a roll of the dice

Tony Abbott seems to have decided to make faith an election-year issue, rather than allowing Kevin Rudd’s public airing of his own beliefs to pass without comment. An excerpt from The Australian:

Question: Do you think his advisers are telling him to tread softly, softly and that it may be starting to be counterproductive?

Abbott: Well, there are enormous tensions inside the Labor Party on this whole question of faith in politics. Thirty of 60 Labor members of the House of Representatives at the 2004 swearing-in took an affirmation rather than swear an oath on the Bible … So there are a lot of people in the ALP who are very uncomfortable with Kevin’s religiosity.

(Religiosity is, in fact, a real word, it turns out).

A cynic might read into the above statement a determination to highlight that, while Rudd may be Christian, his comrades at the ALP are not - thirty out of sixty took an affirmation rather than an oath, after all. The message is presumably that the (apparently) all-important evangelical voters should not be fooled by brother Rudd’s piety.

Whatever Abbott’s agenda, he’s clearly decided to make an election issue out of it. Can we infer that there are orders from on high? - Abbott, already viewed by many as a divisively religious figure, takes on the divine dirty work, while the PM stays relatively secular and appeals to the wrapped-in-the-flag nationalist vote instead?