This week, the High Court in Australia is hearing a challenge brought by the White Australia Party against the Commonwealth Government’s decision to designate it a “prohibited hate group” under new federal legislation.

The designation was made by regulation in May. Under Part 5.3B of the Criminal Code, being a member of, directing, funding or otherwise supporting a prohibited hate group can constitute a serious criminal offence, carrying substantial prison penalties.

The White Australia Party is challenging the constitutional validity of the legislation itself. Among other things, it argues that the Commonwealth lacks the constitutional power to enact the regime, that it impermissibly burdens the implied freedom of political communication, and that it is inconsistent with the separation of judicial power under Chapter III of the Constitution.

But this isn’t an issue that should concern only supporters of the White Australia Party. You don’t have to agree with them, or anything they stand for, to recognise that giving a government the power to ban political organisations sets a precedent that should concern every Australian.

This is because the issue before the court is bigger than one political party. It’s about what happens when a government acquires the power to decide which political organisations Australians are permitted to form, support, and participate in.

That’s something that should concern anyone who values political freedom.

Let’s not forget how political elites and sections of the mainstream media characterised Christians and Christian organisations during the 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite. Those who defended the biblical definition of marriage were routinely portrayed as motivated by “hate,” as though holding a traditional Christian position was not a legitimate contribution to a democratic debate, but evidence of bigotry, hatred and intolerance.

If being branded “hateful” is enough for the government to designate an organisation a “hate group”, how long will it be before churches face the same fate?

Yet democracy isn’t supposed to mean that the government decides which political opinions are acceptable and unacceptable for public life. Democracy, the kind of democracy that Australia so often prides itself on, means allowing citizens to hear competing arguments, form their own judgments and, ultimately, decide for themselves at the ballot box.

Sure, you might oppose the White Australia Party. You may believe Australians should reject its policies at the ballot box. That’s your right, and that is precisely the point.

The answer to a political opponent you dislike should ordinarily be political opposition, not political prohibition. Because once the principle is established that a government can ban a political organisation because it considers its ideology objectionable, the obvious question is: who decides where that power ends?

Perhaps today it’s a party you despise.

Tomorrow it could be a political movement you support.

The British Australian Community has raised precisely this concern, arguing that the law gives the executive government the power to shut an organisation out of public life without first proving criminal wrongdoing before an independent court.

In a recent press release, BAC President Harry Richardson argued that the regime allows serious consequences, including imprisonment for certain forms of membership, fundraising, or assistance, to flow from a ministerial designation rather than a criminal conviction.

The point is that punishment belongs in the hands of courts, not ministers.

If governments can remove political organisations before voters have the opportunity to judge them, the constitutional principle of representative government is severely undermined.

Our choices aren’t free if our options are selected for us.

Australia has confronted questions like this before. In 1951, the High Court struck down the Commonwealth’s attempt to dissolve the Australian Communist Party, finding the legislation beyond federal legislative power.

You don’t have to agree with the Australian Communist Party or the White Australia Party to understand that the state establishes dangerous precedent by undermining the rights of groups the public largely finds “indefensible.”

Who is going to stand up and say, “You can’t do that,” when doing so risks being accused of defending the “bad guys”?

To put it simply, this is about whether governments should be able to decide which political opponents are allowed to exist. That’s it.

If Labor truly believes in “democracy,” then it should trust Australians to reject “bad ideas” at the ballot box, not ensure that Australians can never vote on them at all.

That matters, especially when our governments are increasingly deciding which moral beliefs are acceptable and which are not.

What happens when the ideas deemed unacceptable include the moral teachings of Jesus?

We already know what they think of the Bible. We all remember the condemnation directed at Rugby player Israel Folau after he quoted 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 on social media.

At the time, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called Folau’s beliefs “reprehensible” and “rubbish” that should be “called out” and “rejected.”

The question is not whether you agree with the political views of the White Australia Party. The question is whether you are willing to defend the principle of political freedom even when it protects people with whom you profoundly disagree.

Because the freedom you defend for your political opponent today may be the freedom you need for yourself tomorrow.

There’s something deeply unsettling about the Lindsay Clancy case. Not only because a mother is accused of killing her three children, but because of the extraordinary response to it.

Last week, after nearly six weeks of trial, a Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict.

Clancy doesn't dispute that she killed her children. Her defence has argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time and was therefore not criminally responsible for her actions.

Prosecutors argued that the killings were deliberate and that she understood what she was doing.

Whatever ultimately happens in court, the case has exposed something much bigger than the question of one woman’s criminal responsibility.

It has exposed a genuine confusion about life, death, responsibility, love and moral authority.

Hundreds of women have rallied in support of Clancy. Some have travelled to the courthouse. Many have worn pink and carried messages such as “Believe”, “She Needed Help” and “Peace for Lindsay”. Many of these supporters say the case represents the failure of society to take women’s mental health seriously.

Of course, there’s certainly a legitimate conversation to be had about postpartum psychosis. But there is another question that Christians ought to be asking.

Why does our culture increasingly struggle to distinguish compassion for a person from moral justification for an act?

And why, in particular, does the response become so confused when the person who has exercised lethal power is a woman?

The Garden of Eden is still with us

The Christian story begins with a temptation.

“You will be like God.”

That was the promise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

It was not merely a temptation to eat forbidden fruit. It was a temptation to seize God’s authority and to determine reality, morality and truth independently of the Creator.

Eve was invited to reject the fundamental distinction between Creator and creature.

And humanity has been repeating the sin ever since.

We want to determine for ourselves what is good and evil. We want to determine what constitutes a man and a woman. We want to determine what a human being is. We want to determine when life begins and when it may legitimately end. We want to determine what love is. We want to determine who is worthy of protection. We want to determine what constitutes freedom.

And increasingly, we want the state to recognise our personal definitions as objective reality and compel everyone else to live accordingly.

That is not merely a modern mark of progress.

It is an ancient spiritual rebellion.

The attempt to redefine reality

Just consider the cultural revolution surrounding sex and identity.

A person can now declare that his biological sex does not correspond to his identity, and society is increasingly expected to affirm the declaration.

We have seen arguments emerge around “transethnicity” in which people seek to redefine even their racial or ethnic identity according to their internal conception of themselves.

The philosophical principle here is that one’s internal perception determines external reality.

But that is not Christianity. Christianity begins with the opposite proposition.

Reality does not belong to us. It belongs to God.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

God creates. Man receives. God defines. Man responds. God establishes reality. Man lives within it.

The creature does not get to become the Creator simply by asserting that he is.

This is why the modern argument over transgenderism is ultimately about something much deeper than pronouns. It is a question of who gets to define reality.

And the same question lies underneath the modern sexual revolution, the redefinition of marriage and the continuing attempt to redefine the boundaries of human life.

Who gets to define sin?

The same principle applies to morality.

The Bible does not present morality as something humanity collectively invents.

God defines good and evil.

Sin is not merely behaviour that happens to hurt someone’s feelings. Nor is righteousness whatever happens to be culturally acceptable at a particular moment.

Sin is rebellion against God’s order.

But modern man increasingly wants to reverse the arrangement.

We decide what is right. We decide what is wrong. We decide what is acceptable.

Then we demand that society affirm our decisions.

Isaiah warned about precisely this inversion: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”

That is the perennial temptation of humanity: not merely to sin, but to rename sin. The sinner wants to become the moral authority over his own sin.

Then comes the redefinition of love

The same thing has happened to love.

Our culture constantly tells us that love means affirmation.

If you disagree with someone’s choices, you are hateful. If you refuse to affirm someone’s self-definition, you are hateful. If you believe that certain behaviour is morally wrong, you are hateful.

But Christianity says something radically different.

God is love.

That means love does not belong to humanity to redefine. God defines love because God is its source.

Christian love is not mere affirmation. Jesus loved people enough to forgive them—and enough to tell them to repent.

Biblical love does not require us to call darkness light. It does not require us to abandon truth in order to demonstrate compassion. And it certainly does not require us to pretend that an evil act becomes good simply because the person committing it was suffering.

The question of life and death

And this brings us back to Lindsay Clancy.

Because there is another authority that modern man has increasingly claimed for himself: the authority over life and death.

The abortion debate is perhaps the clearest example.

For decades, Western societies have argued that a woman has a right to determine whether her unborn child lives or dies.

The Christian objection is not primarily about women’s “autonomy.”

It is about God’s sovereignty.

Human beings are made in the image of God.

Therefore, human life has a value that does not come from its usefulness, wantedness, health, independence or ability to defend itself.

The unborn child does not have value because the mother wants the child.

The child has value because God made the child.

That is why the Christian position on abortion is ultimately a theological claim before it is a political one.

God gives life. God owns life. God defines the value of human life.

Man does not.

And yet our civilisation increasingly believes that human beings can decide for themselves who lives and who dies.

That is the same ancient temptation.

“You will be like God.”

When the right to kill becomes a form of power

There is a disturbing common thread in the modern discussion of life and death: the growing insistence that circumstances can transfer moral authority over life itself to the individual.

The abortion argument says, in essence, that a mother may possess the ultimate authority over whether her unborn child lives or dies.

The Clancy case raises the logical end of that question: what happens when that perceived authority extends to children who have already been born?

The answer cannot simply be that killing becomes acceptable whenever the killer is sufficiently distressed.

Mental illness can profoundly affect human behaviour. It can diminish a person’s ability to understand reality and control their actions. That is precisely why the criminal law must carefully consider questions of mental capacity and responsibility.

But we should be extraordinarily careful about what we teach society through our moral language.

A mother who kills her children is not a victim merely because she is a mother.

Her children are the victims.

Their lives do not become less valuable because their mother was suffering.

And their deaths do not become less tragic because their killer may herself have been psychologically unwell.'

Evil cannot kill God

There is an even deeper biblical pattern here.

Humanity cannot overthrow God. We cannot dethrone Him. We cannot kill Him.

So what does rebellion against God do? It attacks what God has made.

Genesis tells us that human beings are made in the image of God. That makes human life sacred.

And that gives murder its particular horror.

When Cain murdered Abel, he did not merely eliminate another human being. He attacked the image of the Creator.

This is why Scripture treats murder with such seriousness. The target is a human being. But behind the human being stands the Creator whose image that person bears.

Evil cannot destroy God. So it seeks to deface His image. Hence, it attacks the family. It attacks marriage. It attacks children. It attacks human sexuality. It attacks human identity. It attacks the sanctity of life. It attacks truth.

And ultimately it attacks the authority of the God who established all of them.

The problem is not that humanity has become too powerful

The great irony is that modern man believes he is liberating himself.

In truth, he is actually repeating Eden.

We have more technology. More knowledge. More medicine. More political freedom. More individual autonomy. More ways of expressing ourselves.

But beneath all of it is the same ancient desire: I will determine reality for myself.

I will decide who I am. I will decide what my body means. I will decide what love means. I will decide what marriage means. I will decide what constitutes a family. I will decide what is right and wrong. I will decide which human beings have sufficient value to live. And I will decide when killing can be justified.

That is not freedom.

It is the old rebellion dressed in modern rhetoric.

Christians should resist two errors

Of course, we should want women and families to receive excellent care long before a crisis becomes catastrophic.

But compassion does not require moral inversion. We can acknowledge suffering without denying evil. We can believe that a person needs treatment without pretending that the victim does not matter. We can believe that mental illness may affect criminal responsibility without declaring that killing is therefore morally neutral.

Because Christianity does not begin with the sovereignty of man.

It begins with the sovereignty of God.

Back to Eden

Perhaps that is ultimately what the Clancy case forces us to confront. The question is not simply whether Lindsay Clancy was mentally ill. It is not simply whether she should be convicted. It is not even simply whether our healthcare system failed her.

Those are important questions. But underneath them sits a question that Western civilisation has increasingly forgotten:

Who owns human life? Who defines good and evil? Who defines reality? Who defines love? Who determines the value of a child? Who determines when a human being may live or die? Who has the authority to tell us what a human being is?

The Christian answer is not complicated.

God does.

That is why the answer to our cultural crisis cannot ultimately be found in giving man still greater power to define himself.

