The state of Victoria has served up yet another watershed moment in the decline of freedom of association. Back in October, Andrew Thorburn was forced to choose between his new job at the Essendon Football Club and his conservative church. This time, Liberal Party candidate Renee Heath is a victim of guilt by association.
Once again, the issue is Christianity. Heath, a conservative Pentecostal, is running as the lead Liberal Party Upper House candidate in the Eastern Region. Liberal leader Matthew Guy regretfully told the media she will remain as the Liberal candidate. But he would obviously love to move her on, and he made it clear she will not be sitting in the party room.
This is an extraordinary event for two reasons. One, Heath, like Thorburn, has never said or done anything to provoke the wrath of those operating the tolerance buzzsaw. Her sin, like Thorburn’s, was associating with a church that holds conservative views on sexuality and abortion.
Heath’s church is City Builders, a conservative ‘charismatic’ church that aims to ‘reach our world, build [God’s] people and transform our city with the life-changing message of Jesus’. This is a pretty bog-standard purpose statement for an evangelical Protestant church. If you remove the bit about Jesus, it could be the purpose statement of Matthew Guy’s Liberals.
Essentially, City Builders is a church that aims to reach out with the Christian message, which should be hardly surprising. Heath’s father, Brian, is the senior pastor. City Builders also, reportedly, harbours some fringe teachings about conversion therapy. Perhaps there are some things at City Builders that not everyone will agree with, but aren’t the Liberal Party about freedom for the individual?
Not anymore. And here’s the catch – Renee Heath has publicly distanced herself from conversion therapy in an interview on Sky News Australia. This denial makes her effective dis-endorsement by Matthew Guy all the more galling. Heath is not barred from the Liberal party room because of anything she says or thinks. She is barred because of who she worships with.
The second reason this event is extraordinary lies in the behaviour of the Liberal Party and its leadership. The response of Guy, and the party machine, reveals how far the Victorian Liberals have fallen. Once the party of Robert Menzies and Henry Bolte, the party of the forgotten people and the battlers, the Liberals are now frantically playing politically-correct catch-up with the most extreme Labor government in Australian history.
Instead of standing up for his own candidate, who will almost certainly be sitting in the Legislative Council come December, Matthew Guy has chosen to parrot his opponent. Heath’s ‘ultra-conservative’ and ‘extreme’ views are unconscionable for Guy, who said that he doesn’t want the Liberals linked ‘in any way to practices which we don’t agree with’.
The Liberal leader seems to be singing from the same song sheet as Dan Andrews. The Premier said that ‘there is no place for some of those extreme views’ in Victoria. Guy’s most telling comment was about the possibility of dis-endorsing Heath. The only reason she won’t be removed from the Liberal ballot is that ‘it is too late to dis-endorse candidates’. Heath is lucky to even be on the Liberal ticket.
But who would want to be, given the shambolic, unprincipled mess that they present? The Liberals claim to believe in basic freedoms, including freedom of association and freedom of religion. But this freedom evidently only extends as far as the front steps of Liberal Party Headquarters. Matthew Guy found Heath guilty by association and she is now on the outer.
We wouldn’t expect the Essendon Football Club to defend a conservative Christian. But even the Liberal Party leadership won’t defend the freedom of conservative Christians to associate. With the Liberals turning into jellyfish, Victorians who care about democratic freedoms face a choice on Saturday between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I don’t envy them.
Simon Kennedy is a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland
