For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard… Matthew 20.1.

First a disclosure. In what follows I write about a remarkable (unreported) speech that Peter Costello recently gave at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. Do I have to remind readers that Costello is my son-in-law? This should not preclude me, as a columnist, from commenting on his extraordinary speech. Sceptics are invited to look it up. It’s on the website of the Centre for Independent Studies (www.cis.org.au). I hope the CIS sends a copy to David Cameron in Downing Street.

So here is Peter Costello – federal Treasurer from 1996 to2007, Guardian of the Future Fund, and until recently chairman of the World Bank committee on corruption – urging a free market think-tank to reflect on Christ’s parable of the labourers in the vineyard. For many, if not most of us, it has been a difficult parable to fathom. The problem is in the apparent unfairness of paying labourers who had worked all day (and ‘borne the burden and heat of the day’) the same penny as those who worked for only an hour at the end of the day (‘at the eleventh hour’). Where is the justice in that? Yet the point of the parable, as Costello reminded his CIS audience, is not about wage justice. The vineyard in the parable is the kingdom of heaven where the person who makes a deathbed confession is on the same footing as the person who has practised the faith all his life. You either enter the City of God or you do not. It does not have the same values as the City of Man. (Many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.)

But Costello went on to ask if there are also some more earthly moral, political, or industrial meanings in the parable. Problems arise because the story is told in terms of an individualistic and, for many purposes, outdated law of contract. Such contracts would be illegal in Australia today. They are individual contracts. There is no pro-rata provision for sick leave, holiday leave, parental leave. There are no penalty rates, no safety gear, no safety training, no provision for an Occupational Health and Safety delegate on the site. Fair Work Australia would immediately declare the contract void and the parable non-binding.

For decades now the benevolent all-wise State has been supplanting the ignorant individual who does not know what is good for him. The Church usually backs the State. ‘Your modern progressive Churchman,’ said Costello ‘has a high and trusting view of the State.’ He is more worried about collective sins (global warming) or collective judgments (rising sea levels) than individual morality or faith. This reliance on the State has gone too far. Is there anything to be done to restore the individual? Many have had a go but they have had little, if any, influence. Hilaire Belloc was one in his polemic The Servile State. Who reads that today? Can the parable of the labourers in the vineyard help?

Costello refers to a letter he recently received from a theological college with which he is associated. It announced an Achievement Award for a Christian Journalist. (Costello does not specify the College or the journalist but it takes little research on the net to learn that the College is Ridley and the awardee is Barney Zwartz, a former religion editor at the Age who now works for the Melbourne diocese.) The College’s letter said that the Award goes to a journalist who is recognised as ‘a truthful, fearless and prophetic voice in the media’ (principally at Fairfax.) Costello has no quarrel with the Award or this year’s awardee. But he queries the word ‘prophetic.

He recalls his own time as a Fairfax columnist. No one ever called him ‘prophetic.’ But he wrote from a free-market point of view (‘as long as they could bear it.’) In modern Christian thinking, ‘prophetic’ has come to mean calling for a greater redistribution of income and a greater role for the State in bringing it about. You are not ‘prophetic’ if you want to limit the State in order to maximize liberty or personal responsibility – just as you are not prophetic if you bang on about some conservative issue even when it happens to be traditional Christian teaching. (Lyle Shelton of the Australian Christian Lobby, for example, is not ‘prophetic’ since he opposes gay marriage on Biblical grounds.) Costello also questions the use of the word ‘fearless’. As a former Age columnist he feels qualified to say you don’t have to be too fearless down at the Age to write in favour of income redistribution or interventionist government. ‘It is the in-house line.’ Nor do you have to be very fearless to do it on the ABC. ‘It’s the Zeitgeist.’

‘I am fascinated by this parable,’ Costello said. When we strip out its time and place, including our vanity as moderns and our assumed superiority over previous generations, can it lead us back to universal truths? Could it be suggesting that people should make decisions about their lives, including economic decisions, and be expected to live with those decisions? ‘Could it be telling us that a big part of being human is to make choices and to live with the consequences?’ Do we really need a Nanny-State to protect us? ‘I have heard plenty of sermons extolling the “prophetic” view of the world. I can’t remember hearing one on Matthew chapter 20.’