Rudd and Abbott are longer prime ministers but both now serve the nation in other ways.

This conversation is to hear their views, as people of the Gospel, as Christians, on how they engage within the public life and society in Australia.

The conversation is in response to Craven's book, "In the Shadow of the Cross".

The host of the event is the Archbishop of Melbourne, The Most Reverend Dr Peter Comensoli.

In opening the conversation, Comensoli said that both Abbott and Rudd are men of faith who have given great service to Australia and in doing so have brought something of the life of the Gospel into their various roles.

The following is an introductory summary. The full video follows at the bottom of these introductory remarks.

Kevin Rudd

If you're a person of Christian faith and therefore you are animated by the Gospel then it's very difficult, and I think improper for us, to simply adopt a form of cafeteria Christianity; a smorgasbord Christianity where we just pick and choose.

If you're alive to what is written in the Gospels; the challenges to our individual souls, our own individual salvation, our own individual relationship with God, these challenges are equally about our relationship with our fellow human beings and more broadly responsibilities for the creation itself.

Of course, if you want to anchor this in a core piece the New Testament it is simply the great commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart and the soul and your strength, and love your neighbour as yourself; and on these two things hang all the law and the prophets.

For those reasons, for me, it has always been an inseparable question that if you are engaged in a spiritual relationship with your understanding of God on the one hand that it cannot be clinically separated from your responsibilities to your fellow human beings

Not just those physically next door, not just those who happen to be in the same town that you grew up in, not just those folks that you know or may form part of what modern society describes as the nation-state but in fact the tradition of Caritas and Catholic Care; regardless of whether we know these people personally or not.

The final thing I'd say is there is a debate, often in the public political process, about whether this responsibility for our fellow human beings; our brothers and sisters, whether that is a discretionary individual decision; that is an act of private charitable choice, or whether it is a responsibility through society acting through the common agency of politics to help look after our fellow human beings by that way through the proper provisioning.

For example, basic and elementary welfare basic and elementary health care basic and elementary education basic and elementary fundamentals for being a human being whose individual dignity is respected and for being a productive member of society maximizing their human individual and creative potential.

Tony Abbott

Obviously, I take religion seriously, although I don't claim to be a particularly good Catholic.

But, I think the main job of religion is not to make us perfect but to make us better and obviously as better people we will bring something of that to public life.

I look at the public life that I've been part of, that there are lots of people in our public life who take their faith seriously and they cover a very broad political spectrum.

I think anything between the hard green left and the ultra-libertarian right is fertile ground for Christians.

This idea that Christian social teaching is able to say this specific policy rather than that specific policy; I'm just very sceptical about that.

So I think that the main role of the church when it comes to public life is encouraging more good people to go into public life encouraging people to be the best they possibly can be, but leaving the detail of policy whether we prefer more government or less government any particular situation, whether we think that there should be a greater focus on this issue or that issue in any particular situation

I think the what and how of any is best left to the people in public life rather than to be pontificated upon from the outside.

• Those keen to get to the content, the conversation proper begins at around the 4 minute mark.

• Video by Archdiocese of Melbourne.
• Narrative by in Flashes of Insight

The comments come from staunch Catholic and former Australian Liberal Party Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.

Abbott claims COVID is costing as much as A$200,000 (~NZ $220,000) to give an elderly person an extra year's life.

He says the sum is substantially beyond what governments normally pay for life-saving drugs.

"In this climate of fear, it was hard for governments to ask ‘how much is a life worth?' because every life is precious, and every death is sad, but that has never stopped families sometimes electing to make elderly relatives as comfortable as possible while nature takes its course."

Abbott says the aim of preserving almost every life at any cost is a case of Governments shifting their goals from preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed with COVID patients to achieving zero transmission.

He accused Governments of approaching the pandemic trauma doctors instead of thinking like health economists trained to pose uncomfortable questions about a level of deaths countries might have to live with.

