(Aussie Opposition) Leader puts Christianity out in front

The Australian ^ | December 16, 2006 | Jeremy Roberts

[Dundee]

KEVIN Rudd says Australia is a predominantly Christian country with a "Catholic-Protestant" tradition that places the Christian churches ahead of other religions in relations between church and state.

Before taking on the job of Opposition Leader two weeks ago, Mr Rudd wrote in The Monthly that the divide between church and state must be broken down to avoid "a polity entirely estranged from truth".

Asked yesterday if he saw Christianity on a different level to other religions in church-state relations, Mr Rudd said: "The history of this country suggests that we come out of a strong Catholic-Protestant Christian tradition.

"According to census data, 70per cent of Australians ascribe a belief in the Christian God, that is just a fact, an historical reality, a truth ... and I don't see any particular problem with that."

Since Labor's 2004 election defeat under agnostic Mark Latham, Mr Rudd has sought to blunt the perception that the Coalition was the religion-friendly side of federal politics.

[Dundee]

Rudd may be a proud Christian but he is definitely in the minority among his fellow Labor politicians (who would sit comfortably on the left wing of the Democrats).

However, like all politicians he is two faced liar, as is revealed here:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20929336-7583,00.html

Kevin Rudd, in an 'exclusive' interview with The Age yesterday, on whether or not he's a socialist

NEW Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd has decisively moved to modernise the Labor Party's view of itself, rejecting socialism as an arcane, 19th-century doctrine and defining Labor's values as equality, solidarity and sustainability.

"It's critical that when we say to the Australian people that we want to construct an alternative vision for Australia, that they know the values for which we stand. Socialism isn't one of them," Mr Rudd told The Age.

"Any political party has to be absolutely confident in the objectives for which they stand. I am not a socialist. I have never been a socialist and I never will be a socialist."

Rudd, in The Australian Financial Review on February 7, 2003:

I MAKE no apologies for being a bit of a God-botherer ... I am an old-fashioned Christian socialist.

Rudd, in The Monthly (October 2006), on his Christian socialist heroes:

THIS progressive social-democratic impulse is also reflected in an entire tradition in modern Western politics, now over 150 years old, called Christian socialism. James Keir Hardie, the founder of the British Labour Party, was a Christian socialist, as was Andrew Fisher, the first majority Labor prime minister of Australia. For his part, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a committed social democrat, although he did not use the term Christian socialist to describe his own politics. Nonetheless, his writings on otherness and the oppressed fit well within this perspective. It is a view of politics that seeks to enlarge society, rather than contract it into a colony of self-contained white picket fences.

[SevenofNine]

AD you hear of this politican what he really like