What sort of work will he look for? What sorts of callings will call most melodiously to a man of his temperament and talents? We can be sure such a dynamic, go-getting, pentecostal self-starter (with a previous career in tourism-promotion) won’t hang about to haunt parliament in the Hell (for go-getters) of Opposition. Only losers do that.

Perhaps, given his talent for scaremongering (much in evidence in recent days as he does his best to turn us into a nation of trembling, Liberal-voting bed-wetters) he will be snapped up by the thriving horror film industry.

One can see him producing and directing chilling movies in which quaking, decent, white Christian folk have their sovereign borders (the walls of their suburban homes) smashed down by invading cannibal-zombie-refugee-boat people-werewolf Godzillas.

But if Hollywood’s thriving horror industry doesn’t nab him first one wonders if, set free from parliamentary life in May (the votes of the bed-wetters outnumbered by the votes of those of us who have stayed dry enough to vote Labor or Green) he will feel called to missionary work?

Sometimes I marvel that ScoMo, throbbing with Christian energy, is not already doing that. He certainly has the zeal for it. But of course he may have imagined that being a faith-propelled prime minister would give him the chance to do big messianic things among Australian heathens. Now, all the polls whisper among themselves, any such dreams of his may have been dashed.

When and if missionary work beckons he will surely turn first to one of the several Christian websites that work, a little like evangelical Centrelinks, to point the zealous to where the work is.

I have just been reading about them, giving gasps of horror, (one does one’s best to like Christians, to forgive them their trespasses, but it is just too much to ask) in Kate Harris’s sensitive piece Where Not To Travel In 2019, Or Ever in the latest online The Walrus.

Her theme, her plea, is that jet-setting, novelty-seeking tourist-travellers should have the decency, the cultural sensitivity to stay away from places their presences will only spoil and pollute. Christian missionaries, she reports, are among the worst offenders.

“The Christian website Finishing the Task for example, compiles the world’s remaining heathens-apparent into a convenient database, enabling freelance spiritual swashbucklers like Chau to advance the dark project of ­divine imperialism.”

John Chau is the famous Christian imbecile or hero-martyr (depending on your point of view) who late last year got in a boat and, illegally, went to try and God-bother/save the souls of the Sentinelese, a protected (isolated for centuries, they are immunologically vulnerable) indigenous people of North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal.

“I love you and Jesus loves you!” Chau yodelled as he paddled up to where the heathens stood, seething, on their beach. They fired arrows at him (setting a noble, if slightly extreme example to all of us who will be resisting evangelical Liberal Party doorknockers in coming months) and Chau died. He had learned of the Sentinelese from another website that uses FTT’s needy-heathens data.

“Here,” the FTT website rejoices, “you can find the list of the world’s unengaged, unreached people groups that have no known full-time workers involved in evangelism and church planting!”

Does Jesus, who we used to think and sing as children wanted us for a Sunbeam, want Scott Morrison for a church planter? We shall see.

January 26, just controversially and unfeelingly celebrated again as an appropriate Australia Day, is among other things a celebration of the arrival (at Sydney Cove in 1788) of the church-planters in the land of some of FTT’s hitherto “unengaged, unreached people groups”. Only a week after the fleet’s arrival Chaplain Richard Johnson conducted the first Christian Service in the Colony of New South Wales.

My musings about Scott Morrison’s future and missionary work remind me of how as a child (secure in the thought that I was wanted for a sunbeam) we also sang in church and at school some beautifully tuneful hymns about the urgency of the unfinished task of bringing unhappy heathens the Gospel Truth. Some 65 years since I first sang them with conviction in my shrill but pure perfectly-pitched treble I can still from memory sing them in my wheezy baritone. Here in my study I have just warbled a verse to my agnostic dog.

Still there are lands where none have seen thy face,

Children whose hearts have never shared thy joy;

Yet thou wouldst pour on these thy radiant grace,

Give thy glad strength to every girl and boy.

What a long, long way the inquiring, ever-maturing mind can travel in a lifetime!

From worrying as a winsome child that unhappy indigenous people might never get to know that Jesus loved them one found oneself hearing last November’s news and feeling glad for the Sentinelese (although regretting their use of lethal force) that they had successfully repelled John Chau’s unwanted spiritual advances.