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Daddy Will Have Been Pleased

Wednesday, 28th June, 2006

Kim Beazley is clearly a dutiful son. He used his last question before the House of Representatives adjourned for the winter recess to advocate the policies of an organisation of which the patron is the Hon. Kim Beazley Snr, A.O., M.A.Hons., F.A.C.E., Hon.D.Litt. (Sydney & WA) LL.D. (A.N.U) and Minister for Education 1972-75.

The subject was internet pornography and the Opposition Leader wanted Prime Minister John Howard to explain why he continued to refuse to adopt Labor's clean-feed policy to block internet porn at the ISP level. “Why does the Prime Minister continue to ignore,” he asked, “the views of the Australian Families Association and 62 members of his own backbench by refusing to block pornography at the source?”

With the Government, the previous day, having announced that it would provide filtering software free to families, Mr Howard did that rare thing for House of Representatives question time and provided a short answer that actually was an answer. He said the reason the government adopted its policy was it achieved the goals of providing protection for Australian children “without imposing the unreasonable restrictions and cost burdens of the Labor Party's policy.”

Restricting the access by children to pornography on the internet is thus a rare case of role reversal where Labor adopts the policy of concerned Christians and the Coalition takes a more liberal line with fewer restrictions on the freedom of people to read what they want to.

If the Liberals and Nationals were influenced in their decision by a communications industry that wanted to avoid the onerous task of blocking pornography to all internet users with its difficulties, costs and potential penalties, then Labor was undoubtedly influenced by Mr Beazley's dad.

The Australian Family Association was founded by B.A.Santamaria and along with Mr Beazley Sr has Dame Elizabeth Murdoch among its patrons.

The Opposition Leader's father has a long association with Christian organisations and he was an active member of the Moral Rearmament Movement (now called Initiatives of Change) for much of his parliamentary career. Early in Beazley Sr's parliamentary career he faced what the Initiatives of Change website calls a turning point. At an MRA world assembly in Switzerland , he was challenged to seek God's guidance, having “nothing to prove, nothing to justify and nothing to gain for yourself." It was “a shockingly subversive thing to say to someone in politics," admitted Beazley. But according to the website he took it seriously. At the end of his 33 years in Parliament he said:

“I've become convinced that this question of motive is the key to social truth. If your motive is the truth, you will be fit for power... There is sanity from the Holy Spirit beyond human ideas of justice. The thoughts of God, given primacy in the life of a man, bring to the innermost motives the virtue of mercy, and with it the cure for hatred that can turn the tide of history. This is the essence of intelligent statesmanship.”

It seems the son has inherited some of the same views.

Note:

Initiatives of Change describes itself as a diverse, global network committed to building trust across the world's divides. It comprises people of diverse cultures, nations, beliefs and backgrounds who are committed to transforming society through change in individuals and relationships, starting in their own lives.

It was first known as The Oxford Group, arising from its work among university students in the late 1920s. In 1938, as European nations re-armed military, its originator, Frank Buchman, called for ‘moral and spiritual rearmament' as the way to build a ‘hate-free, fear-free, greed-free world'.

Following World War II, Moral Re-Armament (MRA), as it had become known, launched “a programme of moral and spiritual reconstruction to foster change in private and public life based on a change in motivation and character.”

It changed its name from MRA in 2001.