WHY RELIGION AND POLITICS MUST BE SEPARATED.

People say that the two subjects you should avoid discussing are religion and politics. When you get the two of them together, you can have a powder keg with a short fuse attached to it.

Well, last Friday, the former NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, a woman who the Prime Minister held up as having the “Gold Standard” for COVID19 tracing and management (for no other reason, probably, than they are both from the same political party) was forced to resign over matters involving her former lover and findings of the Independent Commission Against Corruption. The irony is, the Liberal Party of NSW wanted to establish such a body against Labor Party corruption, yet Gladys was the second NSW Liberal Premier to have to resign due to findings by ICAC.

Now, NSW has a Premier who is a member of Opus Dei and is a conservative Catholic in the same vein as the fool who embarrassed Australia for 726 days. Many of us, who did not want to see that fool as leader, felt that way because of that fool’s performance as Health Minister. Two things on which I vehemently disagreed with him were, his stance on RU-486, a medical abortion drug, and allowing 16–17 year old’s parents access to their medical records.

I remember the Year Co-Ordinator at my old high school, when I was in Years Eleven and Twelve, saying when people made frivolous complaints about the school uniform (one such complaint was opposition to tucking your sweatpants into your socks by the Deputy Principal. I pointed out that in my first two years at high school, in winter, long grey trousers were an option for winter, but my mother wouldn’t buy me a pair because she thought I would grow out of them too quickly. Having to wear shorts in the middle of winter was awful as in some conditions, your legs could chafe from the cold. We were the first high school to be allowed to wear sweatpants, and I said that you only had to observe it at school.) that as a parent, he loved the school uniform, as it was easy to clothe his kids for school, but as a teacher, he hated it, because he had to spend time enforcing it. Now, a right-winger said to me, that if he couldn’t enforce the uniform, what good was he as a teacher, to which I say, there were some kids at my school who persisted in wearing the wrong uniform. My school had a strict policy that the dress uniform and the sports uniform were separate and were not to be mixed and matched. If, once in the proverbial blue moon, you wore the wrong bits because the washing machine broke down and the only clean items you had were your sports uniform socks and dress uniform, okay, bring a note. But some did so not for comfort reasons, but because they thought they could challenge authority.

To be a politician, you have to stand for something, but there also comes a time whereby you can have to put your personal feelings aside for matters that don’t concern you. My father worked with one man who, an this was just manipulation to get his own way, claimed that his company issued Falcon was dangerous and that the rear doors flew open when he went around corners, so my father said, “Okay, leave your keys there and I’ll get you another one,” and the man said, “No, no, it’ll have the same problem.” So, my father said, “Okay, you have two choices. You can either accept your Falcon and do your job, or you can just leave your keys here and resign.” The man chose the latter.

On issues such as abortion and euthanasia, you can have to say, “Okay, as a Catholic, I oppose these measures, however, they will not impact upon my life or my faith, so I can vote in favour of them.” If you can’t do that, then you can’t be a politician. By all means, you can attend church every Sunday, you can attend Mass everyday and twice on Sunday, if you wish, but if you can’t stop your personal faith from interfering in issues that do not impact upon you, then you have to question whether politics is right for you. And let’s not forget, the Australian Constitution is firm about freedom of and from religion.