Will he rise again? The second coming of Eric Abetz

Clouds of yellowing leaves and a tall white spire behind: the Christian Reformed Church of Kingston, south of Hobart, is surrounded by elms — none of your evergreen stuff. The Easter Sunday sky is grey and wan, a festival of rebirth, but in the autumn. Ahead, families are walking in, three, four, five children, teenagers in crocodile file between parents, the car park is filling. They are coming for the ceremony of the resurrection. So am I, in a way — for I am on the trail of Kingston CRC’s most celebrated son (OK, second-most celebrated): Senator Eric Abetz, fighting for his political life, as the third part of the Liberal Senate team’s holy trinity.

Kingston and the Christian Reformed Church is — or was, until recently — Abetz Central, the state’s number one conservative representative, as Tasmanian, and as resemblant to, a souvenir apple core with a faced carved into it. Kingston and the CRC has been his base for decades, and they have served him dutifully and well. Alas, no longer. The Liberal Party has long wanted to rid themselves of this meddlesome adenoidal-voiced priest, and now the deed has been done by Abetz’s former COS, now Senator, Jonathon Duniam, a CRC member himself, with Eric dumped to the third slot. Eric never saw it coming, apparently. If only there were a book that told a story like that…

So Eric is running a vote below the line, put Eric first. That is more of a possible goer than in any other states. Tasmanians love to vote below the line, see it as a sort of political Keno, pride themselves on their sure-footedness in placing 50-plus numbers correctly, love a preference flow of leaping arabesques across the ticket, National Party to SDA Labor to Team Lambie to an independent who thinks Birds Aren’t Real, and so on.

So for the past few weeks, Eric has been put-put-puttering around the state, doing small events, and putting up his deliberately artless signs, a white billboard with a driving licence pic and “Eric Abetz Puts Tasmania 1st” in blue Times New Roman, quite possibly the first campaign laid out on WordPad and sent straight to the printer.

His events are doubtless fire-breathing denunciations of creeping communist infiltration, Chinese influence and progressive godlessness aimed at an aged crowd, many of whom might believe that their beloved Liberal Party has gone the same way. He needs about 20,000-25,000 primary votes to be in the hunt, and a good slice of the minor right preferences. In 2019, the Liberal overquota distribution got Jacqui Lambie over the line, before One Nation preferences were distributed. If the Lambie team’s primary lowers enough, he might be able to leapfrog them from second. 

But Eric has several obstacles in the way, the principal one being that he has spent decades drilling party discipline into his conservative base (well, second — his first worry might be that a cold Autumn and the Tasmanian health system will carry too much of his base away). For decades he has drilled into these congregations, in Kingston, Launceston, Ulverstone, Burnie and elsewhere that they have to stick with the party. No matter how much the party got captured by the trendies and multiculturalists and all, stick with the strength and campaign from within. 

And it’s worked. If any state branch was going to have a major defection to its right, it might have been in Tasmania. The state was dominated by (right-wing) Labor for six decades. Since the 1980s, the Liberals have power-shared, and now have a narrow edge. But it means his own church base has swung against him, and now he has to try and get some of them back. Whatever he’s saying to small audiences gathered in church halls and living rooms across the state, we the media are not privy.

Repeated contact with Eric’s office has gone unanswered. So I thought I would come south and beard the lion in his den, to coin a phrase, knowing that he would have to turn up to his own parish on Resurrection Day. Lo, he was, but it was a strange sight, this man of old Tasmanian bearing, reserved of manner, in a once-stern Protestant sect now given over to happy-clappiness. 

The Christian Reformed Church is responsible for quite a fair slice of modern Tasmania, it must be said. Founded by two Dutch families, whose men were brought over as water engineers for the Tasmania hydro-electric corporation in the 1950s, they soon used their expertise in poured concrete to start construction businesses which spread across the state. They were Dutch neo-Calvinists, loaded with the sense that work was goodness and one’s appetite for it might prove thee of the elect, predestined to avoid hell.

Settling in Kingston, south of Hobart, a hamlet largely composed of beach shacks, they built the place into an outsize regional town of such witless, head-banging ugliness — concrete arcades and petrol stations — that it serves as a standing repudiation of the sinful pleasure of aesthetics, almost a relief after all the Tasmanian pretty-pretty. Their building firms still dominate: their supermarket chain, Purity Grocers, became Woolworths, and the state is pretty much Woolworths Island. They only began admitting non-family and fellow Dutch to the church in the 1970s. 

One of the first to join was a young German-descended chap named… Eric Abetz. His aw-shucks, Mr-Smith-Goes-to-Canberra manner is, of course, a put-on: he was a mover and shaker in Uni of Tasmania student politics — now there’s a small sandpit — before he saw the light and set his cap firmly in the direction of the Dutch. He became the golden boy, then the big daddy, of Liberal politics, with a ready-made national network.

I took a seat at the back of the hexagonal pine-and-exposed-brick auditorium and searched the crowd for him. He wasn’t up the front in a reserved pew (grey stackable chairs, actually), and for a moment I thought he might have stayed up northwest, where he is doing a lot of campaigning, and be speaking in tongues in Ulverstone. But no, there he was, near the back — amid the colourful shirts and floral print dresses, the Rip Curled teens and two or three crusty, saved meth-heads — wearing a dark-blue shirt, his grey hair a dash of pomade shining in clear light.

People around him are swaying to the youf band made up of two guitars, keyboards and drums, but he remains erect. Goddammit, this hunch actually worked! The best feeling of this gig. Lo, I searched for him, and he is risen. What sort of hellfire and brimstone were we in for now?