He told the Policy Exchange thinktank in London that it is not possible to pay so much to keep the elderly alive for another year while 40% of the workforce is on some kind of government benefit.

At some point we just have to live with this virus, he said.

Abbott claimed the response to COVID was causing a form of deep psychic damage.

"People once sturdily self-reliant are looking to the government more than ever for support and sustenance, a something-for-nothing mindset, reinforced amongst young people spared the need of searching for jobs."

"Every day it goes on, it risks establishing a new normal," adding: "Fear of falling sick is stopping us from feeling fully alive."

Abbott also claimed officials were getting trapped in crisis mode for longer than they needed, "especially if the crisis adds to their authority or boosts their standing."

Abbott proudly identifies as being pro-life and labelled last year's changes to the NSW abortion bill as "death on-demand" and "morally shocking" also opposes euthanasia.

Australian Opposition leader, Anthony Albanese was swift in his condemnation.

"Tony Abbott was never known for his compassion. This is a new low,"Albanese said.

Senior Liberal cabinet minister Mathias Cormann distanced himself from the former prime minister, saying the economic cost of the virus was justified.

"Clearly, the first priority was to protect people's health and save people's lives by suppressing the spread of the virus, and that was absolutely necessary," he told reporters at Parliament House.

"As part of that, we did have to impose significant restrictions on the economy in order to suppress the spread of the virus, and that was appropriate."

Sources

• The Telgraph
• The Guardian
• The New Daily
• The Canberra Times

It went on to flourish under the tutelage of Bob Santamaria.

Abbott was and is on a mission from God. Or is he? Let's look at his position on same-sex marriage.

He opposes it. This year, he's on a non-stop bender to stop those of the same sex from marrying in the way he married Margie or the way godless me married my equally godless husband.

He's even allowed his family to be torn asunder while he campaigns. His daughter Frances is taking the side of her aunt Christine Forster, Abbott's sister and a same-sex marriage proponent.

This year, he's talked about the institution of marriage and said his opposition is not about religion but about tradition.

But last year was different. He gave a speech in Queensland to honour the memory of his former headmaster Greg Jordan. In it, he talked about the threats to religion if same-sex marriage was legalised.

"Some of the institutions and the values that have most helped to shape and to define Western civilisation - Christianity, the church and the crown - now tend to be those most frequently under fire ... the traditional concept of marriage won't be maintained by a claim that the church's right to free speech is under threat - though it is.

"It will only be maintained by preserving or by rebuilding the old consensus that, ideally at least, marriage is an exclusive union entered into for life by one man with one woman in the expectation of children."

The church matters desperately to Abbott when it comes to same-sex marriage - but not when it comes to climate change.

Last week, when Tony Abbott gave a speech called titled "daring to doubt" to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in Britain, he said: "In most countries, far more people die in cold snaps than in heatwaves, so a gradual lift in global temperatures, especially if it is accompanied by more prosperity and more capacity to adapt to change, might even be beneficial." Continue reading

• Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist, and an academic at the University of Technology, Sydney.

"We don't blame the Pope for the IRA, and we don't blame the Catholics living next door for the folly of some people, the folly and madness of some people who may claim a Christian motivation. And I think we need to be similarly carefully and cautious in these other areas," he told ABC's Chris Uhlmann.

Abbott admitted that while terrorists claim to act in the name of God and religion, no serious religious leader is defending this.

He told Uhlmann that his friend, prime minister Najib of Malaysia, a devout Muslim, says the ISIL movement is against God, against Islam and against our common humanity.

Confirming Monis was well know to state and federal police and the domestic spy agency, an unsatisfied prime minister is looking for answers.

"The system did not adequately deal with this individual, there is no doubt about that," he said.

Pope Francis agrees

Returning recently from Turkey, Pope Francis told reporters on the plane that it is wrong for anyone to react to terrorism by being "enraged" against Islam.

Equating Islam with violence is wrong, said the Holy Father.

"You just can't say that (equate Islam with violence), just as you can't say that all Christians are fundamentalists. We have our share of them (fundamentalists). All religions have these little groups," he said.

"They (Muslims) say: 'No, we are not this, the Koran is a book of peace, it is a prophetic book of peace'."

"I told the president (Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan) that it would be beautiful if all Islamic leaders, whether they are political, religious or academic leaders, would speak out clearly and condemn this because this would help the majority of Muslim people," the Holy Father said.

Sources

• ABC
• Sjna
• Image: Yahoo News

The man was my grandfather, on my father's side, and the woman he assaulted was his wife, my beloved Nana. When this man died suddenly, aged 51, in 1935, his wife and two sons bought him a hole in the ground but that was all.

In early October his five surviving grandchildren gathered at his unmarked grave in the Catholic section of Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery, where he had lain unloved and unlamented for 79 years.

We had decided to give him a headstone.

We did it, not because we had forgiven him his violence but because we have chosen to confront it.

I did not expect that as we grappled with his behaviour and its impact on our family, our country's political leader would be using a metaphor that suggests roughing someone up is the way to express anger or disagreement.

That was what happened to our fathers - at the hands of their father.

It was only as they approached their own deaths - my father in 1988 and his brother in 1997 - that they opened up to their children about the brutality of their upbringing.

There were stories of smashed toys and holes in walls.

My cousin learnt that in 1928 our grandfather had put her father, then aged 7 , in hospital with a broken arm and jaw, injuries so severe the medical staff refused to believe they had been inflicted by a father.

We grew up living with what World War II did to our fathers with their "surly moods and intermittent brutalities", as George Johnston put it in My Brother Jack, his brilliant novel about young men of our fathers' generation. Continue reading

Source

• Anne Summers in The Sydney Morning Herald

Anne Summers is the editor and publisher of the online magazine Anne Summers Reports.

The first national mosque open day, to be held on October 25, will see non-Muslims invited to take tours of mosques and to ask questions of Islamic leaders.

It will be followed by a "Walk Together" march in 20 cities organised by an interfaith group, Welcome to Australia.

The National Unity Day events were announced by Muslim, Christian and Jewish community leaders at Sydney's Pitt Street Uniting Church on October 8, the Guardian Australia reported.

The president of the Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA) in Australia, Samier Dandan, said the day was about "demonstrating to the wider community that our mosques are open", an openness he hoped would be taken up by in the general public.

"If you have a question, go straight to the source, do your own research, find out what a Muslim stands for, what a Christian stands for, what a Jew stands for.

"I guarantee that you that what you'll find is that 99 per cent between the different faiths is common," he said.

Mr Dandan said the LMA was implementing other interfaith projects, including organising visits between private Islamic and Jewish schools "to cross-pollinate their mindsets".

These moves come at a time when Muslims are feeling increasingly marginalised in Australia and there is disturbing evidence of hate crimes across the country.

Maha Abdo, the chief executive the Muslim Women's Association in Australia, said the debate around Islam in the past weeks, including last week's ban on people with facial coverings sitting in federal Parliament's open public gallery, had made Muslims "fearful and anxious".

But she was heartened by the backlash to the burqa decision, including Prime Minister Tony Abbott's request to Parliament's presiding officers to reconsider the ruling.

Uniting Church Australia president Reverend Andrew Dutney said it was important that Christians loved their neighbours as themselves.

Rabbi Adam Stein, from the conservative Kehilat Nitzan Synagogue in Melbourne, also leant his support to the initiative.

"A National Day of Unity helps us remember that there are more ­issues that unite us than divide us," Rabbi Stein said.

Sources

• Guardian Australia
• The Australian
• St George and Sutherland Shire Leader
• Image: The Guardian

"That would certainly strike me as highly unusual behaviour," Mr Abbott, a Catholic, told Fairfax Radio on Friday.

"Chemists should act professionally", he said.

