Puritanical Left Puts Perrottet In Pillory

A non-religious opinion columnist looks at the anti-Catholic animus against the new Leader of the NSW Liberal Party and Premier of NSW, Dominic Perrottet.

From The Australian

By Janet Albrechtsen

NSW has a new leader, a smart young man, married, with children, who hails from the conservative wing of the Liberal Party. He is also a Catholic. And that is enough for a wicked strain of anti-Catholicism to emerge, as some on the left indulge in their favoured blood sport.

Even before Dominic Perrottet was elected on Tuesday, his religion featured in ABC headlines so everyone understood a “conservative Catholic and father-of-six … will be NSW’s next premier”. Oh my, a family man with six kids? Would five kids warrant this headline? What about four? 

The ABC’s 7pm news turned to Jane Caro to tell us Perrottet’s Catholicism is a problem for women. I’m a woman and not a Catholic, and Perrottet is not a problem for me. That is sloppy journalism. 

ABC’s AM program on Tuesday presented another dire warning about his religion. 

When Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister, ABC headlines didn’t focus on his Catholicism, presumably because staff members were thrilled their secular Messiah had replaced Tony Abbott. It was the same when Joe Biden, another Catholic, became US President.

After Abbott became prime minister in September 2013, the ABC’s The World Today asked: “So how will Mr Abbott’s Catholicism influence his term as prime minister?” Unlike Turnbull’s Catholicism, Abbott’s faith featured in endless ABC musings about keeping religion out of politics. 

How did Abbott’s Catholicism influence the nation when he was prime minister? He abstained from voting on same-sex marriage in parliament because he said he did not want to stand in the way of the plebiscite vote that supported that important reform. There it is. Our own Handmaid’s Tale featuring Abbott. 

Anti-Catholicism was in full swing when The Sydney Morning Herald ran a piece on Monday by Stephanie Dowrick, a self-described social activist and minister, warning readers “within a day, it is possible that NSW, the most progressive state in the federation”, might have a premier with “views that represent the most extreme end of a rigidly male-dominated institutional church”. 

Dowrick’s views are shared by many on the left who likely would never stoop to attack a political leader for being a Muslim, Sikh or Buddhist. Instead, they seem happy to reboot the anti-Catholic sectarian bigotry that disfigured Sydney until post-war immigration and multiculturalism made it completely unacceptable. We saw hints of this in the Cardinal George Pell witch-hunt and it is reaching full flower in some sections of the progressive media. 

The author’s swingeing attempt to paint Perrottet’s Catholicism and Scott Morrison’s Pentecostal faith as non-mainstream ignores the fact millions of Australians – 61 per cent according to the last census – regard faith and spirituality as important to their lives. Twelve million Australians call themselves Christian and 43 per cent of them are Catholic. Pentecostalism has 644 million followers worldwide and about 500,000 in Australia. 

With numbers like that, some believers even may read the Herald, only to be told Perrottet’s Catholicism and Morrison’s Pentecostalism render both men, and presumably people who share their faiths, unsuitable as leaders. 

With no sense of irony, Dowrick said: “Fundamentalisms vary greatly. What they have in common, though, is a narrowness of conviction that cannot be challenged by logic, evidence or appeals to reason. In private life, this causes sometimes irredeemable rifts between friends or family members. In public life, it drives attitudes and often policies that may be severely at odds with the central demands of democracy.” And: “Fundamentalist thinking is also highly divisive. The world consists of ‘us’ – and the rest of you. High levels of conformity are demanded; to doubt, self-question, is unwelcome or forbidden.” 

I’m not religious so I won’t quote the King James version of the Bible. The World English Bible will do just fine: “You hypocrite! First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye.

The left has little self-awareness of the fundamentalism within its ranks. Shaming an entire race for their alleged white privilege is much weirder than believing in the Bible, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in loving God, your friend, your neighbour, your fellow man and woman as you would yourself.

Think climate zealots who deride as deniers people who are curious about climate; critical race activists who impose a race filter on every action; #MeToo activists who would dump due process and head straight to a public witch-hunt; and the cancel mob that can’t bear to hear views that differ from its own. In so many areas, the left’s puritanical positions are resistant to logic, evidence or appeals to reason. 

Where is the solid evidence that Perrottet is a poor choice of leader because he is Catholic? Some on Twitter thought they located the gotcha moment, recalling that Perrottet voted against the NSW abortion bill in August 2019. Except other leadership contenders, including Rob Stokes and Mark Speakman, who hail from the so-called moderate wing of the NSW Liberal Party also voted against the bill. 

The bill was put to a conscience vote for good reason. These issues are personal, not just for people of faith. If euthanasia comes before the NSW parliament, as it should, Perrottet has committed to a conscience vote, too. Good and decent people may disagree without being labelled religious reactionaries. 

Attacks on Perrottet for muddling church and state are spurious, without evidence. Maybe what upsets the anti-Catholic brigade more than Perrottet’s Catholic faith is that he believes in the family, small government, the dignity of work and lower taxes, traditional values of personal responsibility and freedom. Like his predecessor Gladys Berejiklian, he is not from the numbskull school of kneejerk lockdowns. 

Importantly, these values are social and political in nature, common to people of every stripe of religion and people with no religious faith, too. As Premier, Perrottet has a chance to put those values into practice. If that upsets the anti-Catholic brigade, it augurs well for the mainstream people of NSW who don’t buy into bigotry or omnipresent government control over their lives. 

Janet Albrechtsen is an opinion columnist with The Australian. She has worked as a solicitor in commercial law, and attained a Doctorate of Juridical Studies from the University of Sydney. She has written for numerous other publications including the Australian Financial Review, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sunday Age, and The Wall Street Journal.