Ian Warden: The Voice 'yes' campaign could really use a miracle in referendum vote

Though following the referendum debate closely, intently, one has yet to see and hear any church figures speaking up about what God-respecting Christians really ought to do on October 14.

Where are the bishops?

At the 2021 Census, 43.9 per cent of Australians hymned that they were Christian. Clerics would have a substantial audience if they asked Christians to pray for "yes", to ask themselves "How would Jesus vote?"

My shy, softly-spoken inner-Anglican (51 per cent of the time he defers to my loud, sceptical, agnostic side) has been brought out of the shadows by this referendum with its battles of virtue against sin, of good against evil.

My inner-Anglican suggests, shyly, that believers' prayers seem especially necessary now that all polling is suggesting that the "yes" case is falling on stony ground, and will, literally, need a miracle if it is to succeed.

God's miracles are especially on my mind at the moment and not only because the "yes" seems in urgent need of one.

It is also because I am counting the sleeps until next weekend's Canberra performance, in a church, of Handel's seldom-performed oratorio Israel In Egypt.

Action-packed and miracle-packed it tells the story of how God walloped Pharaoh's Egypt with miracle after miracle (the famous plagues of Egypt) in attempts to get Pharaoh to let the captive Children of Israel go.

Handel's music and choruses wonderfully illustrate each plague. The plague of billions of frogs comes alive with musical hopping sounds. The plague of flies has frenzied blowfly buzzings in the strings.

Then, best and most miraculous of all, God (through Moses) parts the Red Sea, enabling the Children of Israel to flee from their captivity along dry ground. But then, in His exceeding great wrath, God promptly closes the sea up again so that the pursuing Egyptians (and their horses) are drowned in their thousands, with "not one of them left".

The opera-oratorio's closing chorus "The Lord has triumphed gloriously! The horse and its rider has He thrown into the sea!" is thrillingly joyful.

Thrilling to it, one finds oneself (only thinking about it later when one has sobered up) getting a fabulous buzz out of a massacre of one's fellow human beings. But that was the way God was, then, in the Old Testament. He mellowed after that.

But my point is that a Christian Australian, mindful of the miracles reliably reported in the Bible and enacted in Handel's high-voltage oratorio, might entertain the shy hope of the relatively small miracle (small by the comparison with parting of a sea) of a "yes" on October 14.

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When and if I pray for "yes" I will at the same time ask God not to smite anyone on the "no" side as forcefully, in fact with deadly force, as He smites the Egyptians in the book of Exodus and in Handel's carnage-celebrating oratorio.

And yet the "no" side's scheming falsehoodmongers deserve at least a divine "rebuke" of some kind (the Old Testament bristles with God's rebukes of those who have appalled Him) for their uses of fearmongering lies to send chills up the spines of simple-minded Australians.

The misguided demolition of the Garran Surge Centre is underway, wasting yet another golden opportunity for the tragically neat and tidy and history-bereft federal capital city to be blessed with some ruins.

The historical-emotional importance of ruins to a city, to give it evocative evidence of its past, is well-documented (read all about it by Googling "ruin porn") and has been repeatedly argued in this history-conscious column.

With an almost magical speediness (it popped up on Garran Oval in just 37 days in 2020) the Surge Centre of 44 beds was urgently erected in anticipation of a surge of COVID-19 cases across the territory.

I'm not one of those columnists who only ever writes about his neighbourhood (no, I am a globalist columnist) but it just so happens that I live in Garran and know the oval's arrondissement well. In 2020 I saw the centre's erection excitingly underway and now, every day, notice its tragic demolition.

If only, to impart the boon of ruins, it had been left to charismatically moulder.

Better still, allowed to decay a little so as to take on some charismatic qualities of true ruins, it could have been a kind of Canberra and COVID monument-museum.

It could have been a poignant reminder of the way we were in the chilling and COVID-menaced 2020s, and a testament to the urgency and ingenuity we (Canberrans and Australians per se) showed as the pandemic besieged us.

One hundred years from now Australians, intrigued, would have toured the old building marvelling at the way we once were in times difficult to imagine.

By then, 2123, its metallic tinniness charismatically rusting, with bats and ghosts colonising some of its parts, it would have taken on some of the qualities of those very old abandoned ghostly shearing sheds with corrugated iron roofs.

Oh Canberra, my Canberra, thou forever past-denying, past-eradicating, demolition-titillated town. Another opportunity spurned.

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