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My journey to be the lead South Australian Senate Candidate for Family First starts at our family breakfast table.

Our family came to Australia in 1971. Mum and Dad had come to faith in the Lord Jesus in Sri Lanka. Being the youngest of four kids, I went to church morning, afternoon (Sunday school) and evening. I made a profession of faith in Sri Lanka, but once we came to Australia and I reached my teenage years, I was more interested in the party I had been to, the cricket/rugby match I had played, or a girl. I remember sitting in church and thinking, how could God be in this place?

To pick up the politics story, we would come home after church, have breakfast and have spirited arguments about political issues.

I got into law and, after first year, took a year off. I worked as a jackaroo on a sheep station, saved money and went travelling. I reached Bangladesh and stayed with an Australian volunteer worker. We had discussions about God, and I found I was losing the arguments.

He gave me The Screwtape Letters to read, which has a part where Screwtape tells Slumgob to make the patient hurt someone he loved. It hit me that before I left, I had said something to my sister which I knew would hurt and I meant it to hurt: I knew that God was angry about that. Not knowing what to do, I knelt down by the side of my bed and prayed.

Meeting God

I went on to Calcutta in India and went to church in St Paul’s Cathedral one Sunday night. There were three people in the church: the preacher, a lady and me. The preacher spoke from John 14, where Philip says to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know Me, Philip? He that has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’”

The minister explained that we could have grown up in a church and know the Bible stories, but may never have met God. He said to meet God, we have to meet Jesus Christ. Right there, I said in my heart, “Yes, Lord.” And I knew something had happened, because as I left the church, I felt a peace that I had never felt before. I knew it was real because on the bus to my hostel, there was a girl on the other side of the bus, and I thought to look at her as I would have before, but thought, “No, I do not want to lose this feeling.”

I stayed on in Calcutta and worked with Mother Teresa’s Missionary Brothers of Charity. I was thinking of joining them, but on Christmas Eve, 1977, I met Mother Teresa and asked her what I should do. She said, “Go home. If God wants you here, He will bring you back.”

I came home and resumed law. I became involved in a disciple-making ministry called the Navigators. The Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20 was laid on my heart, and my prayer was that I would help fulfil the Great Commission by making a deep impact in the lives of a few.

My wife Amanda was also in the Navs. After graduation, we both worked in the country, Amanda in Mildura and me in Loxton. We came back to Adelaide, started seeing each other and married in 1991.  We have four adult children; the eldest boy is married to our best daughter-in-law, and we are waiting on the others.

But in all the years of child rearing and legal practice (I have practised as a barrister in Adelaide since 1993), I never lost my interest in politics. The breakfast arguments had done their job.

In about 2011, Ros Phillips from FamilyVoice asked me to write an opinion in relation to a euthanasia bill then before the SA Parliament. I did (with another lawyer), and the bill was defeated.  Soon after, I wrote a paper with the same colleague arguing that the Federal Parliament did not have the power to legislate for same-sex marriage (SSM). That idea came to me when Warwick Marsh and others had organised a National Day of Prayer for Marriage. I could not go to Canberra for it, so we prayed as a family at home. While praying, the idea of researching the federal power to legislate for SSM came to me.

The paper that followed was sent to all Federal MPs, and we were asked to appear before the House of Representatives and Senate committees considering SSM. Through that, I met Lyle Shelton, the then-managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby. I then began to work with ACL, running some pro-life cases, and promoting marriage.

In 2017, during the SSM plebiscite, Amanda and I ran the “No” campaign in SA. After that, I worked as the ACL SA Director and later as the National Director of Policy. In my time with ACL, I co-founded the Human Rights Law Alliance (HRLA), which is now helping many Christians and others around Australia.

After years of pleading with MPs for issues of life and truth, I thought I should step into the political fray directly. I left ACL in August 2024 and commenced as lead Senate candidate for the Family First Party. I am also Counsel assisting HRLA.

Family First Policies

Family First advances 3 key policies in this election:

• To help with the cost of living by working to bring down power prices;
• To provide holistic care for sex-confused kids by banning gender-affirming practices and gender-fluid ideology;
• To promote and protect the rights of parents to give their children a Christian education and to strengthen the current protections in the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA).

Family First has many other policies which may be read here.

But to the key policies:

To help with the cost of living by working to bring down power prices

The cost of power affects the cost of everything. We work on computers, watch footy under lights and go to the movies because of power. The cost of power has gone up about 65% from 2007 to 2021, because of government renewables policies. Renewables cost more because they:

• only work part of the time (22%-33% approximately). That means to get capacity we have to build double the generation at least. Coal is about 70% efficient, and nuclear about 90% efficient;
• need back-up (firming) by batteries, which costs. Because batteries can only store small amounts of power, we also must retain a gas or coal system.
• have to be replaced every 25 or so years, as against over 50 years for a coal and 80 years for a nuclear generator.
• need new transmission lines as they are distributed generators, scattered abroad, whereas gas, coal or nuclear are dense power generators and can use the existing grid.

This means that an all-renewables system over the next 80 or so years will cost us about $2.57 trillion against about $800 billion for nuclear and $500 billion for coal.

The cost of power is a spiritual issue — we are to fight for the poor and needy (Proverbs 31:8-9), and they are the ones who will be most hurt.

To provide holistic care for sex-confused kids and to ban gender-affirming practices from medicine and gender-fluid ideology from schools

Gender fluidity is a Marxist-based false doctrine, designed to separate kids from truth and parents. It confuses vulnerable kids who are taught that only they can say if they are a boy or a girl. They are then led to irreversible harm through puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and body-mutilating surgery.

The SA gender clinic promotes this practice, while Queensland has banned it. Not only Queensland, but the UK, Finland and Sweden have all banned it, as has the USA. Many other nations are moving away from it.

Kids are rendered sterile, with reduced or absent sexual function, and are drug-dependent for the rest of their lives. We will fight to stop this.

To promote and protect the rights of parents to give their children a Christian education and to strengthen the current protections in the SDA.

Parents have the right to bring up their kids in Christian education. Labor planned to take away the SDA protections which allow Christian schools to employ staff according to their Christian faith and practice and to run schools according to a Christian ethic. If Labor is elected, or if there is a Green/Labor Coalition, this will happen, ending fair-dinkum Christian schooling in Australia. Even the Liberals will water down the protections.

We will fight for the rights of parents and kids to a genuine Christian education.

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Image courtesy of Family First.