Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm regularly criticised for being overtly Christian. I'm told to keep my faith private, to leave it at the door of this chamber and to speak as though God is irrelevant and truth is negotiable. I just will not do that. I'm not merely a man with opinions. I'm a man under authority, and that authority is the authority of Christ and his church. That changes everything.

Christianity is not a lifestyle. It's not a cultural accessory. It is a total claim on the human person—on the mind, on the conscience and on the soul. Here's the reality that my critics refuse to admit: every single person in this chamber serves a doctrine of some sort. Some serve God; others serve Marxist ideology. Some serve the state or maybe even public opinion, but no-one is really neutral. So, when I'm told to leave my faith behind, what I'm really being told is: 'Abandon your authority and submit to ours instead.' No, I will not do that. I'll not trade eternal truth for political convenience. I won't bow to the false religion of relativism.

What we are really dealing with here is not the absence of religion but the rise of a new one. It's a creed without God, a morality without foundation. It's a system that demands obedience and calls it tolerance. Let's just be clear: the claim that religion has no place in politics is itself a dogma—an exclusive claim, a coercive claim. The question is not whether beliefs shape this place. They already do. We know that. The question is: which truth will govern us? When God is pushed aside, it is not neutrality that replaces him; it is power. The most oppressive regimes in history did not honour Christ; they rejected Christ. What followed was not freedom. It was control, it was persecution and it was suffering on an industrial scale. Don't tell me that taking God out of society makes it safer. It just makes it worse.

Let's speak plainly about what Christianity actually claims. What does it claim? It claims that Jesus Christ is God, that he rose from the dead and that he established a charge of authority to teach truth in every single age. Just look at the king that we proclaim. He's not a tyrant. He's not a conqueror. He's a king that was crowned with thorns, a king who went on to forgive his executioners, a king who laid down his life for his enemies. Do you know what? That is strength. That is power rightly ordered. That is the model that Christianity calls us to follow. It's not weakness and it's not chaos. It's discipline, strength and order towards truth and the good. Christianity also destroys the modern obsession with moral superiority, because no man earns salvation and no-one stands above another. We are all in need of mercy and in need of grace, which means that there is no room for the smugness, the posturing and the endless virtue signalling that now dominate public life. From that humility comes order, from that order comes justice and from that justice comes peace.

I ask you again: what kind of society does that produce? It sounds remarkably like the one that we all claim to want. Let's just be clear, again: I'm not going dilute my faith. I'm not going to pretend that truth is negotiable. I'm not going to speak as though Christ is optional. I serve a higher authority than this chamber, than this place, and that authority does not, and will never, change with the polls. A nation that rejects Christ does not become freer. It simply finds a new master; that's all. Some of you in this place don't serve the right master. I won't name names, but you know who you are.