Not a lot, as it turned out. These hills would have once echoed to the mixture of thundering dour and joy of a Dutch elect in a new world, that mix of melancholy and hope. Now the young pastor in a Miller shirt and jeans stands before a big screen and flicks through a PowerPoint presentation while preaching in the tongue of the people.

“Imagine ya had a tree.”

[Picture of a tree]

“Imagine it was a jackfruit tree.”

[Picture of a jackfruit tree]

“Now imagine the tree produced this.”

From a stand, he produces an enormous, silver-wrapped Easter egg — huge, redolent of a child’s view of an Easter egg, larger than could be imagined.

“You’d be pretty surprised, wouldn’t you? You’d be ASTONISHED.”

Well, it’s neat. Take the pagan symbol of Easter, its cheap desire, and make it the resurrection. The emphasis is on Jesus’s return to life, guaranteeing that you will never die. A little therapeutic, a little transactional. A lot about the Son, very little of the Father.

We get the prayers, and then the greeting. I turn to the mumsy woman next to me, in white and strawberries floral-print blues, and sporting an arm sling.

“He is risen.”

“He is risen, indeed.”

“Are you new here?”

“I’m from Melbourne, here on, uh, business. Thought I’d take a look.”

“You are welcome.”

“Thank you. What happened to your arm?”

“Oh, I sprained it playing pickleball.”

“Pickleball?”

“It’s a combination of badminton, table tennis and netball.”

“Is it, uh, native to Kingston?”

“No, it’s American. I went up for a high tap and came crashing down.”

“How does the, um, table tennis component fit in?”

“Oh, with the paddles.”

“Ah… you’re sort of standing up… but you’re hitting… across a net…”

“Yes!”

The band starts to kick in, the standard acoustic, easy-listening Christian groove. The hymn comes up on the PowerPoint, words as plain and rough-hewn as a wooden altar, aeons distant:

I cannot deny what I’ve seen
Got no choice but to believe
From now till I walk streets of gold
With the wonder of my soul

“Where do these hymns come from?” I ask my neighbour.

“Oh, they get them from a database.” 

By the second verse, I’m into it. I look over to Eric. The people around him are into it too, but Eric is more subdued. Are his lips moving at all? Perhaps he yearns for the old Protestant thunderers — “zeal of the Lord for ever burning”, “once to every man and nation”, “bread of heaven”. Imagine if you’d joined, for whatever reason, a church of men of stolidity and stone and your continued commitment was vital to your political survival, and over the decades you’d been in it, it changed with the culture to prop work with Easter eggs and a band that sounded like they might at any moment kick into “Save Your Kisses For Me”.

Not doubting Eric’s faith; just wondering if his aesthetics are more like mine than his people’s. That’s his problem in a way. This part of Tasmania was simple, content and modest for decades, described in the names of the towns — Kettering, Margate, Snug — scattered through its elm-wooded hills, and it was so for decades and decades. Then Hobart’s boomer bohemia came south, then the treechangers, then the commuters, public servants and academics, and now its booths return a Greens state member and may send a left independent to the state’s kooky upper house.

The church has adapted to its changing congregation, born into a global mass culture, its Christianity ecstatic, the resurrection a guarantee against the shadow of death. I like its plainness, its lack of interest in history, majesty, tradition. It bodies forth the belief that an unmediated relationship with God is possible, and that such community is grounded in it. Pine, plain glass and a PowerPoint. In our time, a low church seriousness is expressed by having the hymns projected in Helvetica. Helvetica! Minor parties shouldn’t write these people off as a Liberal phalanx. They should try scattering a little seed here. Among these, Eric Abetz is an ancient idol here, a thing of stone and wood. 

The band kicks in again for the final hymn:

I have seen, now I believed
Lord, you have my pain relieved

And the drummer, a Black African-Australian kid, really lets it go. He’s driving the band — going off chart, I bet, from the tinga-tinga light cymbal work down to the toms. Then he’s infilling, then it’s triplets — he’s away. Ha, I’ve seen half a dozen megachurch bands and they’re always tight as anything, drilling endlessly, no drugs, no sex, and it’s always the rhythm section that breaks away, the drummer freestyling, the bassist doing funk lines, and I bet they always get yelled at after — “Don’t upstage Jesus!”

There’s coffee and coffee after: a machine at one end, Nescafe at the other. The latter line is twice as long. I am herded up to the real coffee end on sight, even though I want Nescafe, the chemical froth and three sugars in a polystyrene cup, a true taste of the ’70s, and there waiting for a latte is the man himself. 

“Hello. He is, uh, risen.”

“He is risen indeed.”

He didn’t recognise me, thought I may be a Jesus-curious blow-in, and I was going to fake it, see what I could get out him — “Trees, uh, aren’t real, they’re periscopes run by, uh, the UN and the Greens from, uh, bunkers” or somesuch — but nerve failed me. There’s the journalistic ethics thing too. And just decency, I guess.

“… from Crikey. Any chance of coming along to an event you’re doing in the next couple of days?”

“Mmm, chances are… not.”

“I’ll be fair. What about shadowing you on a walkaround?”

“Chances are… not.”

“Take my card, you might change your mind.”

He took it as he passed by me. Chances are… not. He didn’t have much of a crowd around him or wanting to speak to him. He should have bowed out now, but he seeks the final election to a place of no time and no pain, Canberra.

It would seem that he is yesterday’s man everywhere. But you know who else was written off as yesterday’s man? He may yet be risen indeed. Politics, in the end, becomes pickleball, absurd in the pursuit, itself for itself only, something that will somehow get you through to the next prayer. 

Outside, the line of cypresses along the road screened the church from Kingston proper, an act of mercy, a wall of imported nature, it could have been the road to Rome. The trees leaves are yellow now, they will be golden in a few weeks for a few weeks. And then die. And then fall.