Today the Australian Christian Lobby released its now regular “party policy summary booklet”, that summarised political parties’ responses to a range of ACL questions.

In truth it’s a bit of a let-down compared to the 2007 version, which neatly illustrated the ACL’s many hang-ups with a variety of questions about s-x.

But it does reveal, in passing, just how much the ALP has been making policy on the run. On school funding, the ACL asked for a guarantee that any review of school funding would not reduce funding for fee-independent and Christian schools. The survey was sent out in late June, the ACL says, so evidently it’s only been since then that Labor decided to extend current funding arrangements by 12 months to 2014 regardless of the outcome of the Gonski school funding review. “Federal labor will conduct a transparent review to inform new funding arrangements for 2013 onwards,” Labor told the ACL.

The ACL is still focused on controlling women’s fertility but its general emphasis on abortion has been toned down compared to three years ago. It asks whether parties will permit a conscience vote on Medicare funding for late-term abortions. Neither side is willing to go out on a limb. Labor defers to the states and territories and says it supports conscience votes on abortion issues; the Coalition says it has no plans to change current arrangements in relation to abortion. The ACL also asks what will be done to obtain more complete abortion data. Labor talks broadly about better data collection around maternal and peri-natal mortality and morbidity; the Coalition says it supports the government’s position.

There’s also the standard ACL homophobia, but more subtle this time around. In 2007 parties were asked if they only supported laws relating to “unreasonable discrimination” against gays and lesbians.  This time, parties were asked if they supported defining marriage as “the union of a man and a woman” and limiting surrogacy laws to only permitting surrogacy for heteros-xual couples.

P-rnography’s also missing, subsumed within requests for views on a review of media laws and the classification system and internet filtering. There’s an amusing question on sharia law (Christians like having a Christianity-based legal system but not one based on any other religions) and prayer in Parliament, but several social justice issues get an airing. The ACL ask whether parties will commit to continuing Labor’s commitment to contribute 0.5% of GDP to international aid by 2015 and the UN goal of 0.7%.

The Greens —  who this time around decided to answer the social justice and environment questions, after rejecting the survey altogether last time — the Christian Democrats, Labor and Family First all answered positively, leaving the Coalition the odd one out with its vague talk of 0.7% as an “international aspiration.” The Coalition also strikes trouble on the homelessness question, where Labor can reel off several big-ticket commitments and the Coalition can only talk about “education and training opportunities” and its education rebate.

The more amusing version of the document is the online one, which has been updated to incorporate responses from the Australian S-x Party and the Climate Sceptics. The Sceptics have the honour of being the first political party in the world to not merely deny anthropogenic global warming, but to suggest that if it is happening, it ought to be encouraged.

“Increased concentrations of carbon dioxide do have the scientifically proven benefit of accelerating plant growth and therefore food production,” say the Sceptics on the ACL’s climate change question.  “Therefore the best thing we can do for poor countries is emit as much carbon dioxide as possible to help increase crop yields and reduce starvation.”  They also don’t like foreign aid except for emergencies.

The S-x Party hasn’t got policies for many of the ACL’s questions, but where it does it swings for the fences. On euthanasia, “this topic is fundamentally flawed through a misunderstanding of the nature of ‘life’ in this context. Life is not the opposite of ‘death’. ‘Birth’ is the opposite of ‘death’. Life is something that continues through both of these natural cycles and beyond.” On collecting abortion data, “the question … is an insult to intelligence and sensitivity of the many women who reluctantly undergo this procedure each year.It assumes that women have abortions on a whim and use abortion as a form of birth control, lightly and without thought. Such a question could only have been posed by men with another agenda and we will not dignify it with a reply.”

Can someone please encourage them to respond to the rest of the ACL’s questions?