Queensland Senator Matthew Canavan has never shied away from his Catholic faith, but the new Nationals leader says he is not in the business of salvation – and he warns anyone from thinking the state should be.
“I agree with CS Lewis, that the state’s there to help people have ordinary happiness,” he said.
“I can’t save your soul, but I can make this life be a little bit happier, particularly for families, a little more care free.”
He said not many Australians were having carefree Sunday afternoons lately.
“They’d be worried about their bills, worried about fuel supplies now, worried about interest rates going up potentially this week, there’s a lot of anxiety in life and I’d just like to give people their carefree Sunday afternoons back again,” he said.
Canavan emerged from the Nationals party room as leader last week, tearing up the record books as the first Nationals leader to hold a seat in the upper house in 106 years.
He told The Catholic Leader he felt energised by the outcome but said it was “not about becoming leader”, instead about “doing something as leader”.
More babies
One of Canavan’s top priorities is seeing Australians have more babies.
The most up to date ABS data put the fertility rate at 1.48 babies, which falls short of the prized replacement rate of 2.1 babies.
Canavan chalks the decline up to a proportionate decrease in Australia’s assistance to families.
He said when the Howard Government left office in 2007, the birth rate was near replacement levels, but has declined since.
“But what has also declined that’s less commented about is that the amount of family assistance provided in the budget has fallen as a proportion of our economy,” he said.
“With less assistance going to families, we’ve ended up with fewer babies.”
He said part of the solution was alleviating some of the pressures on the childcare system but he was also interested in casting the net wide for other solutions that could provide “more choice to parents”.
Boosting childcare “still doesn’t necessarily provide the kind of life that a new mother often wants and father wants – they want to spend more time with their newborn baby,” he said.
Christianity on the comeback
As the Brisbane Archdiocese prepares to receive more than 450 adults into the church at Easter, Canavan said spirituality and Christianity as a subset was “making a massive comeback”.
“People want meaning in their life and the material, consumerist society that we’ve been lumped with doesn’t fill the gaping hole in people’s lives,” he said.
He has held concerns for a long time that this meaning gap could give rise to “lots of more extreme ideologies”.
Australia, he said, was “extremely lucky to be a society based on Christian principles, especially the sacredness of the individual”.
Still, he said, there was “a genuine debate about whether you can have a Christian-based society without a large number of practicing Christians in it”.
“I think it’s a risk that if Christianity fades away, we may end up in a very different approach to society, to government, then we have in all our time as Australians,” he said.
Missed phone calls
Canavan said it was a “real loss” to him that the late former Senator Ron Boswell, who was farewelled at a state funeral in St Stephen’s Cathedral earlier this year, was not around to pick up the phone to share advice.
“I could have really done with that in the last week,” he said.
Canavan and Boswell had a close friendship for many years after Canavan took Boswell’s place on the ticket after his retirement.
“In saying that, I wouldn’t have had to pick up the phone – he would have called me, called me multiple times,” he said.
“I do pray, I pray to him and I pray to others, that’s all I can do now.
“I hope he’s looking down happy.”
This article was originally published at The Catholic Leader and is reproduced with permission.
