B.A. Santamaria: The Power of One
by Veronica Brady
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 60
Autumn 1998

The Catholic Church as saviour

SANTAMARIA'S VISION CAME FROM a radically different source to the quasi-socialist, unhesitatingly modern doctrines of post-War reconstruction. He was sure that human nature was hopelessly flawed and the Catholic Church was the only authority that could save humans from their self-destructive earthly passions. Political parties promoting a welfare and economic program were anathema to him.. He sums it all up himself: We tried to impart a vision of the land as the natural human habitat; of the family as the primary and indispensable social unit; of agriculture as the first and most indispensable industry; of a farm economy based, wherever climatically possible, on diversification of crops rather than on the then fashionable one-crop specialisation, pressing the point of diversification down to the production of most of the family's own food; of the Australian township as potentially the kind of social, recreational and educational centre that the English and European villages still remained after centuries of evolution."

Santamaria acknowledges that this vision "owed something to my own European peasant background". Its anti-modern populism sharply contradicts the modern cosmopolitanism of the Chifley Labor Government's post-War reconstruction program. As Professor O'Farrell notes: "what Santamaria and the Movement formed was a sect-that is, a group of dedicated men who were determined to put a Catholic social program into political action: they were setting out to reform the existing social order according to a doctrine or set of principles" (The Catholic Church and Community in Australian History, New South Wales University Press, 1992). This set of principles was the antithesis of Labor policy thinking.

Admirers of Santamaria's most recent attacks on economic rationalism have failed to appreciate that those attacks came from a religious nostalgia based on a medievalist doctrine and from a darkly negative pessimism about the possibilities for political reform in high modern politics. His criticisms of economic rationalism did not come from a fellow-travelling, late-in-the-day convert to Keynsian economics and a defence of the public good.

We have yet to see a detailed critical analysis of Santamaria's contributions to Australian public policy. When we do, we shall find that they have been terribly damaging to Australia's political life. They will show too that Australian Catholicism has a great deal to answer for by having permitted itself to be in thrall to what Max Charlsworth describes as Santamaria's sect-like machinations ("Australian Catholic Intellectuals", Australian Intellectuals and Social Movements, OUP, 1987).

His attacks on public enterprise, on the public good, that have been unleashed with such brutal effect over the past quarter century in this country are in no small part a consequence of Bartholomew Augustus Santamaria's theologically derived nostalgia and pessimism, a religious inheritance that still limits Australian Catholicism and Australian public policy.

If Catholics are ever to break free of this inheritance, they probably need to go back to Rerum Novarum and start all over again. It may not look like an easy task, but it is certainly an exciting challenge. One thing is sure, we can only take up such a challenge if we are clear about the mistakes that have been made along the way-in particular that many of these errors were contrived by the late B.A. Santamaria. No doubt he did so in good faith, bravely and with a religiously derived sense of duty. However, these virtues are not enough to save us from the oppression of a very narrow ideology.

To achieve this ideology, Santamaria focused first and foremost on institutions and the power structures within them. Power subsumed love and the ends justified the means. Contemporary thinkers such as Leszek Kolakowski and Charles Taylor point to an altogether different argument than the one pursued so trenchantly and for so long by Santamaria. This public theology, based on Christ's unwavering love for the unique person, necessarily defined the nature of human institutions and power structures, not the other way around.

To: Perspectives Issue 60

Allan Patience Allan Patience is Professor of Political Science at the Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne.