[6] South Australian delegates at a CSO meeting in Melbourne in 1972 led the move to hold "a nationwide act of Christian witness, similar to that conducted in Britain last year (Festival of Light)".
[8] The committee appointed Dr Court as chairman; Rev Shilton and Mrs Roslyn Phillips as deputy chairmen, and Peter Daniels as publicity officer.
The Festival of Light was formally launched in Adelaide in June 1973 with a media conference and the release of a new book by Dr Court and SA journalist Helen Caterer, Stand Up and Be Counted,[9] which aimed to motivate readers to defend publicly their Christian faith and values.
[10] Reverend Fred Nile accepted leadership of the NSW branch in July 1973, becoming the full-time director in January 1974, and greatly increased the organisation's activity and public profile.
[32] FamilyVoice has made submissions on the partial defence of provocation in New South Wales after Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland have changed their laws.
FamilyVoice has made submissions on referendum machinery, bicameral parliaments and electoral funding, opposing caps on political donations[41] FamilyVoice Australia submissions have included other issues such as human rights, euthanasia, childcare funding, paid parental leave, the commercial television industry code of practice, suicide, men's health, religious freedom, "adult" stores, alcohol-related violence, child sex abuse, equal opportunity laws, reproductive technology and gambling.
In 1974 Flinders University historians Hilliard and Warhurst noted that supporters of Festival of Light were mainly Protestants of the Evangelical tradition and conservative Catholics and that some other Christians tended to be critical of the organisation's "overconfident presentation of complex moral issues in simple black and white terms".
[46] On 10 September 1978 at the Whitehouse rally in Adelaide's Rymill Park,[47] Festival of Light circulated a petition calling for tighter control of pornography, later signed by over 14,000 South Australians.
[48][49] On 20 September, Labor Premier Don Dunstan delivered a blistering attack on the Festival of Light in the South Australian House of Assembly, calling the petition pamphlet "disgraceful".
[51] Liberal MP Mrs Jennifer Adamson later fully documented the statistics in the Festival of Light petition pamphlet, and listed the academic credentials of the founding chairman Dr John Court.
[51] On 28 September, the Dunstan government introduced the Criminal Law (Prohibition of Child Pornography) Bill,[53] which passed both houses of parliament without dissent on 21 November 1978 after opposition amendments tightened its provisions.
[11] Mary Whitehouse successfully toured Australia for a second time in September 1978, amid controversy over UK court action she had initiated against an offensive poem about Jesus published in a homosexual paper.
[59] The Australian Festival of Light and some Catholic leaders invited Mother Teresa to Australia to mark the 1981 United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons.
Speaking to the media, public and private meetings and seminars for Christian leaders (a total of over 2500 people attended in all mainland capitals), Nazir-Ali expounded the theme of "Courage in a hostile world".