An excellent article Bernard. Your points about the dishonesty of the Liberal Party are spot on.
Minor parties should hold the Liberals to account for this dishonesty.

Perhaps the Victorian Liberals have learnt from the fate of the Republican Party in the US: hitching your wagon to the lunatic policies of the dwindling Christian Right is a recipe for long-term disaster.

It looks very much as if Family First are doing the Victorian Liberals an enormous favour by disassociating themselves from mainstream politics.

Lucky Liberals. Saves them from being tainted by association.

Secular governments have no authority to assume themselves as our moral guardians. Matters such as this, immoral as they are, are for the heavenly court, not for politicians. If someone avoids killing their baby only because they fear going to jail - that doesn't make them any better persons!

As for withholding preferences, it is wrong for parties to influence preferences to begin with - and this, I hear, is going to change in the next elections anyway. It's up to citizens to specify their preferences, not the parties.

If you want to talk about honesty then why not declare that you are anti-abortion rather than pro-life. The word life means a great deal more than not having been aborted. It means freedom of choice, joy, delight, happiness, creativity, wonder, awe, delighting, feeling and thinking and imagining. To suggest that those against abortion are pro-life and those in favour of it are not is the extreme height of arrogance. Such arrogance is also very un-Christian.

If you are against abortion have the courage to say so emphatically and unambiguously – do not hide behind such emotionally manipulative language as ‘pro-life’. Every human being is pro-life but there are some aspects of it that they may find unpalatable. This does not make them ‘anti-life’. It makes them anti the particular things they dislike. Using such emotional manipulation you could just as readily say that those in favour of abortion are pro-life since they support the freedom to choose which is a fundamental value that even Christians accept in general. You could also say that Christians are anti-life since their focus is constantly on getting out of this life and into heaven. Their behaviour denies so much of what it means to be human.

If you are against abortion then say so and give your reasons or are you afraid that your reasons are not valid? You would not need to resort to emotional manipulation if you had water-tight arguments for your position.

Honesty in politics begins when people stop trying to emotionally manipulate debates and present arguments for their position that can be challenged or accepted. No one has presented a case against abortion which does not contain some element of emotional manipulation designed to protect themselves rather than any ‘unborn child’.

Jon J,
The Republicans have been defeated by demographic change, not because of their policies,Bush the younger will probably be the last ever Republican president simply because there are no longer enough White Republicans left to swing a presidential election. Christianity is now a third world faith practiced mainly by social democrats and leftists in the West, so those values you disparage aren't "conservative" anymore because the churches are no longer "conservative" institutions.