Minor Christian parties: is there a resurrection in sight?

Clearly, some formal alliance or coalition between the minor Christian parties is needed to address failing. This should be based on down-the-line Christian commitments to life, marriage and family. It should also consider encompassing other policy areas such as border protection and climate change.

Most importantly, any alliance should seek to separate the majors and other minor parties from the Greens, Sex Party and HEMP Party. A no compromise preference agreement should ensure that any other minor party that seeks to enter into a preference arrangement with these radical, far left parties will be preferenced collectively by the Christian minors after both the Liberal and Labor parties. Furthermore, pressure should be applied on Labor to preference the minor Christian parties in the Senate ahead of these far left alternatives. If a Green/Labor alliance has left a sour taste in the mouths of Australians, Labor is hardly going to want to publicly defend preference deals with either of the Sex or HEMP Parties. Besides, these parties have no option but to preference Labor ahead of the Liberals anyway, so a minor Christian alliance would have some bargaining power.

Such an alliance will do three things. Firstly, it will greatly increase the chance of the minor Christian parties at the next election. Secondly, it will make it much more difficult for the Greens to be elected, which should be a public aim of the Christian political collective. Thirdly, even if a Christian candidate is not successful, a Christian alliance will have a huge say on who is. This will raise influence and increase the political dependence of all other parties on the Christian vote – especially middling powers like Clive Palmer.

All of this should be possible. And it will support efforts of the minor Christian parties to increase their vote.

At the last election there was a swing against them, even though homosexual marriage was a prominent issue of the campaign. Obviously, the entrance of both the Palmer United Party and the Katter's Australian Party had some impact. But the main reason is because the minor Christian parties simply failed to effectively attack the Liberals from the right. This meant that Christian voters who might have been persuaded to leave a weakening Liberal Party were given no reason to do so. And I certainly spoke to many people who sympathise with Family First but who believed that the best way to ensure Kevin Rudd's marriage plans were sunk was to vote for the Liberals.

This is where the Greens, of all parties, should be a source of inspiration. It is a great credit to them politically that they have been successful. And that success has been based on identifying left-leaning Labor voters and picking them off with a hardline approach to politics. You don't hear the Greens apologising for their views. And you don't see them acting as shrinking violets in the public eye. The minor Christian parties need to take a leaf from their book and adopt the same approach with the Liberals on their battlegrounds of the right: life, marriage and family.

There is always fertile ground for a minor Christian party ready to enter the debate on abortion. Major parties steer clear of the issue precisely because they know it is internally divisive and that they will lose votes. A minor Christian party that is too timid to debate this issue is simply wasting its time.

However, four other areas immediately spring to mind that will bear fruit for a Christian alliance.

The Liberal Party is weakening by the day on homosexual marriage and is ripe for attack from the right. It will take courage, but minor party politicians can't win without it.

On climate change, the Liberals are continuing with an illogical plan to spend billions on direct action. It is clear that they don't believe in climate change. The minor Christian parties should pressure the Liberals into an embarrassing backdown on the issue, or swoop on voters who want all climate change policies scrapped.

The minor Christian parties should defend ferociously the rights of Christians to speak their mind. They have been given plenty of ammunition by the New South Wales Administrative Decisions Tribunal order that Australian Christians candidate, Tess Corbett, apologise for raising her concerns that paedophiles might use anti-discrimination laws to secure rights as homosexuals have. If they don't fight this one, not only are the minor Christian parties giving up a golden opportunity to prise Christian voters from the Liberals, but they will stand idly by while their own candidates are muzzled by unelected bodies.

Finally, on border protection, the minor Christian alliance should be a thorn in the side of the Liberals. It is the biggest political issue of all, and Australians simply want to see the boats stopped. If they are not, the only reason the Liberals will be allowed to get away with it is because the minor parties fail to step into the breach. Labor and the Greens simply have no credibility in the area and it must be attacked from the right. Here the Christian parties must also stave off a threat from Clive Palmer. If he moves in on border protection, there will be no way a Christian alliance will gain any airplay on the issue. The Christian parties must mark their territory on border protection, and soon.

If the four minor Christian parties can get their act together on preferences and boldly stand their ground on core values, they could reshape Australian politics. And while there is simply no chance that they will be elected to the lower house anytime soon, they may well remove the Greens from the Senate. Even the majority of non-Christian Australian voters would support that.