We have tried that before. It happened in a garden. The serpent offered humanity the chance to become like God. And humanity took the bait.

Thousands of years later, we are still reaching for the fruit.

The tragedy is that every time man tries to sit in God’s chair, someone else ends up paying the price.

Sometimes it is the unborn child. Sometimes it is the family. Sometimes it is the confused and suffering individual. And sometimes, as in the Clancy case, it is the most vulnerable of all: children who trusted their mother to protect them.

The answer is not to become less compassionate. It is to become more truthful. Because only when we recognise that we are creatures, and not God, can we begin to recover the proper order of things.

God is God. Man is man. Life belongs to its Creator. And the image of God in every human being must never again be treated as though it belongs to us to erase—whether that life is inside or outside the womb.

The New South Wales Labor government’s multicultural calendar for schools has no designation for Father’s Day.

This is despite the calendar recognising Mother’s Day and Grandparents Day.

Dads don’t even get a mention in the state’s 2026 School Planner Calendar for Cultural Diversity.

The September weekend is instead dedicated to the false Hindu god Krishna Janmashtami.

Caldron Pool is highlighting this because Sunday marks the day for Aussie dads nationwide, who aren’t deadbeats and deserve recognition.

The second reason is the stench of hypocrisy coming from the government excluding dads from what is effectively the NSW government’s nod to inclusivity.

Additionally, ditching dads seems to be contagious.

As the Daily Telegraph (DT) reported today, “Teachers at a prestigious international French school have scrapped Mother’s and Father’s Day art and craft activities in the classroom in favour of a “more inclusive day.”

The Sydney primary school campus allegedly told confused parents in a Zoom meeting that the “new initiative” will merge those days into one “unified parents and loved ones day.”

DT writer Danielle Gusmoroli added that while parents are still permitted to celebrate the days at home, “instead of classroom activities, a “pedagogical” gift made by students will be given to dads for Parents and Loved Ones Day on June 1.”

One mother angered by the decision said, “We’ve been told that it is forbidden to do anything for Father’s Day until June 1, when it’s a unified celebration day.”

The change was “due to the risk of isolating students with two dads or those who have lost a parent.”

An “aggrieved dad” told Gusmoroli, “Mother’s Day and Father’s Day form part of the cultural landscape that helps children understand the world, like Christmas and Easter. For children, I believe that distinction matters”.

Quoting an email sent out by the school’s principal Abdellatif Achiq, DT said, “Classroom activities and gift-making in honour of mothers, fathers and special people will take place on 1 June, the UN’s Global Day of Parents.”

He also stated that the days would remain on the school’s calendar and “continue to be recognised separately as important traditions within our community.”

Western Australia director for Family Voice Australia, Daryl Budge, said “he was disappointed in the decision.

He told Caldron Pool, “The man-hating and the father-hating has to stop!”

“We have to celebrate and uphold the honour of protective and caring dads and granddads.

“They are a source of life to us, as Jesus is the source of life to His body, the church.

“Fathers and men,” Budge added, “were made to be fruitful and multiply children with mothers on this earth.

“They must be equally honoured and praised for their worthy work.”

The NSW Government move sends the wrong signals to society, especially dads and Australian men, who already rank as the highest demographic most likely to take their own lives.

The decision doesn’t just devalue dads; it adds to the further feminisation of education.

That point is something David D’Lima, National Alliance of Christian Leaders, warned about when talking with Vision FM on Thursday.

“There are a number of primary schools out there, public schools in particular,” he explained, “where there’s not one male member on staff except possibly the groundsman.”

Men matter.

“As I look back on my teaching career 35 years ago, there were a number of kids in the schools who did not have fathers.

“They would gravitate to the groundsman as he was pruning roses and mowing the lawn.

“He had a fatherly, pastoral ministry as groundsman in the school.

“What we’re facing is the feminisation of education, which means that schooling, which includes Sunday schools, is really “women’s business.”

That, D’Lima said, “sends the entirely wrong message to the young men we’re trying to raise up in our schools and in our churches. We absolutely need to restore the concept of Biblical Christian Manhood.”

He preceded this by saying, in effect, that we’re losing too much to the feminist philosophy that’s taking over our institutions.

We can’t separate the abortion issue from the immigration issue. Anyone who says abortion should be excluded from the current political debate has already misunderstood the nature of the problem.

Mass immigration, cultural decay, family breakdown, excessive taxation and the steady expansion of state power aren’t isolated problems. They’re symptoms of a much deeper crisis. Treating one symptom as though it’s the cause is like putting a Band-Aid over cancer. It might hide the problem for a while, but it doesn’t stop the disease from spreading.

That’s why isolating any one issue as the “real” problem is a mistake. Every one of these issues matters, and every one of them needs to be confronted. But none of them makes complete sense when separated from the deeper cause behind them.

At its heart, the West’s crisis is theological before it is political. Politics flows downstream from theology. When our understanding of God, man, morality and authority changes, our politics eventually changes with it. What we’re seeing across the West is the displacement of Christianity as the moral foundation of public life and the gradual elevation of the state into the position of ultimate moral authority.

Put simply, once there is no law above government, rights are no longer grounded in the inherent dignity of the human person. They become permissions; things the state can define, grant and ultimately take away.

That’s why abortion isn’t some secondary political issue. It goes right to the heart of this transformation. Once a society accepts that the state has the authority to determine who may live and who may die, it has abandoned the Christian principle that underpins every other right: the right to life.

And once the right to life becomes something the state can decide, why should we assume other rights are permanently secure? Property, speech, conscience, family and citizenship can all become conditional if they exist only because the state allows them to.

Without a moral order above the state — one that the state itself is accountable to — government becomes the final authority over what our rights are and who is entitled to them.

So it shouldn’t surprise us that the same state claiming authority over unborn life increasingly asserts authority over borders, taxation, education, national identity and culture.

If the state can decide who may live and who may die, then the underlying principle also allows it to decide who may enter the country, what may be owned and by whom, what a family is, and even what a nation is permitted to be.

These aren’t completely separate battles. They’re different expressions of the same underlying question: Who is sovereign?

That’s why focusing on a single symptom will never be enough. Abortion, immigration, family breakdown and the erosion of freedom all need to be resisted in their own right. But if we never address the root cause, the system producing these problems will remain in place — and new symptoms will keep appearing.

The West didn’t begin to decline because of one bad policy or one political mistake. Its deeper decline began when it stopped recognising any authority higher than the state.

Until that foundational error is confronted, we’ll keep fighting the symptoms while the system producing them remains untouched.

Click here to read How to Handle a Difficult Wife: Part One.

Click here to read How to Handle a Difficult Wife: Part Two.

I once heard a preacher say that whatever God repeats is something he wants us to pay real attention to. This is a very common teaching technique.

Every teacher knows that much of what they say will not be retained by the person they are speaking to, so something which makes sense to do in every sermon, or every Bible study, or every teaching opportunity, is to make sure most of what you say reinforces the message you want to stick in people’s minds. So, when the Bible repeats something, you know that it wants us to pay attention.

We see this in the book of Proverbs, and especially on the topic of the dangerous, or contentious woman. If you read Proverbs 1-9 you will see that there is losts of advice for a young man to protect himself from the bad woman. For example, in Proverbs 7 we read,

“My son, keep my words,
And treasure my commands within you.
Keep my commands and live,
And my law as the apple of your eye.
Bind them on your fingers;
Write them on the tablet of your heart.
Say to wisdom, “You are my sister,”
And call understanding your nearest kin,
That they may keep you from the immoral woman,
From the seductress who flatters with her words.”

It is important to teach our young men how to be respectful to young women, how to treat younger women as sisters, as Paul the Apostle says, and to guard their sexual desires until marriage. This is vital. But it needs to be noted that the Bible spends more time warning young men about the dangerous harlot than many modern Christians probably realise.

Today, we are trained to think of men as the sexually obsessed, and the woman as the sexual object. We have been taught this by movies and other media. But the reality is far more complicated. There are many women who take delight in weaponising their sexuality to corrupt or even destroy men.

It is true that a lot of women in the porn industry are there because they have been sexually groomed from a young age or even trafficked. This is a reality. But OnlyFans shows what happens when you create an almost free market and tell people to gather a fanbase with whatever assets they have. What happens is that women will turn that site into a porn star’s dream, direct access to their simps whom they can exploit at will.

In fact, part of how OnlyFans markets itself is as a Feminist-driven organization:

“As it’s grown, OnlyFans has sought to use explicit content – its seemingly bottomless source of revenue – as a springboard to greater scale, positioning itself as a tech pioneer with a place among social media giants such as Instagram and X. Key to that effort is making porn more socially acceptable and distancing the company from the abuses often associated with the industry.

The public face of OnlyFans is CEO Keily Blair, an Irish lawyer and self-described feminist and “safety nerd” promoted to the top job in 2023. In public appearances, Blair, 42, presents the platform as lucrative and empowering, particularly for women, and often mentions her two daughters. “I want them to have a good online life,” she told delegates at a UK child-protection conference in 2023. “I want the same for your kids.”

There is often discussion in conservative and Christian circles that one of the reasons that porn is so evil is because it exploits women, and we have to acknowledge that this does happen. But less often is the other prominent side of the problem with porn talked about: that a lot of women use it to exploit men, particularly younger men.

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This discussion is changing; the language of simps is used to describe these men now, because many young men are becoming increasingly aware of how they are exploited by porn. Many now know that they are being exploited for their money, their time, their energy, and their devotion. They are waking up to this reality.

When we read Proverbs 7, we should immediately think of this kind of woman, a woman who knows how to exploit the simple-minded.

“For at the window of my house
I looked through my lattice,
And saw among the simple,
I perceived among the youths,
A young man devoid of understanding,
Passing along the street near her corner;
And he took the path to her house
In the twilight, in the evening,
In the black and dark night.
And there a woman met him,
With the attire of a harlot, and a crafty heart.
She was loud and rebellious,
Her feet would not stay at home” (Prov. 7:6-11).

Society is replete with these kinds of dangerous women, and many young men are sent into their embrace like lambs to the slaughter. In fact, in verses 21-22 of Proverbs 7, Solomon uses almost this exact imagery to describe the effect of these women on young men.

But we should not only think of the adulterous woman when we read this passage, or the porn star, even though this certainly should be our primary application. We should also think of the “loud and rebellious” woman who uses her sexuality to trap a man in marriage and then rule over him.

There is a stereotype of marriage, and just relationships in general, that a woman will use her sexuality to trap a man in a committed relationship and once she has achieved her goal, then she will drip-feed sexual attention as a means of control.

This stereotype exists precisely because it does happen often. But we should not see this as a stereotype of marriage as a whole, even though that is how people do see it; we should, rather, see it as a stereotype of marriage with the difficult woman. The difficult woman uses her sexuality to entrap a man and then to rule over him.

There are many men who live in this sort of arrangement, and they are relatively OK with it. In fact, not only are they ok with it, from their perspective it “just is what it is.” In their view, this is what marriage is. After all, the common stereotype has told them that. As the joke often goes in sitcoms, “When was the last time you had sex?” “Are you kidding, I am married!” is the reply.

If you watch shows like Everybody Loves Raymond from the late 90s, you will see how the media presented marriage as a relationship where a man longingly desires sexual attention, and it is drip-fed to him by his wife when he has done the right thing and earned it. Shows like this should be seen less as a description of reality and more as an attempt to shape reality. But whichever way you perceive it, there is this understanding in culture that marriage is, in general, a sexual wasteland.

Why?

Because of this idea that a woman will use sexuality to entrap a man into a relationship. And the truth is that the difficult woman will do this. Many men have experienced this.

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This is why this discussion of Proverbs 7 is so important for this third article in our series about How to Handle a Difficult Wife. Solomon is warning men to watch out for that woman. To watch out for the kind of woman who will use their sexuality to entrap you. To watch out for the adulterous woman who says,

“Come, let us take our fill of love until morning;
Let us delight ourselves with love.
For my husband is not at home;
He has gone on a long journey;
He has taken a bag of money with him,
And will come home on the appointed day” (Prov. 7:18-20).

