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New church leader’s presidential priorities:
Faith in reconciliation.
Faith in communities.
Less faith in economics.

The newly installed Uniting Church President, Professor James Haire, today spelled out to the Adelaide media his presidential priorities.

Speaking to journalists the morning after the opening service of the church’s ninth national assembly, Professor Haire said he wanted the church to increase its involvement with the community, pursue reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, focus more on its relationship with the international community, and tackle what he called the "totalitarianism of economics".

Professor Haire was elaborating on points he made in his Presidential address the previous night.

Firstly, he said, the church was one of the largest non-government employers in community services agencies, schools, hospitals and domestic health support. But it needed to do more to express its faith and Christian witness and provide Christian content to the services it provided.

Secondly, Australia was recognised as a successful multicultural society but it had not successfully dealt with the relationship between the settler population and the indigenous population.

He said self-interested fears of legal processes had messed up attempts to resolve the relationship and that a proposal before the assembly for a treaty could be one way forward.

The Uniting Church, he said, included Aboriginal people. "We do not speak as Europeans about a ‘problem’. We have been committed to this for a long time … This is beyond party politics. It is an issue of advancing humanity, one part reconciled to another."

Regarding the church’s relationship with the international community, Professor Haire said many people in the South Pacific, Fiji and eastern Indonesia were Christians and most of them related to the Uniting Church. They were also areas experiencing serious problems and warranted more attention from the church in Australia.

Professor Haire also said churches could not accept that the community be defined solely in terms of economics. Australia’s increasing dependence on gambling, he said, was a logical outcome of such a definition. "Now, instead of the Cold War’s ‘military industrial complex’ we have an economic taxation-gambling industry."

To throw everything over to the market, he said, was a sign of ethical irresponsibility. Christians had an interest in how wealth was produced, not just in the production of wealth.

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