Do you regard the Australian Family Association (AFA) as an ‘authority’ on anything? For the uninitiated, the AFA is the ‘family policy’ arm of the late B. A. Santamaria’s National Civic Council (NCC) i.e. it’s a conservative Catholic political pressure group and, as far as I’m aware, has never claimed to be anything else. It sometimes employs sympathetic Protestant spokespeople, Bill Muehlenberg being a good example, but in general its public pronouncements on abortion, contraception, sex education and all other ‘family’ issues are pure Pope-speak. AFA views on any of these questions effectively come straight from the Vatican and to this extent the AFA itself is an ‘authority’ on, and mouthpiece for conservative Catholic opinion. No more, no less.

Besides this, the AFA is not an especially large group. I’ve seen claims of up to 5,000 members Australia-wide but this must be a mailing-list figure if it’s not just wishful thinking. It seems to be strongest in Victoria and Queensland, and in Victoria it boasts a grand total of five branches - in Bayswater, Bendigo, Geelong, Malvern and Maribyrnong (another one may start up soon in Box Hill). Realistically, the number of truly active AFA members in Victoria is probably no more than a few dozen. The AFA is a small, self-appointed organisation, quite unrepresentative of Australians and their families in many demonstrable respects (opinions regarding divorce, pregnancy termination, IVF etc.)

So did Brad Newsome of the Melbourne Age know this when he wrote his recent piece on teenagers and television (’Fast times at TV High’, 29 July 2006)? He asked whether what young people watch is harming them and his very first ‘expert witness’ was Angela Conway, AFA Victorian vice-president.

Here it comes:

… [T]he teenage TV milieu is ‘hyper-focused on sex’ and [Conway] fears that it is giving children ‘a skewed view of reality. They’re seeing a fairly hefty diet of sexual involvement and there’s evidence to suggest that it’s ageing young people’ … Conway says teenage soap operas need to lose their ‘overemphasis on dysfunction’ and portray marriage as a viable, stable relationship …

Conway’s opinions occupy about one-quarter of the article’s length. Nowhere is there a reference to the AFA’s total dependence on NCC doctrine and policy in these matters. Indeed, Conway could be Australia’s greatest family psychologist and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference: if she diverged even slightly from the official NCC/AFA (i.e. conservative Catholic) line she’d be out on her ear.

And the poor old public goes away thinking, ‘Oh, so that’s what the family experts say’.

There oughta be a law …

Filed in: Family Values