As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was a village. I then became pastor to the slums of inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a country parson and a teacher at a one teacher bush school out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for thirteen years, I was a suburban minister in one of Australia's largest suburban ministries.
And now, for more than 20 years, I've been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia's largest church ministry.
I've told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight, I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
When I arrived in Sydney to take up my task as Superintendent of Wesley Mission in the late 1970s there was one name I knew who had been associated with the Mission from another area of contact. It was the name of Rev. Fred Nile. I had known Fred Nile through a series of booklets that he had written while he was the national director of Christian Endeavour. I was running Christian Endeavour classes and had grown up within Christian Endeavour. I felt it was one of the best training programmes for young people in the Christian faith. Rev. Fred Nile had been the full-time director of the Christian Endeavour movement across Australia and had written a number of handbooks for leaders in the work. I was very impressed with these handbooks. They were extremely practical, methodical, well organised and quite clearly showed the mind of a man who knew what he was about when it came to planning and developing strategies.
I didn't know Fred Nile had served in the Australian regular army, had been through officer training and had been given the task, as army officers have, of planning war strategies. He certainly had planned the strategy of leadership training for young people in Christian Endeavour quite well. I also had known that he had been the organiser in Sydney of the Billy Graham Crusade that was held over 9 days in April 1968. Fred Nile had set up an extraordinarily good program to contact every church in NSW and to organise all the details of what was a huge undertaking for the Billy Graham Crusade. He had visited churches in preparation for that, had 25,000 people viewing Billy Graham films before Billy Graham arrived and had over 1200 supporting churches preparing for the crusade. He had to develop a wide-scale transportation system involving the hiring of over 500 buses to transport people to and from meetings. About 100 country towns were signed up for direct land line broadcasts. More than that he had the oversight of 4500 prayer meetings around the state. The crusade itself was a superbly organised event with over 400,000 people attending with 100,000 people attending the closing meeting. One unusual feature with such an organization was that the crusade finished up with a significant surplus in spite of its quarter of a million dollar expenditure. He certainly had a great capacity to organise.
That capacity for state-wide organization flowed over into his employment by Wesley Mission from January 1970 when my predecessor Rev. Alan Walker invited Fred to organise his year long evangelistic mission to NSW while President of the Methodist Conference.
Dr Walker was funded by the NSW Methodist Conference to conduct a special outreach program entitled "Newness NSW." Fred Nile was geared up to organise all of the meetings throughout the year. At the end of that time, Alan Walker invited him to continue running a Jesus Commune in some old houses we had in Woolloomooloo. I as surprised that Fred undertook this program as it was really a very small program with only a dozen students. To come from organising programmes involving a hundred thousand people to working for a dozen was in my mind lacking challenge for him, but he provided very regular and reliable service through his next few years.
Consequently, I knew of Fred Nile as an extremely competent organiser. What I didn't know was that he was to develop a remarkable capacity for being in the news.
In the United Kingdom, the Festival of Light had been established in 1971 with people like Mary Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge and Sir Cyril Black, supported by people such as Sir Cliff Richard and other Christian Entertainers. They had developed a whole program across the United Kingdom based upon a passage written by the Apostle Paul where he describes Christians as being children of light. The Festival of Light in Great Britain drew the attention of the British people towards some of the unfortunate features of British society and how Christian people ought to be seeking to raise the awareness of people towards Christian values. More than 100,000 people attended the launching rally in Trafalgar Square.
Fred had already been involved in drawing the public attention to a number of public entertainments, which he believed were below the standards expected in a Christian community. He had organised together with Bishop Paul Barnett of the Anglican Church a successful protest outside the theatre in Glebe that was staging the notorious nude musical, "Oh Calcutta!"
It was only natural that in 1973, the Festival of Light committee invited Fred to be the Director of the Australian Festival of Light, a position that he has held to this day. This in turn meant that he organised large scale Festival of Light gatherings in all the major cities of Australia. 14,000 people attended the first rally in Adelaide during Mrs. Mary Whitehouse's visit. By the time the public rallies came to Sydney, the numbers were extremely strong with 20,000 people attending and 35,000 people attending. Heads of churches got behind the huge rallies and an attempt was made to lift high Christian standards.
Fred Nile was responsible for bringing to Australia Malcolm Muggeridge, a crusty old coverted atheist. He had been the scourge of British clergy and the Royal family but a remarkable conversion changed his whole outlook and he saw the essential contribution of the Christian faith to civilised society. When Malcolm Muggeridge came to Hyde Park, 35,000 people came out to support him and there was enormous press coverage of all of these activities.
There were of course always detractors, there were those people who for their own purposes did not want light shone upon their activities. There were people who were making large amounts of money from the growing video pornography industry. There were others who were exploiting children and, of course, there was the new public profile growing out of the homosexual movement.