To watch out for the woman who will sell you her body online and trap you into a simping relationship. To watch out for the woman who will honeytrap you into a relationship.

There is a reason why the Bible commands that young men and women avoid sex before marriage. This is to protect them both from the dangers of promiscuity. The problem is that our modern culture is set up to encourage most young people, even Christians, into exploring before cleaving. This sets up many young women to be used by men of a reasonably high status for their temporary enjoyment, and it sets up many young men to find themselves being trapped by the very kind of woman that Solomon warns about. The Bible’s advice is not prudish, but it is prudent.

What is the difference, you ask?

Well, ‘prudish’ is a slang term for someone who is “easily shocked by matters relating to sex or nudity…or…excessively concerned with sexual propriety…” But can you call a book wherein God commands a prophet to walk around naked, another prophet to marry a prostitute, and which uses the words “whore”, “harlot”, or “prostitute”, in hundreds of references “easily shocked by matters relating to sex”? Of course not.

God is all-seeing, which means he has seen it all, and his word speaks about these things without embarrassment so that we can be led in the right direction and away from certain danger, which is what prudence refers to. A prudent person is someone who shows care and thoughtfulness for the future.

If you allow yourself to become trained to be a simp, to be ensnared by the porn star, then you are training yourself to be exposed by the harlot to this kind of weakness with women. So, to prevent this, you need to be “master of your own domain.” Rather than simp after the “loud and rebellious” woman, you need to shun her from your life.

You should aim to be married at a young age, so you can build as much of your life with your wife together as possible. But it is better to take your time to master your own domain, so that when you are searching for a woman, you are clear-headed, and not in as much danger of being the lifelong simp that so many men become.

Porn should not just be avoided because it is immoral. Though that should be reason enough. It should also be avoided because it weakens your ability to be the clear-headed, respectable man that a woman will want to submit herself to for life, and live under your frame. A man who can control himself and not be walked all over.

Why do you think that the self-proclaimed feminist CEO of OnlyFans describes the site as “lucrative and empowering” particularly for women? Because it trains young men to become lifelong simps. It trains them to think that living under the thumb of a contentious woman is what marriage is.

Why do you think the Rolling Stones is concerned that men shunning porn is a right-wing phenomenon?

Because avoiding the trappings of porn and masturbation helps men break out from under the spell of what could turn them into lifelong simps. A man who diminishes himself in this way is much more likely to fall into a relationship with a woman who uses sex to draw him in and then use it to dominate him for life.

When feminists and progressives basically confirm what Solomon says, but from the opposite direction, you should really listen to him.

But many people reading this will be thinking, “How does this help me with my difficult wife? I am already living in this kind of situation.” You are right; my article here is more preventative than directed at transforming an already broken marriage. The correlation between a woman who constantly berates her husband and one who has turned down the sexual tap over time is very high. So, what is your recourse?

Well, remember, look at what Solomon repeats and therein you will find wisdom. In Proverbs 21:9, Solomon says this, “Better to dwell in a corner of a housetop, Than in a house shared with a contentious woman.”

Just in case the message has not landed, he says again in Proverbs 21:19, “Better to dwell in the wilderness, Than with a contentious and angry woman.”

And for those who are particularly hard of hearing, he again says in Proverbs 25:24, “It is better to dwell in a corner of a housetop, Than in a house shared with a contentious woman.”

Three times Solomon writes the same thing. He slightly changes the illustration, but he repeats the same principle three times. If your marriage has descended from a relationship of mutual love and regular affection initiated and reciprocated on both sides, into a situation where the wife is constantly at you and has nothing but contempt for you, then you need to be willing to live anywhere but with her.

In fact, many men find that when they make this decision, that is often when things start to turn around. Hence, being willing to shun the contentious woman and live somewhere else, ironically, is one of the more effective ways of reigning in the contentious woman.

Of course, this is not guaranteed to be successful and is often not. Solomon speaks more in principles than in promises. Some marriages are just too far gone, even he recognizes this, “A continual dripping on a very rainy day And a contentious woman are alike; Whoever restrains her restrains the wind, And grasps oil with his right hand” (Prov. 27:15). Sometimes you have failed to assert yourself for too long, or worse, you have made so many mistakes in your marriage that she cannot bring herself back into fellowship with you because all love and marital duty has been drained and the affection that was once there is long gone.

But even if it does not work, Solomon’s words are wise. Some people will say you have to stay and serve her, and live like roommates for life, even though what made your relationship a marriage is functionally dead. And yet Solomon says the opposite. Why?

Because the Bible has an insight into human nature that often those of us who follow its ways do not; until we have seen it applied properly, at least. I think behind many, not all, but many contentious and unruly women is fear. Sometimes it is not this; it is just a bad woman.

But remember, I said in my first piece in this series that any woman can become the bad or difficult wife if her husband sows enough negativity. Some women react to this by becoming the difficult wife. It is not what they want to be, it is not what they intended to be, and driving the man away is not their end goal. Sometimes seeing the consequences of her speaking to her husband this way, as he plans to live in his tent somewhere else, will bring her to repentance.

So, sometimes, to save your marriage, you have to be willing to shun it. It sounds counterintuitive. But I think this is at least part of what Solomon’s advice points to, and I have seen this applied in this way, and I have seen it turn things around.

As I said, this is not a guarantee. But then in this fallen world you can do everything right and still things can go wrong. Such is living on this side of paradise…

Till next time, God bless you.

“After I began to get dressed, I’d realized that I’d done it. I’d just had sex like a man. I left feeling powerful, potent, and incredibly alive. I felt like I owned this city—nothing and no one could get in my way.”
— Carrie Bradshaw (Season 1, Episode 3: “Bay of Married Pigs” Sex and the City)

The television show Sex in the City popularises the cultural idea that sex is detached from commitment. Ideas have consequences, and this view has had significant legal and relational consequences.

Sex and the City was a television series that ran through the late 1990s and early 2000s. Across 94 episodes, it followed the lives of career-minded women in New York as they pursued career and sexual freedom. Sex and the City was a biographical retelling of Candace Bushnell’s relationship journey (disguised so her parents would not realise that it was her personal story).

The series promoted an idea that sex was a transactional encounter between consenting adults. In decades to come, it formed the mindset behind apps such as Tinder, where sexual intimacy could be pursued with minimal expectation of permanence.

Sex, detached from covenant, consequence and commitment.

Over the last couple of weeks, the concept of transactional sex without consequences has been played out in every tabloid newspaper across Australia. Five footballers now referred to as the ‘Pullman Five’ invited ‘Exotic Dancers’ into their hotel room. Allegations of sexual assault have stemmed from that night, and the Pullman Five have been stood down for the remainder of the season. Pictures of the distraught fiancés and girlfriends of the Pullman Five soon followed.

In 2025 Lachie Neale admitted that he had an affair with his wife’s best friend. This week his shattered wife gave a tell-all podcast. Her now estranged best friend then gave her own response on a separate podcast show, thereby escalating the sad affair.

How much pain and grief have stemmed from liaisons of these young men who seemingly had it all. Private pain has had a public fallout, and the sexual consequences of five men have had consequences far beyond the short private moment of the liaison.

There is a dreadful fallout to the notion that sexual freedom is cost-free. Sex is not free.

I have seen that fallout closely in legal practice. Over the past nine years, I have represented abused girls, accused men and institutions affected by sexual offending, false allegations and relational breakdown.

One does not easily forget walking down to the cells to meet a young man whose sexual liaison has landed him in a police station. The terror in his eyes asks the same question each time: how did it come to this?

One does not forget sitting with a young woman who has been violated and is then required to recount her trauma to another person in a moment by moment analysis.

One does not forget the relief when an accused person proves before a jury that he did not commit an offence and was the subject of a false complaint.

One does not forget the stress and anxiety an institution suffers when a non-consensual sexual incident occurs on its premises.

One does not forget a sobbing wife standing in the lobby of your office having discovered that her husband had left her.

There is horrific fallout when sex is non-consensual, as there should be. But what has also staggered me is the significant fallout that can occur when consensual sex takes place outside its proper bounds, the commitment of a marriage relationship. Family law regularly encounters the wreckage of affairs, new relationships and broken trust. Parties spend enormous sums contesting property settlements or parenting arrangements driven often by the grief, humiliation and betrayal of a sexual affair.

There are relationships in which abuse makes separation necessary, and nothing in this essay should be read as minimising that reality.

The point of this article is narrower: our culture is often surprised by the depth of the fallout that follows sexual conduct, but it ought not be. Sex and commitment reveal that there is a moral reality in this world to which all are beholden.

Consider this thought experiment. If a man approaches a woman and puts his finger in her ear, he will be regarded as a creep or an idiot, a delinquent, but the incident will soon pass. But if a man approaches a woman and engages in a sexual act towards her, the consequences will almost inevitably be severe. If the act is non-consensual, criminal consequences will follow with certain jail time. If it is consensual, the consequences will still be profound: a marriage may end, relationships with children will be impacted, and families will be estranged and parties out of pocket tens of thousands of dollars.

Having sex like a man, i.e. having multiple relationships, simply does not work and culture knows this.

How much pain will society have to take before we realise that the message of Sex in the City was flawed?

The law has developed elaborate frameworks for dealing with the fallout of broken relationships. In Australia, the Family Law Act requires property settlements to be just and equitable, a principle confirmed by the High Court in Stanford v Stanford. In parenting matters, section 60CA of the Family Law Act provides that the best interests of the child are the paramount consideration. In England, a similar concern for fairness can be seen in White v White, where the Court discussed the “yardstick of equality” in financial division.

These doctrines are not merely technical rules. They are a cultural admission that intimate choices of two parties create obligations the law must later attempt to order, and it is complicated to unwrap this.

The very complexity of these legal principles challenges the notion that love is simply free. If sex were merely physical, recreational or transactional, the law would not need to devote so much energy to untangling its consequences as it presently does.

Family law, criminal law and institutional liability all testify, in different ways, that sex is never only private.

Private acts have public consequences.

Sex has consequences because it is the most intimate of acts. Sex is imbued with moral meaning.

The grief on the face of the betrayed spouse tells us as much.

The guilt on the face of the unfaithful partner tells us as much

Sex is shaped by love and grounded in the commitment two people give to one another. It is therefore a moral act. Sex, therefore, carries a sense of permanence. Spouses and partners become the moral centre of public stories when sexual betrayal is exposed. As a society, we instinctively recognise that sexual betrayal is not morally neutral. We are not usually drawn to the cheater; we are drawn to the wronged party.

Christianity does not treat the body as disposable or the sexual act as morally weightless. It sees the human person as embodied, relational and accountable before God. That account may sound strange in a culture that prizes autonomy, but it explains why sexual decisions so often outlast the moment in which they are made.

I have spent too many hours in a professional context dealing with the fallout of misplaced sexual liaisons, and so I keep returning to the question: why? This article is borne of the fact that too many people in my nine years of practice have spent too much money because of one act that simply didn’t need to occur.

Sex is not unique to human beings, but the moral and relational consequences of illicit sex are uniquely human. Sexual misconduct can produce scandal, betrayal, litigation, estrangement and lasting grief.

The law can manage consequences, but it cannot finally explain why those consequences cut so deeply. A Christian understanding of the human person can. We live not in a moral vacuum, but in a moral universe in which sex touches the body, the conscience, the family, the community and, ultimately, the soul. That is why sexual betrayal wounds, why sexual abuse devastates, and why even consensual sex outside commitment can leave damage far beyond what the language of private choice is able to describe.

The cultural promise was that sex could be liberated from consequence. The legal record suggests otherwise. The Christian claim goes further: sex has consequences because sex has meaning, and its meaning is bound up with love, covenant and the eternal dignity of the human person.

That is why Sex in The City remains such a powerful cultural image. It promises freedom without permanence, intimacy without covenant and pleasure without moral cost.

Sex in its proper place tells a truer story. Sex belongs within a moral order that law can only partly perceive.

Sex reveals there is a moral order.

Embrace the moral order; stay committed to your partner. Grow old together. Stay married. You will save money on lawyers.

Harry Richardson, President of the British Australian Community, speaking at the Sydney Free Speech Rally on 30 August 2026:

First, an acknowledgement. The BAC would like to acknowledge the Anglo explorers, the pioneers and their descendants who planted the British flag and Christian faith on this continent, creating the Australian nation. We acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who have lived here since the Dreamtime.

And we acknowledge the Federal Commonwealth of Australia, created by the nation, under the Crown, to guard the nation and the liberty of all citizens. Today, in 2026, there are few countries that have free speech. The ones that do are mostly European or European-derived.

Yet in England, Sir Edward Coke insisted that freedom of speech was an ancient custom of Parliament. That was in the 1590s, more than 400 years ago. I grew up in England in the 60s and 70s and played out in the street every night.

And once in a while, some kid would come running into his mum and say, Mum, Johnny called me an idiot. And the answer every kid got from his mum was the same. Go and tell Johnny, sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

In other words, grow up and take it on the chin. Hurty words won’t damage you. People have a right to insult you. Deal with it.

This was the ancient culture of free speech that we were marinated in as we grew up. But whilst in the atmosphere and parts of Western Europe, free speech was a foundational part of our culture, in the rest of the world, it mostly wasn’t.

Saying the wrong things could have you punished or even killed. Our leaders used to tell us that we were an anomaly, because we were a European country in Asia. Now they tell us that we’re not a European country at all and never were.

They say that the only defining feature of Australians is their values. They say that anyone could come here and adopt our values and instantly be as Australian as anyone else. But in order to bring in people from such diverse backgrounds, one of the first things they had to do was to shut down our free speech, which is one of our most precious values.

In 1975, just three years after Whitlam decided to abolish discriminatory immigration, our elites introduced the Racial Discrimination Act, which began the process of cramping down on free speech in order to facilitate a diverse society.

But that wasn’t enough, of course, so later they added the hated 18C. Then when Tony Abbott promised to repeal 18C, a coalition of diverse minorities got together and made damn sure that he would do no such thing, even though it was a foundational value of the Anglo-Celts who settled and built this nation.

Now even that isn’t enough, so they bring in the anti-Semitism and hate speech laws, which are even worse. And this isn’t the end of it. You mark my words.

The destruction of free speech has been intertwined with the project to force multiculturalism onto Australia. If you don’t believe me, Chris Minns, the New South Wales Premier, spelled it out for you. He said, and I quote,

“We don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States, and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community.”

So there you have it. We can’t have free speech anymore because now we’re multicultural. We all need to understand that.

When we choose migrants, most of us want people with the same value systems as we have. But how do we make sure that people share our values before we give them a passport to one of the richest countries in the world?

Well, our founders wrestled with this idea and came up with a simple solution. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was the best they could manage. They decided to restrict entry mostly to people from the British Isles and to a lesser extent Western and Northern Europe. Some people called this the White Australia Policy.

Why did they think that people from Britain would share their values and loyalties? Well, probably because our founders were of British descent, and they were very explicit about that.

Henry Parkes, the father of Federation, talked about the crimson thread of kinship. His views were hugely popular. So they ran this policy for the first 70 years or more after Federation, and not surprisingly, most of the migrants shared the same values as other Australians.

They believed in freedom of speech, the rule of law, Christian morality, and the Protestant work ethic, and so on. During this time, the policy was wildly popular with the citizens of the nation, and the nation flourished. Australia had a high standard of living, low levels of crime and corruption, and all the benefits of a high-trust society.

Importantly, we had a deep cultural affinity for free speech, which we understood was the bedrock of the kind of free and stable society to which we were accustomed to. But our elites decided to introduce non-discriminatory immigration, which benefited minorities. They told us that this wouldn’t matter, because the new migrants would have our values.

But when people found that many new migrants had different values, the government crushed dissent by clamping down on free speech. The problem is that once the government gets the right to ban speech they don’t like, it never stops, because they love to ban criticism of their own policies. And the policy that most people wanted to criticise was mass indiscriminate immigration.

So multiculturalism and immigration have been protected by constantly undermining our ancient free speech rights and values. In Britain today, thousands of people are arrested every year for expressing opinions, and most of those opinions are in opposition to mass indiscriminate immigration. Free speech is effectively dead in that country, and Australia is catching up fast.

You can’t import people en masse from countries with different value systems, and expect them all to adopt our loyalties and value systems the moment they arrive here. It isn’t easy to defend free speech, even amongst educated Westerners. How can we expect people who’ve grown up in cultures which hate free speech to suddenly embrace it? It was never going to work.

Just ask Salman Rushdie. Under our current immigration system, only about 3-5% of migrants come from the British Isles, and 90-95% of our new migrants come from outside Europe. These new people come from countries with different values, and for the most part, free speech is not one of them.

Values exist in the minds of people, not in the magic soil or floating in the air. Different people have different values. If we allow the government to turn us into a hated minority in this land, then don’t expect our values to hang around.

So this is the game. They want to shut down your free speech so that they can bring in more people who don’t believe in free speech. We have to fight these laws and preserve our free speech, or as George Washington said, it may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.

WATCH:

Birmingham City Council, Britain’s largest local authority, has gone to the High Court to stop residents putting the Union Jack and the St George Cross on lamp posts without its say-so.

If a judge grants the injunction, breaching it could mean up to two years in prison or an unlimited fine. Yeah, you can be imprisoned for the unauthorised raising of your own nation’s flag.

The application, which was filed on August 26, names eight people directly, including Ryan Bridge, who co-founded the grassroots Operation Raise the Colours campaign that’s put English and British flags on street furniture across the country over the past year, plus a catch-all “persons unknown” clause that leaves the net open to anyone who does the same thing.

The council insists this isn’t really about the flag. Green councillor Jane Baston, Birmingham’s cabinet member for equalities and communities, called it a lawful, proportionate, and evidence-led approach to unauthorised attachments on the highway. She cited public safety and staff welfare as the actual concerns.

Birmingham isn’t the first. Oxfordshire County Council won a similar High Court order back in April, the first council to do so.

But nobody’s buying the “neutral policy” framing. Multiple outlets have noted that this enforcement push applies to English and British flags specifically, while flags from other countries flown elsewhere in the city haven’t drawn the same court action.

And yet, if the English and British flags are problematic, what do foreign flags flown in Britain communicate? Nobody plants a flag as mere decoration. It’s a claim of belonging: this is ours, we’re here, we stand under this, this represents who we are.

Take a flag down and put nothing up in its place, and you’ve made a slightly different, quieter claim that whatever it stood for doesn’t get to be visible here anymore. At the very least, the land no longer exclusively belongs to those that the flag represents.

That’s true whether it’s a war memorial, a town centre, a local council, or a lamppost.

The St George’s Cross has flown over England for the better part of a thousand years. A red cross on white, adopted from the banner of England’s patron saint and tied to the Crusades before it ever became a national symbol.

The Union Jack layers three Christian crosses on top of one another: St George’s cross for England, the blue-and-white saltire of St Andrew for Scotland, and the red saltire of St Patrick for Ireland.

It’s not an abstract or arbitrary pattern. It’s the patron saints of the home kingdoms stitched into a single piece of cloth. It’s a literal union forged from shared ancestry, homelands, and Christian inheritance.

Of course, none of that is what Birmingham’s injunction talks about. They use the rhetoric of “unauthorised attachments” and “community cohesion.” But it is curious how all of these multicultural efforts result in the same thing: no native Britons, no English imagery, and no Christian symbolism.

But let’s suppose, for a moment, that Birmingham’s neutral framing here is entirely accurate, and that the council is genuinely concerned about “unauthorised attachments” undermining social cohesion and fracturing the community.

If that’s the case, then we should be asking another obvious question: What does it say about the state of those communities if displaying the national symbols of the country is supposedly enough to threaten social cohesion?

If newcomers and immigrant communities regard St George’s Cross and the Union Jack as so provocative and offensive that their mere presence on a lamppost is deemed a threat to community cohesion, what does that suggest about their relationship and commitment to the nation those symbols represent?

In that case, the problem isn’t the flag or what it represents. The problem is a failure to integrate people into a shared national identity. The problem is the importation of attitudes that are so hostile to that identity that even its most basic symbolism has become something to be suppressed rather than celebrated.

A Catholic priest based in the West Bank is asking Christians not to flee.

Father Firas Khoury spoke with Catholic news site Aleteia, saying, “What if all the Christians flee from the Holy Land, if they could not face the terror? What would this land mean for Christians in the West?”

“What would their story mean?”

It would mean, “shrines and history will never tell you the story of the man from Nazareth.”

Khoury, who lives in Zababdeh, a town in the northern part of the West Bank, spoke out because of trouble with Israeli settlers in Taybeh.

Taybeh, located east of Ramallah, is the Palestinian territory’s “last fully Christian town.”

According to Khoury, what’s going on there is serious and deserves worldwide attention.

“For the last three years, settlers have attacked the villages near the settlements and burned the olive trees and the fields belonging to the Palestinians.

“These settlers,” he claimed, “want to terrorise the people to flee and leave their homes.

“If they control the city, they could delete the long Christian history of this place.”

This is why he wants Christians to stay. “Their presence keeps alive the story of Jesus in the land where he lived,” Aleteia reported.

Khoury is that concerned, he’s “begging” Christians around the world to “stand for justice and solidarity with the Christian community there.”

His goal is to see “Taybeh survive.”

This is part of a broader series of clashes across the territory between Israelis and Palestinians.

The West Bank priest told Aleteia, “We invite you to pray for us and hear our stories and come to visit; we have many stories to tell you.

“We need you to stand for peace, to listen to the Christian Church in the Holy Land and stand with us, your brothers and sisters.

“Today, we are trying to survive in the middle of the conflict.”

That conflict is due to Israeli settlers violently attacking Taybeh’s residents.

In response, Israel’s military closed Taybeh to non-residents, telling Reuters it was being done “to prevent the attacks.”

This is still in effect and “only applies to ‌Israelis and not to Palestinians,” the IDF said.

In a statement quoted by Reuters, they added, “Upon receiving any report of violations of the ​order, IDF soldiers are dispatched to the area.”

They then “operate to disperse the gatherings and detain suspects in order to protect the citizens of the area and to maintain order.”

The Times of Israel’s Tom Livny described the town as a “closed military zone,” and it will be so for at least a year, he said.

Two “activists” also told him that the closure “will have a severe economic impact because Taybeh, rich in Christian heritage, relies heavily on its tourism industry.”

Questioning the official military narrative, Livny said, “If the reason for this move truly was the settler attacks, then why should tourists from Brazil be prohibited from entering?

“If,” he added, “residents can’t earn an income, then they’ll leave.”

Appearing to suggest that this could be the real reason for the IDF action, Livny asserted, “they don’t even want Christians to be living there.”

The left-leaning Jewish activist also called the whole experience weird.

Settler incursions “have the upper hand.”

“Shoving a camera in their faces and blocking their way from trying to get through a fence around someone’s home is about as aggressive as you are allowed to behave.”

Saying he wasn’t sure what the IDF’s presence had fixed, Livny said, “All of the settlers that I saw had their faces mostly covered with bandanas. That may be a precaution against having their faces appear on camera in a place they aren’t allowed to be.”

The people behind the attacks on Taybeh’s residents tend to be “kids and young men riding their donkeys around people’s property.”

They appeared to be doing this to “make them afraid and uncomfortable, and waging a very patient war of attrition until they finally give up and pack their bags.”

“There is absolutely no logic in closing the road,” Livny remarked.

“The settlers don’t use cars; they travel by donkey.

“So, in other words,” he concluded, “the entire town could have ended up being sealed off as a punishment for being harassed by settlers.”

Livny’s account gives weight to Khoury’s complaints.

Independent Catholic News published a letter from the priest on 25 August, in which he stated that the IDF presence and new settlement in Zababdeh, near Jenin, is making life difficult.

“What we are experiencing,” he said, “should not remain unknown.”

Check out Labor’s recent attack ad on One Nation.

It’s actually quite revealing.

The ad reads, “ON’s Roberts backs rights of Nazi party in podcast.”

Labor NSW appears to treat it as scandalous that One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts “backs the rights” of a particular group of people. Which seems to suggest that Labor believes one’s political views determine whether their “rights” are worthy of recognition?

But there’s an important distinction between disagreeing with a political position and questioning whether the people who hold it are entitled to the same rights as everyone else. The former is legitimate political debate. The latter is a little more disturbing. And it appears to be a position that Labor unashamedly embraces.

They may not intend to make this argument, but the ad, at least, inadvertently exposes an underlying assumption that some people’s rights become less legitimate, or less deserving of support, depending on which side of the political spectrum they occupy.

But “rights” aren’t supposed to be rewards for holding the correct political opinions.

If a right is genuinely a right, it doesn’t cease to be one because the person exercising it votes differently, belongs to the wrong political movement, or holds unpopular views.

You can strongly oppose a political group. You can reject its policies. You can argue that its thought-leaders are dead wrong. But the moment you start treating the rights of a particular group as objectionable simply because you don’t agree with their ideas, well, you’ve become the fascist you’ve been resisting.

Labor appears to think your rights depend on your politics. Consider the implications of that for just a moment.

If your rights are only worthy of recognition when they are defended by the politically approved people, then they aren’t really rights at all. They are privileges, granted by the state to those who hold the right opinions and denied when they don’t.

That’s a far more revealing message than Labor’s attack ad probably intended to send. It’s not One Nation that’s endorsing authoritarian politics. It’s Labor.

A two-year Tasmanian parliamentary inquiry has landed its heaviest blow yet on a faith-based school system, finding that Catholic Education Tasmania (CET) discriminated against staff over their sexual orientation and marital status — a finding CET flatly disputes.

The Inquiry into Discrimination and Bullying in Tasmanian Schools began in June 2024, after national data showed Tasmania had the country’s worst schoolyard bullying rates. Two years, 55 findings and 33 recommendations later, its final report — chaired by Labor MP Brian Mitchell — reserves some of its sharpest criticism for the state’s Catholic system, which runs 39 schools across Tasmania.

The committee concluded CET’s hiring practices were in breach of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act 1998. But importantly, this is a parliamentary committee finding, not a court ruling, and the interaction between Tasmania’s legislation and Commonwealth anti-discrimination law has not been judicially determined.

The finding rests partly on testimony from Gerard Gaskin, CET’s former executive director, who told the inquiry back in February 2025 that people whose public lives conflicted with Catholic teaching would not be employed in senior leadership positions. A former deputy principal also told the committee that his marriage breakdown and subsequent de facto relationship led to him being stood down and ultimately told he could no longer work as either a leader or teacher within Catholic Education Tasmania.

CET isn’t backing down. The organisation maintains it operates under, and complies with, the federal Sex Discrimination Act, which contains a specific exemption allowing religious educational institutions to discriminate in certain circumstances where doing so in good faith is necessary to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents. The exemption covers attributes including sexual orientation and marital or relationship status. Current executive director Terry McCarthy says the organisation takes the findings seriously and remains confident its employment practices are lawful.

Here’s the part that should worry every Christian institution in the country, not just Catholic ones: two Liberal members of the committee, Michael Ferguson and Mark Shelton, tried to soften the finding by adding the words “may have”, and were voted down five to two. In their own dissenting statement, the pair warned the report risked trampling “freedoms of belief and family choice” — a warning that deserves a lot more attention than it’s getting.

Because that’s really what’s on the line here. A Catholic school declining to appoint a senior leader who publicly rejects Catholic teaching on marriage isn’t simply an ordinary employment decision — it’s bound up with the entire reason a religious school exists in the first place. If the state can ultimately require CET to treat faithfulness to Catholic doctrine as an unlawful hiring criterion, there’s no principled reason it couldn’t raise the same question for any Christian school, or church-run charity, anywhere in the country.

Independent MP Kristie Johnston, who moved the motion that established the inquiry back in 2024, wasted no time turning the finding into political ammunition, pressing Premier Jeremy Rockliff in parliament over what he intends to do about it. Rockliff didn’t commit to anything beyond the usual line about expecting everyone to follow the law. Equality Tasmania’s Rodney Croome has gone further still, calling for the matter to be pursued rather than leaving the fight solely to individual victims of discrimination.

That should tell you where this is heading. This report isn’t necessarily the end of the story — it could become an invitation for activists and government lawyers to take the dispute further and, potentially, use the courts to settle once and for all how Tasmania’s anti-discrimination laws interact with the protections afforded to religious schools under Commonwealth law.

And Tasmania isn’t acting alone. New South Wales is running its own review of anti-discrimination law, one that includes consideration of the religious exemptions affecting faith-based organisations and schools. The pattern is worth watching: another inquiry, another “review,” another set of recommendations, all potentially affecting the amount of room faith communities have to run their own institutions as they see fit.

The report’s other findings — on bullying rates generally, on First Nations students, on gifted kids falling through the cracks — deserve real attention, and nobody disputes Tasmanian schools have genuine problems to fix. But burying a religious freedom fight inside a bullying report doesn’t make it any less of a religious freedom fight. If a Catholic school can’t require its leaders to actually live like Catholics, what’s left of “Catholic” in Catholic education?

Click here to read How to Handle a Difficult Wife: Part One.

“Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. 14 Let all that you do be done in love.” 1 Corinthians 16:13-14

You have all heard the song, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, that’s what your love means to me!” This song, Respect, is well known around the world as Aretha Franklin’s greatest hit. But what a lot of people do not know is that before this song was taken and retooled as a feminist anthem, it was written by a man and sung by a man, the great Otis Redding.

Redding is as famous as Franklin in his own right, and if you are not familiar with his music, but have seen Top Gun, you will probably remember his beautiful song Sitting on the Dock of the Bay. That song is pure goodness. Go listen to it now; you won’t regret it.

But before he wrote that hit, another one of his songs was Respect.

There is some debate over who originally wrote the song, but we know the lyrics were reworked by Redding when he released the song. Before he sang about the beauty of sitting and watching the ships roll in, he sang about one of the inherent longings of the man for respect from his wife,

“[Verse 1]
What you want, honey, you got it
And what you need, baby, you got it
All I’m askin’ is give me a little respect when I come home
Ooh, yeah
Hey, hey, hey
Yeah, now
Ooh, yeah…”

The song is about a man who wants to give his wife anything she wants, everything she needs. He even says, “And I wanna give you all of my money”, so he does mean everything, and all he wants in return is some “respect”. There is some debate online about whether or not Otis meant to use “respect” as a euphemism for sex, as apparently this was one way this word was used as slang in the street culture of his day.

However, even those who make this point highlight how the end of the song really drives home also just how important plain old respect was to the man,

“[Outro]
Respect when I want it
Respect when I need it
Respect when I want it
Respect when I need it
Got to, got to have it
We got to have it
Got to, got to have it…”

As one commentator has noted,

“In the coda that follows the final verse, Otis goes to work, wresting the word free of this narrow meaning, asserting his prerogative with an insistent determination that turns the song in its final moments into a plea for simple human dignity – “Respect is what I want! / Respect is what I need! / I got-ta got-ta have it! / Just give me some respect!” – that doesn’t stop at mere discretion.”

Take just a moment to meditate on the irony of a song about a man wishing for respect from his wife being turned into a feminist anthem, which is how many people remember this song to this day. It is incredible what feminism can subvert, isn’t it; to the impure nothing is sacred. Maybe sit on the dock at the bay and ponder this for a bit.

But then just sit back and consider how this song highlights two things very well: First, just how much a man wants his wife to respect him for who he is, what he does, and how he provides. But also, that simply expecting her to do so is often wishful thinking and also counterproductive. The song encapsulates how many men think, “Well, I provide, therefore my wife should respect me.” And she should. It is common decency. It is not something that should be taken for granted.

But how many people respect those who provide them with stuff without accountability? The government provides, doesn’t it? How many people respect their welfare providers, man or woman? In fact, the less the government demands of them to receive their welfare cheques, the more contemptible their opinion of their provider will be.

You might think that my example paints many wives in a bad light, but that is not the case. How many men have started their complaint to a friend about an impending divorce that they did not see coming, with this statement, “But I was a good provider!” I am sure you were. I am sure you can relate to Redding’s song deeply, “All I’m askin’ is give me a little respect when I come home.” But the truth is the man who puts himself in the position of begging for respect is only going to be increasingly viewed with contempt. You can’t demand respect; you have to command it by how you carry yourself, and what you expect from your loved ones.

We all know the difference between “demand” and “command.” But perhaps I should illustrate it to make it clearer. There were those bosses, or teachers in school, we all had that tried to be our friends, and when that failed, they over-corrected and demanded respect. But it did not work. The more they demanded it, the less we gave it. Then there were those bosses, or teachers in school, whose boundaries were known from the start. Their boundaries were clear and reasonable, and we therefore had respect for them from early on. And that respect grew over time.

This contrast between the one who “demands” respect and who “commands” respect is such a common trope in our culture that it is all through the fiction we consume. You can hardly see a military movie without them presenting some young Lieutenant who keeps demanding respect and not getting it, while some Sargent, Warrant Officer, or higher-ranked officer is inherently given respect by his men. Countless movies use this stereotype, precisely because it is all too commonly experienced in life. We have all experienced people who fit into both these categories.

The one who begs for respect, or seeks to demand it, will have contempt returned, in increasing measure. In the context of the military unit, an officer can correct this by simply showing himself capable in his role. But part of how he does this is by proving himself competent AND having clear boundaries of what he expects and will not tolerate. Boundaries for how you will be treated AND how you will treat others consistently with that standard really matter.

A man who wants respect needs to recognise this. You command respect not by shouting that you deserve it, but by showing you should be respected. If early in your marriage your wife starts speaking down to you, or contemptuously towards you, and you simply allow it, or worse, you just beg for her to stop it, you will likely develop into the man with the unruly wife over time. This is not good for you, her, your kids, or even society.

Most women have within them the capacity to be a good wife, or a bad wife. Even a good woman has the sinful nature, as do you, and if this sinful nature is fed, your beautiful, loving, and submissive wife can become your tyrant, and then you can find yourself, like so many other men, wondering why you provide so well, but are treated poorly.

So, ask yourself, if your wife talks down to you in front of her friends or your friends, will you just ignore it, or will you look her calmly in the eyes and say, “Don’t!”? Will she know that to speak of you in that way is not to be tolerated? Not that she cannot share her mind, or her opinion, or anything like that; of course she can and will. But if she disagrees with you, she knows to bring it to you at the proper time?

A good woman will want to speak up for her husband in front of her friends and his friends. But what if she has friends who influence her to do otherwise? How will you address that? A woman’s friends can mean the difference between a good marriage and a terrible marriage. Some men do many of the right things, but because they take no care to their wife’s social activities, they get blindsided. Are you making sure that you both spend time with people who will model respect between husbands and wives?

Remember Paul said this to Titus in the passage we looked at in our previous piece, “6 Likewise, exhort the young men to be sober-minded,…” (Titus 2:6). Why do you think, in the context of husbands and wives, that Paul tells young men to be “sober-minded”? It is because young men can be a bit silly, a bit daft, and a bit reckless. And if you approach what you tolerate in your marriage with a silly mindset, you could start patterns between you and your wife that may never be turned back.

Are you willing to walk out of a room, or a social gathering, rather than be disrespected by your wife?

Are you willing to live in such a way that you are easier to respect?

Does your wife reciprocate the respect you make sure that she experiences?

Yes, providing, giving money, and being that kind of man in some ways should be enough to get respect from a thankful wife. But if your wife works, why would she need to respect your ability to provide? Also, there are plenty of men who can provide, and probably a lot more than you can, as a lot of men learn from painful experience. Why should you be respected for doing something that you would have to do if you were single anyway? Sure, over time many women will generally come to appreciate their man’s provision. But not always, and sometimes it is how he commands respect in other ways that actually builds that appreciation.

Do you see the conundrum, young men? There is often a disconnect between what you think should get you respect, and what actually will. There is a reason that the bad boy, who might not even hold a steady job, has plenty of interest from women, when the solid middle manager on a decent income might not have had a second date in several years.

Do you have the temperament that commands respect? Does your wife look to you and feel secure in your arms? Do you have the ambition that will build a life where your wife is able to thrive and be freed from many of the burdens that modern women face? Does she see other men look at you with respect?

This is where I bring in church again. Many men get their professional respect at work, and maybe in some social environments with their friends. But Church, alongside also giving you the chance to fellowship with believers and be challenged about how to be a better man of God, gives you the chance to have your wife see how other men evaluate you in the context of a group dynamic.

Especially if their husband does the right thing at home, and then leads in the context of the gathering in some way. If your wife is a true and genuine believer, this will make a difference to how she views you. Every woman, whether or not they believe in Jesus, wants to see her husband respected by other men; the difference is simply that Christian women, who take the Bible seriously, reframe that within a Christian framework and context. But the same principles apply across the board in other social contexts.

Note, though, men, that living in a way that commands respect needs to be consistent. If you are one thing in one environment, and another in the other environment, those closest to you will lose respect for you. That is one of the reasons we often see men who appeared to be notable guys in the church lose their marriages. Along with what we spoke about in part one of this series, the disconnect in his behaviour bred contempt in the home.

Now, someone at this point might want to exclaim, “Matt, that song was talking about sex, not respect. Men are sex obsessed; that is what he wanted!”

But stop, pause and reflect on this: how much does a woman want to go to bed passionately with a man that she does not respect? It is a turn-off, isn’t it? We all know this. Whereas a man she respects, looks up to, and admires is a man she is also more attracted to. There is a reason some women leave their husbands for their boss, or other men in authority over them. Because this dynamic of respect matters.

It should not surprise us, then, that the street culture in Redding’s day brought “sex” and “respect” together, because they are very closely linked in a marriage relationship. Show me a marriage where, for whatever reason, a woman does not respect her husband, and I will show you either a sexless or very low sex marriage. This is not rocket science.

Men, you need to understand that if you present a compelling banner under which your wife can reframe her own life, your chances of ever having the difficult wife decrease massively.

If you already have a difficult wife, this is going to be a lot harder for you to achieve, because she is probably holding a lifetime of your failures to lead, or inability to set adequate boundaries, against you, as these mistakes cause women to feel unsafe. But the sooner you start to be wise and seek to be a man of respect in the home and outside, the more chance you have of turning things around.

On 18 August, United States gross federal debt passed $40 trillion for the first time. Two days later, the Australian Government Securities passed $1 trillion for the first time.

The standard explanations are mostly just excuses. Washington will point to COVID debt, to the rate cycle, to the tax bill. Canberra will point to the NDIS, to aged care, to hospitals. None explains why every developed democracy is doing the same thing at the same time, under governments on every side of politics, in defiance of what all of them say they believe about fiscal discipline.

Each of these explanations is a distraction from the core issues: runaway consumptive spending, declining spending efficiency, expansion in the very conception of what government should be responsible for and inability to pursue any significant structural reforms.

Here is what drives everything as the underlying foundational demographic challenge: declining generational stake. The marginal voter and the marginal politician in each of these countries hold a shrinking personal stake in what happens after they die. Not zero. Shrinking — and moving in one direction for nearly 200 years.

In exploring questions like these, Prothean Institute looks to the political and philosophical approach of James Madison: not moralistic, just assume people are self-interested and will act to maximise their own outcomes within the incentive structures that exist.

Therefore, it’s not a moral observation. It is an arithmetic one, and it predicts the budget, the policies and the outcomes we are seeing today.

The calculation nobody says out loud

A person with no children, or one child, can protect their line by accumulating personally. Save enough, buy the house, top up the super, and the inheritance divides by one. A deteriorating country is survivable if your sole heir and his wife get the accumulated assets of 4 grandparents. Personal accumulation works.

A person with four children cannot do this. The estate divides by four, then by sixteen when grandchildren arrive. And with more than four children, the consequences are exponential. There is no savings rate high enough to ensure a large line of descendants against a shrinking economy.

The only strategy that scales is to create a flourishing country over the long term in which descendants can create their own economic prosperity.

Why low fertility erodes economic performance

What matters here is what it does to fiscal policy and the budget.

Four direct impacts are evident:

First, consumption. For a household that has opted out of children, the rational plan is present enjoyment plus a retirement pot or extraction from government pension plans. There is no inter-generational investment to fund. Politically, that household votes for what makes the present comfortable: transfers, subsidies, cost-of-living relief, protection of asset values and avoidance of significant structural reforms.

It does not vote for anything whose cost is now and payoff arrives in the medium to long term, and will happily borrow money for present consumptive spending.

Consumptive spending now accounts for more than the entire government tax revenues in most anglosphere countries, with little federal spending on real intergenerational productive infrastructure.

Second, debt. This is where fertility bites hardest, through a design flaw that low fertility exposed rather than caused. Social Security, the age pension, and every European state pension are pay-as-you-go. Today’s retirees are paid by today’s workers. That is a claim by one cohort on the earnings of another. When the second cohort shrinks, a government has two options: cut the benefit, or borrow from descendants that are likely not even born.

Cutting is possible, but it is politically expensive enough, particularly in a low-fertility environment, that neither Washington, London nor Canberra has seriously attempted it in a generation.

So they borrow from future generations. American net interest is now over $1 trillion per year. In Australia, public debt service costs exceed the budget deficit itself: had Australia lived within its means historically, it could be running budgetary surpluses despite the enormous government spending programs such as NDIS.

Neither country set out to put themselves in these precarious financial situations. It is the compounding cost of incremental decisions and structural reforms consistently deferred.

There is a number that gives this mechanism a formula. Across twenty-three advanced OECD economies from 1980 to 2010, every one-year increase in the median voter’s age is associated with a public debt-to-GDP ratio about 4.5 percentage points higher. A study measuring the age of the electorate (rather than the fertility of the people running it) — but it is what the generational stake predicts.

Third, deferral. Work published in February by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group modelled the American budget under continued low fertility and under an immediate return to replacement fertility in 2026. Deficits are unsustainable through 2055 in both cases — and replacement fertility makes the primary deficit worse by 0.2 to 0.5 per cent of GDP a year for the next three decades, because children cost money long before they pay tax. The fiscal payoff arrives around 2075. It’s the very definition of intergenerational investment.

Read that again, because it is the whole problem in one sentence. A politician who fixed the birth rate tomorrow would spend their entire career, and their successors’ careers, paying for it. The same calculus applies to all significant structural or spending reforms that might yield significant benefit in the long term, but require short-term austerity.

The incentive to act on any significant civilisational issue is not merely weak. It is negative at a political level in a low-generational-stakes political environment.

Fourth, immigration as a ‘cheap’ substitute for children. Once fertility repair or structural reforms to improve productivity are written off as too hard or uneconomical, the rational policy is to substitute population and economic growth with migration, and the low long-term consequences of these policies are not considered relevant to a low-generational-stakes electorate.

In Australia, net overseas migration accounted for 73 per cent of population growth in the year to December 2025. Migration levels have been fought over at recent elections in all Anglosphere countries. What has never been put to a vote is migration as a demographic replacement strategy — the quiet substitution of imported adults for domestic births. It arrived because it is the only lever that shows results inside an electoral cycle.

That is what managed decline is. Not a plan. A sequence of individually rational decisions by people whose personal calculation is satisfied either way.

The biggest problem of our time

Apply the inheritance calculation to the people currently in office, and it makes an awkward prediction.

The senior figures of the American executive have unusually high fertility: Trump (five children), Vance (four), Hegseth (seven), and RFK Jr. (six). Between them they have twenty-two children — an average of 5.5.

Set against the recent leaders of other major Western democracies — Macron (none), Scholz (none), Merkel (none), Albanese (one), Sunak (two), Starmer (two), Trudeau (three) — the average falls to roughly 1.14. The gap is striking.

Yet the high-fertility group is also running one of the largest structural deficits in the developed world.

Elon Musk is the cleanest illustration of the problem. A man with more than ten children entered government specifically to attack the long-horizon fiscal problem, at considerable personal cost to his companies and his public standing. What happened next is an informative bit. The effort achieved a fraction of what it claimed, ran into an entrenched appropriations structure that no executive could break through, and wound down. A high-stakes individual attacked the problem directly, and the low-generational-stakes incentives won. If that does not settle the question of whether personnel can substitute for institutional design, nothing will.

We will not pretend this away. On the most visible short-term test available, the mechanism appears to get the wrong answer.

There are two compounding explanations:

1. The inheritance calculation is a claim about long-horizon incentives, not about the next budget cycle. The same administration has pursued (with mixed success) spending restraint (in particular Musk), reshoring, energy expansion, and family-formation measures — projects whose payoffs, if any, arrive well beyond the current electoral window.

2. Perhaps more important for the argument of this piece: a high-fertility executive still faces low-fertility voter preferences and the same institutional incentives that produced the deficits in the first place. Personnel alone does not rewrite the incentive structure across a population.

Which is, in the end, the point. The deficit is downstream of what the median voter demands and what the institutional design rewards. Changing the people at the top, even when those people have strong personal generational stake, does not automatically change the outcome.

The clearer tests of the underlying mechanism are the structural cases of Singapore and Israel.

The Israeli exception

Israel is the only country in the OECD with fertility above replacement — 2.87 in 2024. If the generational stake operates at population scale rather than only through individual leaders, this is where it should show.

It does. Israel cut general government gross debt from 269.8 per cent of GDP in 1984 to 59.3 per cent in 2019, and ran a budget surplus in 2022.

No other developed country has managed anything close. Over the same thirty-five years, every low-fertility peer moved the other way.

Israeli fertility did not rise during the deleveraging — it sat between 2.8 and 3.1 the whole time. That is the point: the generational stake is not a switch that gets flipped; it is a standing condition that biases policy toward long-term investment. Israel held it continuously and deleveraged continuously. The Anglosphere and Europe held the opposite continuously and did the opposite.

The war since October 2023 has added roughly ten points to Israel’s debt ratio. But borrowing to resolve a problem permanently rather than manage it indefinitely moves cost into the present so that the future inherits a solved problem instead of a costly running one.

Israel did not choose 7 October. What it chose afterwards was to prosecute the problem to a resolution rather than return to managing it — at eight per cent of GDP, three credit downgrades, and sustained international diplomatic cost.

A low-stakes political class facing the same attack has an obvious alternative available: absorb it, restore the prior equilibrium, defer the underlying problem, and protect the status quo. And that is what the west has chosen repeatedly to for its significant challenges.

The Singapore objection

The other obvious rebuttal is Singapore. A fertility rate of 0.87, among the lowest in the world. Yet a budget surplus, a AAA rating, and a net asset position. If low fertility drives debt, Singapore should be a wreck.

Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had three children, together with a near-dynastic attitude toward generational stake, and he built its institutions, economy and government with this long-term vision. He made sure Singapore voters had little influence for half a century.

He built its retirement system to require workers to contribute to their own retirement over their productive lifespans, rather than draw on the next cohort’s payroll. Half the long-term real return on the national reserves must by law be reinvested rather than spent. Intergenerational investment is built into its economy.

None of that requires virtuous politicians. It is Madisonian design in the strict sense: long-horizon outcomes out of ordinary self-interested people. The recent history of Singapore is also instructive on two points:

1. Voter power growing - As Lee Kuan Yew stepped back progressively from leadership, and the voter influence grew from around 2000, we see the emergence of the very consumptive spending trends evident in other Western democracies.

2. The primary balance — budget excluding investment returns — went negative this year for the first time since the pandemic. The system is now funding current spending from the yield on inherited capital, exactly as the West does

Singapore has not solved low fertility. It bought several decades of insulation from the fiscal consequences with its capital accumulation, and it is now spending the yield.

What follows

Asking the political class to think longer term is wasted breath, and it does not much matter how many children they have.

A voting public that rewards consumption, debt and reform deferral will produce consumption, debt and reform deferral.

Moral exhortation asks people to act against their interest, and Madison’s entire point was that durable institutions never require that, and those that do, fail.

And read the debt figures and intergenerational theft as the cost of failed institutional design.

Forty trillion and one trillion are not the problem; they are the reckoning — addressed to the grandchildren of the people who still have a generational stake.

The corrective is structural, or it is nothing.

The Prothean Institute is an independent strategic research organisation dedicated to understanding, preserving, and renewing the foundations of thriving societies. All policy recommendations and strategic analyses are grounded in strict epistemic rigour and the reality of real-world conditions and human nature. We reject abstractions untethered from reality and seek to equip leaders with tools that work in the world as it is — not as we might wish it to be.

Notes and References

US Department of the Treasury, Debt to the Penny. Total public debt outstanding was $39,986,657,878,071.92 on 17 August 2026 and $40,047,425,768,420.22 on 18 August 2026. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/

The $1 trillion figure derives from the Australian Office of Financial Management’s issuance schedule as calculated and released by Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson, 20 August 2026, which puts AGS on issue at $1,000.8 billion on 20 August and $994.8 billion on 21 August following $6 billion of maturities. AOFM’s own last published stock figure was $983.7 billion as at 14 August. Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2026–27, Budget Paper No. 1, Table 7.1 projects AGS on issue of $982.0 billion in 2025-26 and $1,051.0 billion in 2026-27. https://www.miragenews.com/australia-hits-1-trillion-of-commonwealth-debt-1730112/ | https://www.aofm.gov.au/

Prothean Institute, The Generational Stake: Why Different Fertility Patterns Produce Different Incentive Structures — and What That Predicts About Political Behaviour, Policy Brief, May 2026 (Paper 3, The Divergent Societies series).

Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036, February 2026. Mandatory outlays $4,529 billion of $7,449 billion total in FY2026 (60.8%); $7,028 billion of $11,416 billion in 2036 (61.6%). https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61882

Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2026–27, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 3, Table 3.1 (payments 26.6% of GDP in 2025-26, 26.8% in 2026-27) and Statement 11 historical series (1986-87: 26.9%). These are budget estimates, not outcomes. https://budget.gov.au/content/bp1/download/bp1_bs-11.pdf

Congressional Budget Office, Monthly Budget Review: July 2026, August 2026. Fiscal year to date: Social Security $1,373 billion; net interest $963 billion; Medicare $952 billion; Department of Defense (military) $763 billion. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61983

Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2026–27, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 7, Table 7.9 (AGS interest $27,690 million in 2026-27 rising to $40,425 million in 2029-30, +46.0%) and Statement 3 (public debt interest averaging 8.8% annual growth over the projection period, against hospitals 7.3%, defence 6.4%, aged care 5.4%). https://budget.gov.au/content/bp1/download/bp1_bs-7.pdf

Ernest Dautović, ‘The weight of the median voter ageing on public debt’, Constitutional Political Economy, vol. 29 no. 1, 2018, pp. 69–92. Panel of 23 advanced OECD economies, 1980–2010. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10602-017-9248-8

Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees, 2026 Annual Reports, 9 June 2026. OASI depletion fourth quarter 2032 (78 per cent payable); Medicare HI depletion second quarter 2033 (89 per cent payable); seventy-five-year OASDI actuarial deficit 4.42 per cent of taxable payroll, widened from 3.82 per cent, of which approximately 0.33 points is attributed to lower fertility, 0.18 to reduced immigration, and 0.16 to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/2026/

Lisa Dettling and Luke Pardue, Low Fertility and Fiscal Sustainability: The Effects of Past and Future Fertility Rates on the US Federal Budget Outlook, Aspen Economic Strategy Group, 24 February 2026. https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/publication/pardue-dettling-budget/

Australian Bureau of Statistics, National, state and territory population, December quarter 2025, released 18 June 2026. Total population growth 412,500; net overseas migration 301,000; natural increase 111,500. Australia’s total fertility rate was 1.481 in 2024, a record low: ABS, Births, Australia, 15 October 2025.

Statistics Canada, ‘Canada’s total fertility rate reaches new low’, 22 April 2026. https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/9140-canadas-total-fertility-rate-reaches-new-low-2024

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, ‘OBBBA Dynamic Score Comes In At $4.7 Trillion’, on CBO’s dynamic estimate including debt service, FY2026–2035. The conventional provision-only score is $3.4 trillion. https://www.crfb.org/blogs/obbba-dynamic-score-comes-47-trillion

Israeli Government Israel Economy Recent Trends 2026 economic update:
https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/israel-economy-recent-trends/en/Files_eng_israel-economy-recent-trends.pdf

Singapore Department of Statistics, Total Fertility Rate 2025, 26 February 2026 (preliminary resident TFR 0.87, from 0.97 in 2024); Speech by Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong, Committee of Supply Debate 2026. South Korea’s 2025 provisional TFR was approximately 0.80. https://www.singstat.gov.sg/news/total-fertility-rate-2025

Singapore Ministry of Finance, Analysis of Revenue and Expenditure, Financial Year 2026. Net Investment Returns Contribution S$28.48 billion, 17.4 per cent of total revenue (21.1 per cent of operating revenue); primary balance −S$2.57 billion in FY2026 against +S$6.40 billion in FY2025. https://isomer-user-content.by.gov.sg/153/b25a4bb9-db1b-428d-ab48-4528e0ee0d37/fy2026_analysis_of_revenue_and_expenditure_2026.pdf

Once upon a time, Western societies understood truth as something objective—something grounded in God and reality, rather than something each individual could invent for themselves, regardless of the facts.

Concepts such as “religious pluralism” and “moral relativism” helped change that. The argument for these ideas is often presented as tolerance and inclusivity: that different people can choose different gods, beliefs, and moral frameworks, and society should simply respect them all, regardless of who they worship and how they worship.

But once religious belief becomes entirely a matter of personal preference, and individuals are free to choose their own ultimate authority, on what basis can we meaningfully object when they choose their own truth and reality?

If truth is no longer something discovered but something personally constructed within the mind, then objective claims about reality, morality, humanity, and biological sex become impossible to define and defend.

The individual has become the final authority in the world of their own making.

“Choose your own god” has gradually become “choose your own truth.” And once truth became something you could choose, it was only a short step to the notion that you could choose your own identity, even when reality itself says otherwise.

The irony is that a culture which abandoned the idea of an objective Creator didn’t abandon religion. It relocated religious authority from God to the self. Consequently, the result is a society in which subjective feelings can be treated as more authoritative than biological reality, and personal identity has become something that others are expected to affirm regardless of what is actually true.

Today, you can be arrested, taken to court, and fined if you do not affirm the “realities” constructed in the minds of other people. The facts of reality have become second to the dictates of the relativists.

But this identity debate is far greater than a dispute about pronouns and terminology. It’s the logical end of a much broader social transformation. It’s ultimately about the replacement of objective truth—or more specifically, God—with personal authority.

Once there’s no higher authority above the individual, there is ultimately no reason the individual can’t declare, “This is my truth, and it is no less true than your own.”

And if truth is whatever we choose it to be, and we can be whoever we choose and believe whatever we wish, then the worldview framing our society is no longer Christianity.

The worldview framing society is now indistinguishable from the mentality of an inmate in an asylum—convinced that reality is whatever his mind tells him it is. But the disconnection between the mind and reality was never something to celebrate or validate. It was always understood as a posture of the mad.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has filed an application with the High Court for leave to appeal a Full Federal Court ruling that upheld a finding she unlawfully racially discriminated against Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

The case stems from a September 2022 post on X, then Twitter, in which Hanson told Faruqi to “piss off back to Pakistan” after Faruqi criticised Queen Elizabeth II and the British Empire following the Queen’s death. The Full Federal Court dismissed Hanson’s appeal on 27 July 2026.

Hanson is now asking the High Court to consider whether Section 18C, as applied to political communication, is constitutionally valid and whether its operation impermissibly burdens the Constitution’s implied freedom of political communication.

The case matters because Section 18C does not require a statement to threaten violence or incite criminal conduct. It prohibits conduct reasonably likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” another person because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin.

The Full Federal Court confirmed in July that Section 18C is constitutionally valid and does not impermissibly burden the implied freedom of political communication. It also found that Hanson’s post was not protected by the Act’s Section 18D exemption for conduct done reasonably and in good faith.

The court found that the post fell within conduct prohibited by Section 18C, but Senator Hanson has vowed not to forfeit the fight.

“I’m taking this fight to the High Court for every Australian who feels they are being silenced and to keep their opinions to themselves,” Senator Hanson said on Saturday in a media release.

“Too many Australians are afraid to speak honestly about immigration, race, religion, Indigenous policy and other important issues because they worry they will be called racist, dragged through a complaints process or taken to court.

“That is not how a free country should work. Australians choose their government. The government should never get to choose what Australians are allowed to say.”

Justice Angus Stewart, who heard the original case, acknowledged that Australian political debate can involve deliberately offensive, exaggerated and angry speech, and that restrictions on such communication can burden political freedom.

Australia has no entrenched constitutional Bill of Rights guaranteeing broad freedom of speech. Instead, the Constitution protects political communication through an implied freedom that operates as a limitation on government power rather than as a personal right to free speech. That makes judicial scrutiny of laws such as Section 18C particularly important.

“I don’t mince my words,” Senator Hanson said. “I never have. People know exactly where I stand. But speaking plainly about political issues should not put you in court. The Full Federal Court accepted that my comments were close to the core of political communication protected by our Constitution.

“It also accepted section 18C casts a wide net, sets a relatively low bar and places a significant burden on political communication. Yet the law was still upheld. This is why I am asking the High Court to hear this case.”

Senator Hanson said she believes all Australians should be able to disagree, argue, and say things other people don’t like.

“Freedom of speech means nothing if it only protects words everyone agrees with.”

She said it’s not about giving politicians special rights, but rather, it’s about the right of everyday Australians to take part in the political debates that shape their own country without being frightened into silence.

A healthy “democracy” does not require citizens to agree with one another—or even to speak politely at all times. It requires sufficient freedom for citizens to argue, criticise, offend and challenge one another without the government becoming the final arbiter of permissible political expression.

“Millions of Australians feel like they have been told there are things they are simply not allowed to say anymore,” she added. “I hear from them all the time. I will not be silenced, and I will take this fight as far as I can for Australians who feel they no longer have a voice.”

The Australian Senate passed new powers for ASIO 26-15 on Thursday.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill (No.2) 2025 adds to the 1979 ASIO Act, raising concerns about citizen protections vis-à-vis police questioning.

Such as the broadening of ASIO’s power to include “sabotage, promotion of communal violence, attacks on Australia’s defence system and any serious threat to Australia’s territorial and border integrity.”

Under current law, this is regardless of “whether these [words or actions] were directed from, or committed within, Australia or not.”

The biggest concerns centre on the “promotion of communal violence” and threats to national integrity.

Under existing laws on adult questioning, anyone who fails to comply with ASIO when they demand information can be imprisoned for five years.

Put simply, in these cases you do not have the right to remain silent.

Ramping up those concerns is the fact that neither inciting “communal violence” nor “threats to national integrity” are properly defined.

According to section 4 of the ASIO Act, foreign interference is defined as: “activities relating to Australia that are carried on by or on behalf of a foreign power.”

Activities included anything that is “detrimental to the interests of Australia “ or involves “a threat to any person.”

Promoting communal violence is defined as: “activities that are directed to promoting violence between different groups of persons in the Australian community.”

Added here is any activity that “endangers the peace, order or good government of the Commonwealth.”

In effect, publicly questioning COVID vaccines, lockdowns, mass immigration, and multiculturalism could be considered incitement and a threat to national stability (integrity).

As could critiquing Islam, or even criticising Albonomics that is currently edging Australia’s economy irreversibly towards’ Labor’s “we’re saving the world from climate change,” Net Zero Nanny State black hole.

By far one of the bill’s most prominent opponents, Senator Alex Antic, said on X that he’s disappointed it passed.

Antic also stated that he voted against the amendment because “extraordinary powers should never become ordinary.”

The South Australian Liberal Senator then declared the law an expansion of the surveillance state.

Antic told the Senate that the bill “doesn’t merely fine-tune existing arrangements.”

“It breaks in new powers and makes permanent extraordinary intrusions on the liberty of Australians.

“Compulsory questioning warrants,” Antic argued, “allow ASIO to compel a person who may never have been charged with an offence or may never be charged with an offence to appear and answer questions under threat of criminal penalty.”

Even telling anyone about being questioned or detained is now an offence.

“These are not ordinary investigative tools,” he stated. “They sit well outside the framework of the traditional criminal justice system.”

Since 9/11, the government has repeatedly extended what were meant to be temporary powers.

That’s because they were the exception, not a permanent rule.

“As it currently stands, the bill removes that sunset clause entirely.”

Making them permanent is a problem, Antic added.

“History shows that temporary emergency powers have a long and chequered history and habit of becoming permanent features.

“Worse still, the bill actually expands the reach of adult questioning warrants.

“The definition of an adult questioning matter will now be broadened under this bill to include sabotage and, most alarmingly, the promotion of communal violence.”

Criticising the loose language, Antic rightly pointed out that “Promotion of communal violence’ is particularly elastic.

“Vague drafting is the enemy of the rule of law.”

To this he added, “What does it actually mean? What does it capture?”

“Does it capture passionate political speech, advocacy that offends certain groups, legitimate protest or religious expression that crosses an often-ill-defined line?”

Antic then asserted, “In a free society, the state shouldn’t be handed an open-ended power to compel citizens to answer questions about speech or association that falls short of actual criminality.”

Blurring lines when it comes to criminality and rights, he further argued, removes certainty about where that line is drawn.

The even greater concern here is whether or not the law could be used to detain and question people against their will.

“The bill also retains the capacity to subject children as young as 14 to these processes. On its surface, that alone should give this chamber reason to pause.

“Security which is purchased at the price of permanent, expanded and coercive powers is a false bargain.”

Extraordinary laws require use-by dates.

“The rule of law requires that the state’s most intrusive rules remain exceptional, tightly confined, regularly scrutinised and subject to genuine sunset clauses.”

They should not, Antic protested, be “quietly normalised” and “quietly allowed to creep into the norm.”

Notably, Antic joined One Nation and The Greens in opposing the expansion of ASIO’s powers.

There’s something incredibly unsettling about the growing public sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of murdering her three young children.

Clancy is currently on trial for the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. According to her defence, she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and was not criminally responsible for her actions.

Yet the bizarre reaction online has gone far beyond sympathy for a woman suffering a mere psychiatric crisis.

Women have actually begun publicly identifying with Clancy. Some have posted tearful videos with their own kids, accompanied by captions like “Same, Lindsay.”

What’s more, hundreds of women have also rallied outside the courthouse in support of Clancy, wearing pink and carrying messages such as “She Needs Help” and “End the Stigma.”

And the internet has rightly responded with indignation that a woman accused of killing her own children has become, for some women, an object of identification and solidarity.

But as murderously insane as it is, perhaps there’s some grim logic to it.

For more than a century, feminists and the women’s rights movement have fought to establish that a woman has an absolute right to decide whether her child lives or dies. Abortion has been elevated into a defining symbol of female autonomy and liberation.

And once that has been normalised—once abortion has been accepted as one of the most fundamental rights a woman can exercise—an obvious question arises: What, exactly, makes the child inside the womb fundamentally different from the child outside it?

Human life is continuous from conception until natural death. As such, there is no magical moment during pregnancy when non-human life suddenly becomes human life. The child does not become a different kind of being when he or she passes through the birth canal.

Location doesn’t determine human worth. Size doesn’t determine human worth. Degree of dependency doesn’t determine human worth. The environment in which a child exists does not determine human worth.

A child does not become more human because he or she moves from the womb to the crib. That’s why abortion and infanticide are morally distinct in law but not in the underlying question of human value.

If an unborn child is a human being, then deliberately killing that child is the intentional killing of an innocent human life. Birth changes a human being’s location, not nature.

If Clancy had aborted her children in the womb, she would be celebrated for exercising her “right” as a woman to choose whether her children live or die.

Perhaps that’s why the “Same, Lindsay” trend is so disturbingly revealing. The Western world has spent decades teaching women that killing an unwanted child can be an expression of freedom, autonomy, and empowerment.

Today, there are social media and cultural campaigns, such as “Shout Your Abortion,” which exist to “normalize abortion,” as though killing an unborn baby is something to boast about.

So, should we really be surprised when the culture begins to lose its ability to articulate where the boundary of human value actually lies? Should we be surprised when the culture that celebrates the killing of children inside the womb begins to sympathise with those who kill children outside of the womb?

A society that “normalises” the deliberate destruction of millions of unborn children shouldn’t expect that attitude towards human life to remain confined to the womb. It should be obvious that when killing becomes routine, people become desensitised to killing.

This is the tragedy of the culture of death. It not only kills the children, but it also changes the society that watches.

The Archbishop of Brisbane has apologised after St John’s Anglican Cathedral was used in a Stan reality television program featuring pornography performer Lily Phillips, saying the church was misled by producers and condemning the program for attempting to “validate the porn-industry.”

Archbishop Jeremy Greaves issued the apology after Australian commentator Melinda Tankard Reist condemned the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane for allowing the cathedral to be used in Turned On: Dirty, Sexy Money, a Stan series centred on the sex industry and OnlyFans creators.

Tankard Reist accused the production of turning the 125-year-old cathedral into a “prop” for the program, questioning how the church could have permitted its sacred space to be used in a production promoting the commercialisation of sex.

The controversy centres on the program’s sixth episode, in which British pornography performer Lily Phillips is shown participating in a religious ceremony at St John’s Cathedral.

The ceremony was conducted by the Very Rev’d Dr Peter Catt, Dean of Brisbane. Phillips is shown responding “I do” when asked whether she turns to Christ, renounces evil and repents of her sins.

Tankard Reist argued that the cathedral had effectively been used to lend legitimacy to a production she described as part of a broader public-relations push for the pornography industry.

Greaves has now apologised, saying:

“On behalf of the Dean (who is currently on leave) and the Cathedral Chapter, I would like to apologise for the distress and anger generated by the Dean’s decision to allow St John’s Cathedral to be used as a backdrop for a reality television program currently streaming on STAN.”

The Archbishop said he was “shocked by the content, nature, and intent of the program,” which he said “does not align with the faith and values of this Diocese.”

Greaves said the program had been presented to the Dean very differently from the finished product.

“Pitched as a documentary program that would explore faith, intention, and life’s complexities, through the experience of an individual who had previously been excluded from faith communities because of past involvement in sex work, the series is nothing more than click-bait, reality TV content that shamelessly attempts to validate the porn-industry.”

He added:

“I unreservedly condemn any attempt to validate an industry that exploits women and girls and contributes to degrading and unhealthy messaging around sex and sexuality.”

According to Greaves, conversations with cathedral staff indicated that “the program’s producers misled the Dean.”

The Archbishop also acknowledged that the Diocese had failed to conduct adequate due diligence before allowing the filming.

“Despite being misled by the program’s producers, it is clear to me that there are a number of gaps in our policies and procedures concerning approvals for filming in any of our churches or other properties.”

Greaves said the Diocese had contacted the producers and requested that “all vision, images and content featuring people other than The Very Rev’d Dr Peter Catt (Dean of Brisbane) be immediately removed,” including footage showing children inside the cathedral.

“This is a situation which should never have happened,” Greaves said.

He announced an immediate review of the Diocese’s policies and procedures to ensure “thorough due diligence” before third parties are granted access to church sites.

The apology marks a stark repudiation of the production by the Diocese, which now says one of Brisbane’s most prominent Christian sites was used in a program whose portrayal of the sex industry directly conflicts with its stated values.

Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong has said she is “outraged” over an Israeli government decision not to pursue criminal proceedings against those responsible for the death of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in an IDF strike in Gaza.

The IDF acknowledged serious failures, including mistaken identification and errors in decision-making, but concluded there was “no reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct” sufficient to justify opening a criminal investigation, according to SBS News.

Frankcom was killed on 1 April 2024 while supporting a World Central Kitchen aid delivery in Gaza. Australia subsequently appointed former Chief of the Defence Force Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin to assess Israel’s investigation and response. His report found that the deaths resulted from failures in IDF controls, mistaken identification, errors in decision-making and failures to comply with procedures and rules of engagement.

Importantly, the Australian investigation did not conclude that the strike was a deliberate attack on humanitarian workers. The report instead identified serious failures surrounding the identification and engagement of the vehicles.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Israel’s decision fell “far short” of the accountability Australia expects. She said Israel’s ambassador would be summoned and Australia’s ambassador in Israel had been instructed to convey the government’s position directly.

Wong also criticised the timing of the announcement, saying it was made on World Humanitarian Day and was “especially insulting” to Frankcom’s loved ones, humanitarians and Australians, according to the Australian Government statement.

World Central Kitchen has rejected the Israeli findings and called the decision unjustified, maintaining that the IDF knew its team was unarmed and knew the movements and identities of the humanitarian convoy, according to The Guardian. (Those are WCK’s claims and should be distinguished from the findings independently established by the Australian and Israeli investigations.)

The question now is whether Israel’s explanation will satisfy Australia, Frankcom’s family, and the wider community. For a democratic ally, scrutiny and accountability shouldn’t be seen as hostility. They’re fundamental to Western legal and moral traditions and therefore accompany military power.

Australian journalists demand transparency from politicians, businesses, and public figures they don’t like. They scrutinise their finances, question their motives and investigate who funds the organisations and causes behind them.

But when it comes to the media itself, there is considerably less enthusiasm for transparency.

South Australian Senator Alex Antic is seeking to change that.

Antic has introduced the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Register of Media Interests) Bill 2026, which would establish a public register requiring journalists and others working in the media to disclose what they earn, the gifts they receive and the source of those gifts.

“Today I am introducing the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Register of Media Interests) Bill 2026,” Antic said in announcing the legislation.

“If passed, the Bill would require journalists and others inside the media to publicly disclose what they earn, any gifts they receive and the origin of same.”

If the media really is as powerful and influential as journalists themselves insist, Australians have a legitimate interest in knowing who is financially connected to those shaping the information they consume.

In a video posted to social media, Antic drew a comparison between journalists and federal politicians.

“In this building I’m required to disclose everything I earn, everything I own, everything I take as a gift and put it on the Senator’s Register of Interest register,” he said.

“But journalists, despite the fact that they’re always telling you how important and relevant and influential they are, they don’t have to do that.”

Antic said his proposed register would require journalists to disclose “all of the gifts, all of the earnings they get” so Australians can see “who’s paying the piper.”

That question goes to the heart of the debate.

Politicians are routinely subjected to scrutiny over their financial interests because Australians understand that financial relationships can create conflicts of interest—or at the very least create the perception of one.

The same principle can reasonably be applied to journalists.

A reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry, for example, may be influenced—or perceived to be influenced—by financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies. A journalist reporting on politics may have relationships with political organisations, lobby groups or wealthy benefactors. A commentator advocating for particular causes may receive speaking fees, gifts, travel or other benefits from organisations that stand to benefit from their influence.

That does not necessarily mean the journalist is corrupt or dishonest.

But transparency allows the public to make its own judgment.

This is particularly relevant in an era when the traditional distinction between journalists, commentators, activists and influencers has become increasingly blurred. Media personalities can have enormous audiences and wield substantial influence over public opinion, elections and political debate.

If influence is the justification for greater scrutiny of politicians, it is difficult to argue that influence suddenly becomes irrelevant when the person wielding it works for a media organisation.

Of course, the proposal is likely to encounter fierce opposition from sections of the media, with concerns about privacy, editorial independence and the potential for such a register to be abused.

However, a genuinely independent journalist should have little to fear from allowing the public to know whether they have financial interests or relationships that could reasonably be relevant to their reporting.

The media has long insisted that Australians deserve to know who is funding political campaigns, lobbying organisations and advocacy groups.

Now Antic is asking whether Australians should also know who is financially supporting the people who tell them what to think about those issues.

That is not an unreasonable question, because “If the news media in this country are as influential as we are told, then Australians deserve to know this information.”

If journalists expect politicians to disclose their interests in the name of transparency, perhaps the people who scrutinise those politicians should be prepared to accept some transparency of their own.