Tony Abbott is the most prominent current Australian political leader with ties to the Labor Split of the 1950s, through his personal association with B. A. Santamaria, the leader of the Catholic Social Studies Movement.
The Movement was central to the politics of that Split. It produced the Democratic Labor Party which was not only anti-Communist and socially conservative but was also traditional Labor in its economic policies.
Other current politicians have connections through their parents and through its residue in party and union politics. But no one else has ties as deep as Abbott, who stresses the closeness of his association with Santamaria, his personal inspiration and mentor from school days onwards.
Abbott joined the Sydney University Democratic Club, supported by Santamaria's National Civic Council, before he moved on to the Liberals. Abbott often reflects on the consequences of this period, including the rise of Catholic Liberals. He has been known to observe enigmatically that the DLP is alive and well within his party.
Abbott has personified church ties with politics through his relationship with the man he has called his confessor, Cardinal George Pell. In the past the relationship of Catholics with their church authorities has contributed to Protestant distrust. And the Liberal Party has been deeply Protestant in its composition and beliefs.
As Malcolm Fraser recalls in his recent memoirs, when he asked his parents what was wrong with Catholics he was told 'Well, they are different. They are not Australians; they owe their loyalty to the Pope.' i
The transfer of Catholic allegiance from Labor to the Liberals at the parliamentary level has been the most dramatic shift in Australian politics over the past 50 years. The astounding numbers have attracted attention, but many questions have been left unanswered about the impact of their arrival on the party. Has the transfer shaped the Liberals, matters of life-and-death morality like euthanasia and abortion aside?
Abbott himself explored this question in his Sir Philip Lynch Memorial Lecture in 2004. He argued that the influx had 'broadened the Liberals' social and economic base' and made the party less starchy and more eclectic. It had changed Liberal culture by providing more feel for the underdog and making it less wowserish. But he concluded that there had been no really major distinctive Catholic contribution to party policy debates.
His analysis may be right but it neglects the more sensitive area of policy. Now Paul Kelly, the national political commentator in The Australian newspaper, has opened up a rich vein of speculation. In regards to Abbott's parental leave scheme, funded by a tax on big business, Kelly reckons he sees a distinctive Catholic Liberal approach, or at least an Abbott-Catholic Liberal approach.
In particular he recognises a Catholic social tradition as espoused by Santamaria, a tradition suspicious of the market and of big business. Kelly goes so far as to argue that this new policy 'shows Abbott's emotional preference for Santamaria over Howard'.
He argues that Abbott represents a departure from the Liberal mainstream. He makes him sound like the Independent Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine, another with deep roots on the Santamaria side of the Split and a commitment to Catholic social teaching.
Kelly needs a lot more evidence and more examples before his proposition holds that Abbott is deeply indebted to Santamaria in his policy stances. But he raises two fascinating questions. First, is Abbott drawing on some instincts deeply lodged in Catholic social teaching? The evidence is slight. Certainly if he is then it is just one strand in church thinking.
The second question is whether Abbott is a one-off or represents a larger group of Catholic Liberals. There are certainly enough other senior Catholic Liberals, like Joe Hockey, Kevin Andrews and Andrew Robb, to make a difference if they constitute a distinctive and coherent group. But in fact there are as many different types of Catholic Liberals as there are Labor sub-factions. They are on all sides of the party.
Nevertheless you can't change the demographics of a political party as much as the Liberals have changed without ultimately questioning aspects of party philosophy.
"Late in his life he began to write passionately against the dangers of "monopoly capitalism" and was consistent in his view that this represented as great a threat to civil society as communism. He wrote throughout the 1990s, in The Australian newspaper and elsewhere, that the debt-based monetary system, credit creation and the private ownership of major banking institutions were all fundamentally deleterious to good order and government, and that international investment banks based in New York, London and Frankfurt had taken effective control of the levers of Australian economic policy since the 1970s.
He was also concerned about the consistent contractionary economic policies pursued in the "pro-market" 1990s, which in his view had produced a long-term decline in real wages, which had in turn forced mothers into the workforce, and had then led to the breakdown of the family unit. Late in life, he continued to believe that the power of the "market" was the greatest threat to the survival of the family and, more broadly, of Western civilisation in the late 20th century.
He was consistent throughout his life in being a supporter of what he called the "Christian Democratic thesis". Based on his strong anti-socialist sentiments, his opposition to completely unrestrained capitalism as well as his support of traditional morals and ethics, many commentators have described Santamaraia as a national conservative."
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