Easter brought out the godliness in political leaders

Various political leaders took the opportunity over Easter to appeal to their religious voters with messages of faith both phony and hypocritical. Paul Begley reports.

ABOUT 250 YEARS AGO, Samuel Johnson observed that “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. Johnson was not objecting to the idea of love of country but to snake-oil public officials selling the notion to gullible young men to make themselves sound virtuous in order to recruit cannon fodder for their wars.

Calls to patriots by public grifters are still a thing, but increasingly the most unctuous public scoundrels attach themselves to churches and religions. Their method involves referencing the language of faith, a word defined as a strong belief in a religious doctrine founded on spiritual conviction rather than proof.

As such, people of faith are open to abuse by shysters who sense the foundations of a business case taking root on fertile ground. As confidence tricksters, they prey upon the ignorance and gullibility of ready-made believers by confirming the assumption that pious declarations of faith in a deity are evidence of good character and trustworthiness, despite the very wealthy among their number being revealed as swindlers and fraudsters.

Religious feasts are off-the-rack opportunities for these scoundrels. The most recent examples occurred during the Christian feast of Easter. Ample calendar days enable political leaders of all stripes to derive some residual off-shoot to their credit by appropriating bits of the sacred narrative to suit their personal schemas.

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Donald Trump

The first cab off the rank in 2024 was former U.S. President Donald J Trump.

Just before the Easter weekend got into full swing on Maundy Thursday, he circulated a video spruiking a new product for sale to his millions of ardent donors. If they were to give him USD$60 (AU$90.68) plus shipping, they would receive an authentic USA Bible endorsed by DJT himself. Between its covers, they were promised the King James Version of the Old and New Testaments as well as copies of the Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.

Among book readers, Donald is on record as calling the Bible his favourite book ahead of his second favourite volume, The Art of the Deal. That would possibly make the former President a book reader, never to have read his two favourite books.

While Trump is credited as the author of his nominated runner-up, his ghostwriter would not be the only person to wonder whether Donald himself had ever read the published copy and his initial reluctance on national television to offer a single quote from his favourite book suggested to some unkind observers that he may never have opened its pages. He returned to the question at another time to offer his choice quote as “an eye for an eye”.

Peter Dutton

A day later, on Good Friday, one of Trump’s dutiful acolytes in the southern hemisphere took a cue from his American mentor.

There was no time to cobble up a book, but a quick godly video was not out of the question. It was not on brand for the current Leader of Australia’s Opposition, Peter Dutton, to engage in activity that could be characterised as virtue signalling. That would be “woke” and he hates woke.

Fortunately, a former colleague did Dutton the favour of calling him a thug on national television, a non-woke badge he appears to have since worn with pride.

Like his U.S. guru, he seems to like the idea of his voter cohort seeing him in the guise of a mobster who has the ticker to torture immigrants and foreigners with dark skin who have the hide to seek refuge in Australia from ever-present dangers to life and limb visited upon them and their families in their own lands.

But Dutton the mobster was put aside on Good Friday so that he could win credit for extolling to his own person the Easter virtues of ‘service and humility, gratitude and forgiveness, tolerance and love’. These attributes are orthodox Christian virtues, yet they are the very attributes Dutton has spent his political life flouting.

But hey, this was Easter, when we are permitted to take a leave of absence from reality to indulge in searches for chocolate eggs, make random references to a rabbit and sign up for virtues that would never pass muster at a mythological pub.

Mr Dutton went on to cite Reverend Martin Luther King Jr to let his voters know that death is more akin to a comma than a full stop in the ‘great sentence of life’. In what was a brazen reference to an iconic Black rights activist in Dr King, it’s worth a reminder that Dutton is the man who helpfully rang the alarm bells for Melbournians in February 2018 by informing them that African gangs were terrorising their town.

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He was the Morrison Government Immigration Minister at the time and seemed to know that the notion of “Black African” rather than “gangs” was the thought that best generated the sense of urgency and fear from which he was promising to protect the good people of Melbourne. The Black African alarm was followed in March 2018 by the same Minister promoting the idea of fast-track visas for South African White Christian farmers so they could emigrate to a “civilised country” on the other side of the Indian Ocean.

Easter gave Dutton the perfect opportunity to claim he was a man of faith and to cheerfully remind his followers that light prevailed over darkness and that the stock notions of death and reality had taken a holiday.

His message avoided anything like the idea that death is a leveller that places the powerless Black asylum seeker on an equal footing with his imperious White torturer.

Outside the cover of Easter, Dutton will still be here to remind us that powerless citizens and visiting immigrants with coloured skin need to know their place. Fortunately, he embodies the imperious leader who is always with us.

And by never surrendering to the soft touch that woke socialists fall for, Dutton stops the Black man at the border in the manner of the good shepherd Iago and, in so doing, protects the worthy fathers of Christian daughters from discovering that ‘an old black ram is tupping your white ewe’.

Anthony Albanese

Not to be outdone, Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, joined the 2024 Easter chorus with a video message on Sunday morning.

If his advisers reminded him that Australia is officially a secular nation consisting increasingly of citizens who have no religious convictions, he did not pay them much attention. He was interested in speaking to the large minority who in the last census declared a belief in a religion, many of whom were convinced that the god in which they believed is the one and only true god, and because that god is easily offended and somewhat needy, they feel obliged to take a firm stand on His behalf.

Easter is of particular interest to people of the Christian faith, some of whom are deeply invested in the notion of themselves as people of faith. Albanese wants their vote and opened his message with a somewhat clumsy acknowledgement that Easter Sunday is a “holy day that reflects on the resurrection” and, therefore, signifies the values of “hope and renewal”.

Unlike the Opposition Leader, who identified himself as a man of faith, the non-practising Catholic Albanese spoke as a virtual outsider acknowledging their day of faith and their belief in a political activist 2024 years ago being brutally killed by his enemies but rising from his tomb three days later.

The Prime Minister was more comfortable once he got over that hurdle and moved to a note of gratitude for those Australians working on the Easter long weekend.

On safer ground, he shifted focus from a god-fearing audience that was unlikely to receive him kindly to the many thousands of workers in retail, hospitality and essential services who turn up to work on a public holiday to make the day pleasant for the rest of us.

Had Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke given the Easter message, he might have found a way to allude to the thought that those workers are doing what the rest of us don’t want to be doing and deserve to be recompensed for it in a practical way.

That might mean obliquely referring to penalty rates in some form, but that is a Labor Party message, and for some reason best known to himself, Prime Minister Albanese increasingly steers away from those messages in favour of speaking in vain to Trump’s evangelicals and Dutton’s people of faith.

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Paul Begley has worked for many years in public affairs roles, until recently as General Manager of Government and Media Relations with the Australian HR Institute. You can follow Paul on Twitter @yelgeb.