Farmers have a reputation for speaking bluntly and as urbane and sophisticated as the former deputy Prime Minister may be, John Anderson still pulled out the straight talk for this years Men’s Convention at Katoomba.

Mr Anderson’s address, on the first two weekends of the convention, drew from the convention topic, “Men of Courage: the Battle for hearts and minds”, taught from the book of Daniel.

The Bishop of Wollongong, Al Stewart, had already encouraged men not to ‘fall off either side of the donkey’.

“For Daniel, it wasn’t an option to either withdraw from the world he was in or to lie down and become like everyone else in his world.”

The Rev Simon Manchester told the men not to follow the world’s teaching that intolerance is always bad.

“There are things we should not tolerate - germs in a hospital, firebugs in the bush, errors about God….” said Mr Manchester, a last-minute replacement for the scheduled speaker Mark Ashton, who could not travel due to terminal cancer.

Mr Anderson said the so-called ‘perfect storm’ of the recession was a dramatic example that we do not control our own destiny.

He said that people were discovering that post modernism had led them to a God of material things that was no God at all.

He said it was time for men to get off the fence and “ask again the big questions - who am I, what’s it all about, is there any purpose, how do I find an ark in the middle of all these storms where I won’t be drowned?” he said.

“There’s nothing Aussie and ‘blokey’ about avoiding the hard questions.”

He referred to the campaign by atheists in England which put signs on buses saying “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Mr Anderson jokingly asked what would have happened if he, when he was Transport minister, had said “You can fly on any plane in Australia, it’s probably safe….”

The convention’s third weekend will be addressed by the New South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione.