Catholics & the BallotForming Conscience for Australia's Elections

Where It Aligns

• Unambiguous defense of the unborn from conception to natural death - the strongest pro-life platform in the field.
• Defense of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and of the natural family as the foundational cell of society.
• Robust religious-liberty and religious-education platform, defending faith-based schools and parental rights.
• Child-protection commitment (ISP content filtering) protecting the young from the predatory content economy.

Where It Conflicts

• Small parliamentary footprint: platform is strong, but the votes of Australian Christians MPs are few, so the measured federal record is thinner than the pledge.
• Limited experience of the burdens of executive government; its pro-family and pro-life instincts have not yet been tested by the compromises of office.
• A broad single-issue tendency risks underweighting the full breadth of Catholic social teaching (economic ordering, immigration, the common good) beyond the non-negotiables.

Where It Aligns

• Consistent opposition to the culture of death and to gender ideology - the two areas where the modern secular project most directly attacks the non-negotiables. The 2026 pro-life policy pledges to roll back extreme late-term abortion, ban sex-selective abortion, restore doctors' conscientious objection, and mandate care for babies born alive.
• Defence of parental rights, free speech and conscience protects the domestic church and the Church's public witness; the free-speech policy seeks constitutional protection against censorship.
• Education policy rejects ideological shaming and returns to discipline, merit and free inquiry - closer to the Church's vision of education ordered to truth and the parents' prior right.
• Energy and climate policy rejects the net-zero alarmism the apostolate also identifies as a false gospel, backs reliable baseload power, and targets honest cost-of-living relief for families.

Where It Conflicts

• The immigration posture is defensible at its prudential core - ordered integration, a measured intake, and the protection of the inherited moral and religious culture are stands the Church's own tradition, from Aquinas on the limits of toleration (Summa Theologiae II-II.10) to the memory of Lepanto and Vienna, does not condemn and may commend. The deficiency is not the policy but the manner: where rhetoric or implementation treats the migrant as an enemy rather than a person, it fails the charity and the dignity of the person that Pacem in Terris and Caritas in Veritate still require.
• Nationalist framing can, at its edge, subordinate the universal common good to sectional interest. The Church honours a people's right to order its own common life and to prefer its own in care (Pius XII), yet not the absolutising of nation against the solidarity the faith still demands beyond the border.
• Its energy platform is not a rejection of stewardship. Fossil-fuel baseload is advanced as a short-term fix for an acute crisis - surging data-centre demand that risks an unsustainable grid and the cost-of-living burden on households - while One Nation backs the lifting of Labor's nuclear moratorium to open clean nuclear power as the long-term answer. The remaining prudential question is whether the transitional reliance on coal and gas is clearly framed as a bridge to nuclear, rather than an end in itself; the lack of that explicit stewardship frame is the gap, not the underlying policy.
• Positions are reactive and populist rather than rooted in Catholic social principles; the party has shown it can cut both ways, so consistency cannot be presumed.
• The conduct of its office-holders - provocative rhetoric and parliamentary stunts - has frequently cut against the comity and stewardship of public office that Aquinas's regnative prudence (Summa Theologiae II-II.50) and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine require; spectacle is not statesmanship.

Where It Aligns

• Social conservatism that more reliably defends life, marriage, and the family against metropolitan progressivism.
• Rootedness in land, family, and community resonates with the dignity of rural labour and place.

Where It Conflicts

• Agrarian socialism (subsidies, protection, state support for producers) jars the free-market and subsidy discipline of Centesimus Annus.
• Populist and sectional posture can narrow the universal horizon of the common good and Catholic charity (Caritas in Veritate).
• Consistency varies; positions often follow political expediency rather than principle.

Where It Aligns

• Strongest economic alignment of any major party: free enterprise, low and simple taxes, private property, subsidiarity (small business, red-tape reduction) and disciplined spending to pay down debt - squarely in the line of Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno and Centesimus Annus.
• The clearest break from climate-alarmist policy in the parliament: scrapping Net Zero mandates and the Safeguard Mechanism carbon tax, supporting affordable coal, gas and nuclear, and prioritising energy independence. This aligns with Benedict XVI's 'human ecology' (Caritas in Veritate 48-51) - the economy, jobs and families of real people are put before ideological green targets whose modelling has repeatedly failed.
• Affirmation of national sovereignty and the common good ordered to the universal destination of goods: debt discipline, the Future Generations Fund, secure borders, and protecting the regional communities that 'fuel, feed and power' the nation (Pacem in Terris).
• Family subsidiarity in childcare, health and aged care; backing educational basics (reading, writing, maths, attendance) and trades; encouraging work over welfare - consonant with Familiaris Consortio on the family as the first society.
• Linking skilled migration to genuine need and to housing capacity, and requiring Australian Values compliance, are prudential judgments well within the Church's teaching on the common good and an ordered political community (Pacem in Terris).

Where It Conflicts

• No coherent defense of the unborn. The platform is silent on abortion; the Liberal tradition treats it as a matter for individual conscience or the states. On the first non-negotiable - the Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae) - the Liberal Party remains in serious deficiency.
• In 2017 the parliamentary Liberals voted overwhelmingly to redefine marriage; only Russell Broadbent voted No, while Abbott, Morrison, Andrews, Hastie and Christensen abstained. The 2026 platform does not commit to restoring marriage as the union of one man and one woman (Familiaris Consortio).
• Weak on religious liberty: in 2022 five Liberal MPs (Archer, Zimmerman, Martin, Allen and Sharma) crossed the floor to strip the s 38(3) exemptions of faith-based schools, shelving the Religious Discrimination Bill. The current platform contains no Religious Discrimination Bill and no conscience protections for Catholic and other faith-based institutions (Pacem in Terris / Divini Redemptoris).
• Silent on gender ideology and parental rights - no commitment to resist self-ID laws or to protect children from contested gender curricula.
• The plan to reserve welfare and the NDIS to citizens, while fiscally prudential and grandfathered, must be measured against the universal destination of goods and the Church's insistence that the poor and the stranger are not to be abandoned (Compendium of the Social Doctrine 481-484).

Where It Aligns

• Historical defence of labour, the wage-earner, and the poor resonates with Rerum Novarum's core concern.
• Protective social safety net and public healthcare can serve the common good and solidarity.

Where It Conflicts

• Consistent expansion of abortion access (including late-term and Medicare-funded) places Labor in conflict with Evangelium Vitae.
• In practice, progressive social policy on gender and family often outpaces any robust defence of the domestic church.
• Economic tendency toward an enlarged, centralising state weakens subsidiarity.
• Labor increasingly binds itself to the Greens to retain office and Senate numbers - a party whose platform stands in direct opposition to Catholic teaching on life, family and religious liberty, and, on the apostolate's measure, on the defence of the innocent and public order. Preference deals, Senate bargaining, and legislative trade-offs with the Greens turn a partial alignment into a structural one: power is preserved by conceding ground to a party the Church cannot bless.
• The cost of that bargain is consistently compromised legislation. Concessions on gender-ideology curricula, the stripping of religious-school exemptions, the erosion of conscience protections, and the stalling of religious-discrimination law are the predictable price of staying allied to the Greens. Aquinas holds that the prudence of the ruler is ordered to the common good, never to the retention of office at the expense of the innocent (Summa Theologiae II-II.50; II-II.47 on prudence).

Where It Aligns

• Genuine concern for creation and the poor, which in principle echo Caritas in Veritate's call for integral human development.
• Defence of refugees and the marginalised can witness to the universality of human dignity.

Where It Conflicts

• Systematic advancement of the culture of death: abortion and euthanasia treated as rights, directly contrary to Evangelium Vitae.
• Endorsement of gender ideology and the redefinition of the family, contrary to Familiaris Consortio and the Church's anthropology.
• Economic program rooted in collectivism that strains against the private-property and subsidiarity principles of Rerum Novarum and Centesimus Annus.
• Religious-liberty tensions where conscience conflicts with progressive orthodoxy.

Where It Aligns

• Integrity and anti-corruption advocacy can serve the common good and the proper accountability of government.
• Some concern for climate stewardship, though the policy is the alarmist Net Zero framework rather than a Human Ecology approach.
• Independence from party machines frees the conscience to vote outside party lines on individual questions.

Where It Conflicts

• Voted to strip religious-school exemptions in 2022 - placing progressive anti-discrimination goals ahead of the freedom of Catholic and other faith-based schools to staff in their faith.
• No crossbench priority to restore conscience as a protected ground for medical refusal during the COVID mandate era.
• 'Progressive social values' on reproductive rights and gender identity conflict with Evangelium Vitae and the Church's anthropology of the body.
• Net Zero climate-alarmist policy conflicts with the Human Ecology frame and centrist economic prudence.
• Large gap between stated civil-libertarian integrity rhetoric and the actual COVID-voting and conscience record.