Mr Abbott said, "If anyone has a problem with that, who has received that kind of material ... well I think they have a right to raise it with the various pharmaceutical bodies and say 'what's going on'?"

Mr Abbott's comments come after a social media campaign gathered momentum, attacking pharmacist, Simon Horsfall's anti-contraceptive stance.

Horsfall, who owns the pharmacy in Thurgoona, on the outskirts of Albury, refuses to stock condoms and the morning-after pill, and places a note inside each oral contraceptive prescription the pharmacy fulfils.

A portion of the note reads: "If your primary reason for taking this medicine is contraceptive then it would be appreciated, that in the future, you could respect our views and have your OCP prescriptions filled elsewhere."

The nearest pharmacy is 3km away.

Horsfall says he has slipped the note into pill packets for 12 years.

"It's about integrity, if you say one thing and do something else that is hypocricy. We practise what we preach," he said.

Speaking with 3AW, Kathleen Horsfall said the pharmacists don't impose their values on anyone. They sell the contraceptive pill to those who ignore their note, those with menstrual irregularity or problems with acne.

Pharmacy chain, Soul Pattinson released a statement late on Thursday saying it had ended its association with the Thurgoona pharmacy and did not support the chemist's stance on contraceptive products.

Simon Horsefall told The Border Mail, that Soul Pattinson knew he would not dispense the birth control pill for contraceptive purposes when they entered into an agreement with him four years ago.

Elsewhere in Victoria

Mulqueeny Pharmacy, which has stores in Melbourne's Windsor and in Swanston Street, also refuses to stock the morning-after pill but sells the oral contraceptive pill and condoms, reports West Australia Today.

Pharmacy proprietor Stephen Mulqueeny, a practising Catholic, said he refused to dispense the emergency contraception because his priest advised him against it.

Dr Sally Cockburn, better known in the media as Dr Feelgood, said one of her patients was refused access to the morning-after pill at the late-night Windsor pharmacy and was not told about the 72-hour grace period. She said the woman fell pregnant and had to have an abortion.

She called on more pharmacies to disclose their stance on reproductive services and said those that did should not be vilified.

Sources

• West Australia Today
• 3AW
• Image: The Border Mail

During the election campaign he told Neil Mitchell the 'tent city' asylum seeker policy would cost about $50 million to set up.

Abbott said reports of $75 a week in handouts for asylum seekers was incorrect - "we're looking at more like $5 a day (while in a processing centre)".

However, Mr Abbott wouldn't say what support would be provided outside the processing centre.

Father Frank Brennan, who is professor of law at the Australian Catholic University's public policy institute and a confidante of the Prime Minister, believes a deterrent is needed in the border protection policy mix but thinks that has to involve Malaysia and Indonesia and he's dismayed by the PNG plan.

According to Brennan "If the High Court were not to look at this we would be told that in jurisdictional terms the Australian executive government could do what it damn well likes and could never been supervised by the courts and could never again be supervised by the parliament. I think there's no way the High Court of Australia will wear that."

Brennan said he is "very concerned that what we've now got to is a situation when we go into electoral mode where we as Australians are led by politicians who trash the processes that are necessary for detailed bilateral negotiations with neighbours such as Indonesia and Malaysia."

Source

• ABC Transcript
• 3AW
• Image: 2.bp.blogspot.com

Yet the reality is that Abbott almost certainly is one of the most complex individuals ever to hold supreme political office in Australia.

Here we have a Rhodes Scholar - and no, Kevin Rudd never got one of those - who genuinely likes to call people "mate" and hit bushfires with blankets. A deeply religious man, who is massively pragmatic, both philosophically and temperamentally. A social conservative whose rightism does not necessarily extend very far into economics, and who is personally deeply tolerant. All this, plus being the opponent of same-sex marriage with a gay sister whom he deeply loves, and the constitutionally conservative monarchist who probably will put indigenous recognition into the Constitution.

Now we are left to discover the persona of our prime minister after his election.

