Barnaby Joyce claims Australia is a ‘Christian nation’ and says many First Nations people would agree

One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce has claimed First Nations people would agree with him that Australia is a “Christian nation”.

The New England MP made the comments at an anti-abortion gala – where he accepted a prize for “political courage” – in Sydney over the weekend.

In an exchange posted on social media, Benjamin van der Linden from a group called Make Australia Christian Again asked Joyce if Australia was a Christian nation.

“Yes, it was premised on Christian principles,” Joyce said.

“A lot of Indigenous people would tell you straight up and proper Australia’s a Christian nation.”

Adherence to Christian denominations has been consistently falling over many years, while the One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, and others insist Australians live in “predominantly a Judeo-Christian society”.

The gala organiser and controversial anti-abortion activist Joanna Howe said on social media that Joyce and the party’s Hunter candidate, Stuart Bonds, had accepted the “political courage” award for One Nation.

Joyce was the headline act at Howe’s Sydney rally in June to push for reduced access to abortion in New South Wales.

Howe has praised Hanson’s call for a “monoculture”, saying it would include “immigrants like me and my family who assimilate and contribute to Australia”.

Howe is of Indian and Portuguese descent, and moved to Australia from England.

At the Sydney event Van der Linden also interviewed Howe’s husband, James Howe, who said anything “good” in Australia was because of its Christian roots.

Asked what he thought of Islam, James Howe said: “It’s a shit religion, mate.

“It’s a primitive, barbaric religion, it’s false, and it has no place in this country,” he said.

The Howes were jointly interviewed recently on the ۲ Worlds Collide podcast, where Joanna Howe said she had “no national pride” in India.

“If our kids started calling themselves fucking Indian Australians, I swear they’d be grounded,” James Howe said.

Asked about Joyce’s comments, Prof Anne Pattel-Gray, a Bidjara and Nguri woman and the University of Queensland’s academic director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, said Christianity was delivered to Australia through “colonial objectives, denial and theft”.

“It’s colonial Christianity that justified all manner of injustices and violence towards Aboriginal people,” she said.

Many churches have apologised to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for their part in creating the Stolen Generations, but Pattel-Gray said apologies without reparations were “pretty hollow”.

In the ۱۸۰۰s, many First Nations people were forced from their Country into religious missions, which the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies notes were “often created by churches or religious individuals to house Aboriginal people, convert them to Christianity and prepare them for menial jobs”.

In ۲۰۱۶, ۵۴% of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population reported a Christian affiliation.

At the ۲۰۲۱ census, ۴۳.۹% of Australians said they were Christian, while ۳۸.۹% ticked “no religion”.

Prof Chris Wallace, from the University of Canberra’s school of politics, economics and society, said there were lots of crossovers among rightwing groups motivated by specific issues.

“But at the end of the day that kind of feral extremism that they show is a real turnoff to mainstream voters,” she said.

“I think One Nation’s political success has been built on an unwavering instinct for fringe rightwing political positions and they’re getting a lot of support from disgruntled voters, many of whom are just temporarily parking a protest vote with them, while the next election is far off.

“But if they think that continuing to double down on rightwing issues including abortion is going to enhance their success, they’re making a very big mistake. Australian elections are won from the middle ground.”

Dr Prudence Flowers, a lecturer in US history at Flinders University, told AAP in June anti-abortion rhetoric was feeding into the broader anti-migration world, and “linking abortion with population and whiteness”.

“These claims that we have all these abortions and have all these immigrants coming in is a quite noxious brew of anti-feminism, anti-abortion and anti-immigration all tied together,” she said.

Joanna and James Howe were contacted for comment. One Nation did not respond to a request for comment.