Returned Services League honours on Anzac Day. They’re not the wars the sons of our ancestors died fighting to protect our country in. There are no names of the dead on honour rolls or war memorials.
But these wars are fought just as determinedly by those who know what they are doing. They plan carefully and move systematically and make relentless steady gains. They are just as ruthless as the enemies we faced in battles with guns.
The weapons of choice now aren’t guns. They are our own Australian laws and regulations. They are money. They are ideas. They are our media and communication systems.
Why fight a battle with guns for Australia if the laws of the land allow you to buy it. It probably even costs less to buy than it would cost to buy weapons to fight for it! With few constraints Australia invites foreign interests including sovereign interests to buy pretty well anything of value in this country – our minerals our farmlands our businesses our properties. It is remarkable. We don’t seem to have any sense at all that owning our own country has any importance. Australians might not sell our children for money but we are more than eager to sell our children’s heritage their futures for money. We are more than prepared to leave them landless tenants and serfs in the country of their birthright.
We were prepared to send men to die to keep this country for Australians but we allow it to be sold out from under us holus bolus without a murmour. And our political leaders of most varieties are and have always been the first to argue this is a good thing under labels like development investment and jobs. The fact that the profits are exported overseas and foreign wealthy powerful interests end up with huge political clout in this country is kept quiet. Wealthy foreign mining and media interests are increasingly making a mockery of our semblance of democracy in this country.
The other territory that is fiercely fought over in Australia is the territory of ideas values and belief systems. This is a battle of carefully chosen words of images of strategic manipulative moves through corporations not-for-profits governments churches and education systems. This is quietly patiently moving people onto key boards where the power resides to take over control. This is looking for and negotiating deals where opportunities offer and the less aware aren’t paying attention. Money can also play a big part.
When I first went to university there was only one university in the state and it only had about 4000 students with few women. It was a privilege so it has special value in my heart.
The university was a very secular place. It taught science and engineering and law and medicine and commerce. Religion was almost completely absent. Australia was Christian in its mainstream way of life but this wasn’t on display in the university.
More recently that all changed. It came as a very rude shock indeed when Saudi Arabian money started flowing into my alma mater in a big way and Islam suddenly became very much in favour. An Islamic chair ensured Islamic studies had a strong voice in the university and wider community. The graduate magazines they send out started having cover photos of women with their faces heavily enshrouded in scarves and the articles inside were promoting this as a good thing. How would you feel about this?
Saudi Arabia uses cold hard cash to buy its way into the intellectual and values real-estate of our country. They are not the only ones.
American fundamentalist Christianity does something similar through our radio stations. They pay to buy up slabs of available time on Australian radio stations to broadcast their evangelical messages. Whole radio station licences get steadily bought up to the point that the concept of community radio becomes taken over by evangelical Christian radio. Whether we think this is a good thing or not it is still a take-over in the territory of values using systematic strategic planning to get control of key communication channels.
Gay and lesbian interests are making similar financial moves to buy up slabs of unfilled time on community radio. They are pushing their agenda systematically and strategically. They are prepared to plan long-term and use multiple approaches.
The Uniting Church got a rude shock a few years back when gay interests gained control of their governing body the Synod. This came after some years of patiently being the people who came forward to go as representatives on the committees that fed into Synod. This was boring work that few people wanted but they recognised the power and opportunity that came with it and they took the opportunity. It resulted in a Synod giving the balance of power to members supporting the gay movement’s aims and it gave them full control of the church and its property and governance. The ordinary members of the congregations in the church could do nothing at all about it. It was too late. They hadn’t paid attention when they should have.
Now the same thing is happening in regard to marriage. This is part of a long strategically fought campaign working through language and lobbying. The language of replacing words like ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ with ‘partner’. Marriage as territory is being conceptually plundered. The idea of what marriage is about is being moved in on. The most recent discussion I read in The Australian was arguing that fidelity in marriage could be done away with. The lifestyle of gays has never been strong on fidelity. If marriage involves a life-long commitment to one spouse and no other sexual liaisons that might make it too hard for them. So let’s change the definition of marriage as we push for gay marriage. The safe territory for women to marry and have and raise children safely and securely is what is being contested here fought over ruthlessly and skillfully.
Australia has thrown away much of its Christian heritage in the last 4 decades. Often we behave like adolescent children rebelling against our parents rejecting their values. We are not grown up to the point where we understand those values and come back to them by our own choosing. Unfortunately it looks like by the time we do grow up it might be too late.
Because at exactly the same time as we have gone on an orgy of adulation of the values and beliefs of other cultures it has become taboo to speak up for our own heritage. Multi-culturalism is a cover word for every culture except what used to be considered mainstream but is now hard to identify as it is subsumed by other cultures.
Another university story: I was present at the opening address for Freshers Week at one of our universities when all the new students were welcomed. The guest speaker was an Australian comedian and he made the target of his humour the Christian students on campus. It was a grossly abusive attack. Looking around the crowd it was easy to see that the most amazed were the foreign students. Whatever their own religious beliefs the spectacle of a university-sponsored speaker lambasting the religious culture of its own nation struck them as sacriligeous and extraordinary. Yet we do things like this to our heritage in Australia.
Even to talk of we is no longer politically correct yet our last Census clearly identifies that in 2006 we still existed in this upper Kedron Brook valley as a distinct cultural heritage type.
So we are in a battle for the territory of our cultural heritage but one side is tightly restricted in what it can say or do to look after its cultural traditions and faith practices while the other groups are completely unfettered in being able to celebrate their own cultures and promote their own beliefs. This is a one-sidedlosing battle.
In the coming month the battle for territory is going to be played out again in the arena of the Australian Census.
For the first time as far as I can remember there are big media programs campaigning for how Australians complete the Census question on religion.
Two quite different movements are both having a go at the religion question. Muslims and atheists.
There is an attempt to drive up the number of people who identify in the Census as Muslim.
At exactly the same time the atheists are pushing hard for Australians to stop identifying themselves by a religion (which in practice means a Christian religion).
So both groups are pushing in the same direction to reduce the number of Australians identifying as Christian.
And both want to move into the territory that would leave.
It does matter. The Census figures are a major tool for Australia’s planners to allocate resources to prepare policy to build infrastructure like schools and to govern us. In a way the Census is our voice.
The Muslims want more influence and resources for Muslims. The atheists want less influence and resources for Christians. History shows that religious vacuums are unlikely to persist. They will be filled by the more aggressive religion. The atheists are unlikely to win in the medium term.
Should we care? Our community here in the upper Kedron Brook valley identified itself strongly as either Christian or nothing in the last Census. Who will we say we are in this coming Census? Do you care? What will our voice be to determine our future?