Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Easter message of “love thy neighbour” seems at odds with his government’s recent policy.

Happy Easter Sunday, readers, a day of egg decorating, egg rolls, egg hunts … pretty well everything eggs (and, somehow, chocolate bunnies) to mark the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For those less inclined to believe the whole “Jesus rose from the dead” thing, the eggs can represent pagan traditions around fertility and birth; either that, or just smash the eggs and add them to an old-fashioned barbecue.

The last thing you need over the Easter holidays is a politician making a speech, right? Bad luck, Australia: your Pentecostal Prime Minister wants a word.

Flanked by wife Jenny and their seemingly-sedated dog, Buddy, Morrison began his Easter message describing it as a special time when families come together in a way they haven’t been able to do over the past year.

“I’m especially looking forward this Easter to spending time together as a family and to catch up with friends, and just to appreciate each other and how fortunate we are to be able to do that in our country”, Jenny added.

Of course, not everyone enjoys such freedom of movement and association. The Bilolea Tamil family, who were welcomed by locals in the Queensland town where they lived, worked and volunteered, is entitled to live here at least temporarily after fleeing civil strife in Sri Lanka in 2012.

Following a dawn raid in March 2018, they have endured more than three years of immigration detention, including the past 20 months at far-flung Christmas Island, where they live four-to-a-bed in quarters likened to a caravan and unsuitable for a family with two children aged five and three.

“Christmas Island, in all honesty, (is) quite overwhelming. For many reasons: its remoteness, the fact that it’s quite a stifling hot place, and where they were living was really run down,” the family’s lawyer Carina Ford told SBS.

Hardly the circumstances others in this country enjoy at Easter, yet Morrison’s Home Affairs Minister, Peter Dutton, chose to detain them there over a community placement like Bilolea (where they posed no security threat and showed no sign of absconding) before calling the children “anchor babies” and the family a tax burden.

Footing the bill for detaining the family at Christmas Island – $1.4 million in the last year alone – was a decision made by Morrison’s government, not the taxpayers.

Far from finished with his Easter message, Morrison went on to equate Aussie mateship with the fulfillment of gospel (Mark, Chapter 12 Verse 31, if you’re interested).

“It’s our capacity to love our neighbour as ourselves that I think has really demonstrated the great Aussie spirit of mateship over this past year”, said Morrison, referring to our community spirit in the face of Covid19 and floods in NSW and Queensland.

What a shame Morrison and his government couldn’t continue to show that same, Biblical love for Covid-hit businesses and workers after March 28, when JobKeeper payments ended. April could bring the biggest economic shock since Covid first hit early last year, with the end of the $90 billion wage subsidy scheme and up to 250,000 jobs lost.

PLEASE HELP US CONTINUE TO THRIVE BY BECOMING AN OFFICIAL FOOTYOLOGY PATRON. JUST CLICK THIS LINK.

“There will be a whole raft of workers that don’t have jobs to go back to, because their employer has ceased to trade, their retail shop is no longer trading, the cafe has never been re-opened,” Adrian Hunter, partner at insolvency and turnaround firm Brooke Bird, told the ABC.

“They’ve known about it, that they’re on JobKeeper, and then it’s going to be a frantic race to try to find work. Where that comes from? I don’t know.”

Government spending at the rate we had during JobKeeper can’t go on forever, of course, but last time I checked, Covid19 and its economic impacts are still very real, and won’t be fixed by the raft of cheap airfares Morrison recently announced. Loving thy neighbour and fiscal discipline are, for the most part, an oxymoron.

None of us are perfect, of course. No matter our guiding philosophies, we aspire to be “X” and achieve – in many cases – a disappointing “Y”.

Few of us, however, place ourselves on as high a pedestal as Morrison. In his maiden parliamentary speech, Morrison spoke of “loving kindness, justice and righteousness”, values he seems to genuinely think he’s on top of if you watch him at various Hillsong Church events: hand raised in the air, praising God and preaching those same virtues without a hint of self-consciousness.

Morrison’s Easter address offered a pared-down version of the above for an audience that might be weirded out by his Hillsong excesses, but the basics were there: concepts of fairness, justice and a fair go.

How those laudable notions can be reconciled with the fate of the Bilolea family, as many as quarter of a million workers facing unemployment post-JobKeeper, the victims of misogyny and sexual misconduct in Parliament House for whom Morrison has done little, among others, is a puzzle he might not dare contemplate, much less solve. The Prime Minister works in mysterious ways.

Perhaps he should leave Easter messages to the Pope.