Most of us - rightly - were appalled when Julia Gillard was vilified on the grounds of her gender, less often than was claimed by her supporters, but more frequently than is conceded by her detractors. We were particularly upset when she was characterised as a "witch", with all the negative female stereotyping this carried.

Yet many commentators routinely parody Abbott as "Father Tony", "Captain Catholic" or most commonly "The Mad Monk". Exactly why is religious vilification more acceptable than misogyny, and which part of the character of the appalling Grigori Rasputin is to be ascribed to Anthony Abbott? I suppose the imputation of giant genitalia might at least be considered flattering.

The reality is that Abbott will be influenced by his Catholicism in the same way as Gillard was influenced by her womanhood and Bob Hawke was influenced by his agnosticism: it will contextualise, but not define him. So Abbott will not move to outlaw abortion or criminalise contraception. He will not grant favours to his Catholic mates. Cardinal George Pell will not become Minister for Foreign Affairs.

But if we want to ponder things actually worth thinking about, it is a fair bet that Abbott's sympathy with indigenous people has something to do with his exposure to Catholic social justice theory. It also is highly likely that someone formed by the Jesuits is going to place at least a passing value on education. And anyone trying to predict Abbott's industrial stance would be well advised to at least factor in some fairly interesting Catholic intellectualism on the legitimate place of trade unions, as well as Hayek.

This type of analysis is important because we not only have a particularly interesting Liberal prime minister, but a particularly interesting Coalition government. This is not the old caricature of a club of capitalists leavened with a syndicate of squatters. This will be a government seeking to marshal some very different trains of thought. Continue reading

It is less well-known that his wife, Margaret is also a Catholic who was born and raised in Wainuiomata, a dormitory suburb nestled in a valley over the hill from Hutt City, just north of Wellington.

A former teacher who runs a community childcare centre in Sydney, Abbott's wife of 25 years - who once belonged to the Labour Party in New Zealand - remained in the background during the campaign, appearing with Tony only occasionally.Her parents Max and Gail Aitken, both Labour supporters, spent 25 years in Wainuiomata and now live in Hamilton.

Margaret Aitken took part in a pioneering Maori-language course as a schoolgirl. John Clarke, later to become Race Relations Conciliator and a member of the Waitangi Tribunal, set up the course at Wainuiomata College in 1971.

He says Margaret was "an excellent student and a lovely young lady". Margaret was one of a group of pakeha girls who took the course from third form through to sixth form."She was a very able student and she came from a very supportive, well-rounded family,"

Source

• The Sydney Morning Herald
• New Zealand Herald
• Stuff

The Australian opposition leader has refused to support either of the Government's versions of amendments which would have made a Malaysian deal lawful, and offered a third - his own.

Like Labour's, it is designed to accommodate a recent High Court ruling which blocked processing of boat people in third countries.

Abbott's amendments, which he was scheduled to take to his back benchers on Monday evening, would restrict off-shore processing to countries which had signed the UN Convention on Refugees, which would disqualify Malaysia.

In effect, that meant Nauru, which always had been the Opposition's preferred option.

Abbott said the Coalition still believed it could pursue its Nauru plan without legislative change, but wanted to work constructively with the government to put offshore processing beyond doubt.

"Let me make it crystal clear that we don't believe that the High Court decided the other week Nauru is ruled out and indeed the Solicitor-General confirmed Nauru was a viable option under the High Court's decision in our briefing on Friday," Mr Abbott said.

"But we do want to, as far as is reasonable, put these things beyond legal dispute and that's why we've put forward an alternative which is not open to legal disputation."

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen says the Federal Government will oppose the Coalition's proposed amendment

The Australian Catholic Bishops continue to favour on-shore processing of refugees. "As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, our proposal is that people be welcomed within the community and their claims for refugee status be processed within the community," said Father Maurizio Pettenà, director of the Australian Catholic Migrant and Refugee Office.

Listen to interview with Fr Pettenà

Source

• News.com.au
• The Australian
• Image: Perth Now