The presence of Mother Teresa at another series of Festival of Light brought out huge numbers of people as this saintly woman spoke about the need to care particularly for the poor, the dying, the children and the unborn.
It was out of this background of organising Festival of Light rallies that it was suggested to Fred that he stand for the NSW Legislative Council in 1981. It was a big task and Fred was opposed by a large number of people, not the least, some well known politicians.
Fred didn't really expect to win but right from the time of the counting of the first votes it was obvious that he was going to be elected with a large number of first preferences. He was elected with about ¼ million primary votes in NSW which was almost enough to get a second candidate elected. The Premier, Neville Wran, who had little love for Fred Nile's stance on many issues was not pleased, but Fred had been elected, an elected for the next 12 years. He was subsequently elected for another eight years.
This brought Fred immediately into conflict with many of the anti-Christian organizations and those who organise the Festival of Light. There were ugly scenes as a group of homosexual men dressed as Roman Catholic nuns carried full sized fake rifles to intimidate Christians at some of his rallies. They also worked hard to get him off his broadcast program, Sunday Night Light Show on 2GB. This was the year in 1982 when the AIDS scourge began to be highlighted world-wide. In those days, doctors called it GRID Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Fred warned Australia of the impact of AIDS through homosexual activity. He was abused enormously by people because of his stance. His warnings fell on many deaf ears. However, time has proved that his warnings were right as we have seen the scourge of AIDS travel worldwide.
This led to Fred being vilified by the homosexual community, which reached a climax during one Mardi Gras when a large model of Fred's head on a plate was towed along by a group of homosexual men along Oxford street. It was quite clear that many people were giving the viewpoint that Fred Nile would end up like John the Baptist with his head on a plate. Through most of the Mardi Gras over the years, Fred and a group of loyal people stood silently praying for those attending and involved in the Mardi Gras.
The press have never fully presented the significant contribution made by Fred Nile - he has made a large number of very positive moves in many areas. In public rallies, he has always supported reconciliation with the indigenous community long before it became a hot topic of discussion. He is the only parliamentarian to my knowledge that had a running mate who was an Aboriginal minister. Incidentally, the Fred Nile electoral campaign took Aboriginal leaders with them into rural areas in Australia and sometimes they received a negative reaction simply because of his commitment to justice for the indigenous people. He found there were many rural areas who still had deep seated racism.
What is not understood about all of these particular public gatherings was that Fred rarely initiated an attack upon anybody else, or any other organizations including the porn shop owners and the porn video industry. Inevitably, he was only responding to something that had already been promoted by other people.
Fred had established the Call to Australia Party under that theme when stood for the Legislative Council in 1981. Upon his election to the Legislative Council of NSW he received what he calls a disgraceful welcome. He said, "The ALP Government would not give me my legal entitlements as an elected member - no office, not even a seat in the chamber." He had to literally fight his way into finding an office by claiming it from an ALP member who was occupying two offices.
Because this new party arrived in the Legislative Council, it was decided by the President that he should have a special seat halfway between the Government and the Opposition. Carpenters arrived into the upper house chamber and built a red leathered two person bus style seat right in the centre. It was rather prophetic that they should build two seats because Elaine Nile was elected to the Legislative Council in 1988.
Over the years, Fred and Elaine have been two of the busiest people in the NSW Parliament. Independent newspaper analysis of the number of questions asked, speeches given and bills presented indicated that more have come from Fred Nile than any other member of Parliament.
Today, the Christian Democratic Party is national in its organization, is standing scores of candidates in local seats and has Rev. George Capsis as a Senate Candidate.
The newspapers have never paid him the proper credit that was due to him as a Christian politician. They always presented him as an image of a politician concerned only with homosexuality. The newspapers were utterly biased against him. The fact was that Fred developed significant policy suggestions and delivered speeches on issues such as industrial relations, the moral basis of civil government and the importance of a constitutional monarchy. He supported the first Aboriginal Land Right bill to come before the Parliament of NSW which brought him a lot of criticism from country supporters. He has supported education reform, and many other reforms. Of course his voice was always heard when governments tried to legalise prostitution or extend the opportunities for brothels to work in suburban housing areas. He opposed issues on de-facto relationships and voluntary euthanasia and the sexual offences bill, all of which were strongly opposed to Christian belief.
Fred Nile has been a Christian voice in Parliament, fearlessly presenting Christian truths on issues such as the spread of drugs and easier abortion.
Over the years, he has suffered from incredible press bias because of his stand on homosexuality and very few politicians in either State or Federal Parliament have suffered such personal vilification. Fred and Elaine Nile have given great service to the people of NSW and I have been pleased to support them and call them friends.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one of the world's great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world's great churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.
Rev The Hon. Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.