Exploring Religion and Politics: Introduction

During the decade of conservative government under Prime Minister John Howard, religion acquired a political importance long absent from Australian public life. Those who looked to the election of a Labor government to change the situation might have been disappointed: incoming Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who had launched his bid for the Labor leadership by writing a widely discussed pair of articles about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, spoke regularly about his faith. His government’s first formal act in the new Parliament was a quasi-liturgical national apology to the Stolen Generation of Indigenous children taken from their families.