Weekend Wrap for 18 July 2026
Welcome to the NSL Weekend Wrap for 18 July 2026. The Wrap covers Australian secular politics — religious privilege and funding, religion in public schools, discrimination laws, voluntary assisted dying, and many other related issues. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe on our website.
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Parliaments are still in winter recess, so this was a week without bills or divisions. What it produced instead was a set of stories about the terms of religious privilege and religious protection: who is exempt, whose offence carries weight, whose money is making a difference, and whom the state chooses to shield.
The loudest of them is still unfolding in Sydney. A queer arts venue in a long-deconsecrated church was served an eviction notice for "offensive trade" after Christian groups protested its drag performances. The venue holds a one-year lease and a $100,000 Create NSW grant; the Premier has officials checking whether the grant was used as described, while the Arts Minister has defended the venue's right to exist and the Lord Mayor has offered to help it relocate. Strip away the culture-war theatre and the principle is stark: religious offence is being used as a mechanism to shut down publicly funded speech. As one writer put it, if being "insulted and mocked" becomes grounds for eviction, every artist who challenges power is next.
Two stories go to the machinery of money. The state's corruption watchdog is examining whether Catholic Schools NSW — a body that runs on public funding — struck a secret arrangement to hire Liberal operatives whose consulting fees then bankrolled a branch-stacking scheme; its chief executive has stood aside, and Operation Rosny's hearings begin on 27 July. And in Melbourne, a Boroondara councillor put a number on quiet subsidy: 1.8 per cent of all rates in the municipality go to exempting religious sites and private schools, some $2.7 billion in property that other ratepayers carry.
Two more put the "Christian nation" idea to the test. Barnaby Joyce, now a One Nation MP, told an anti-abortion gala that Australia is a Christian country and that "a lot of Indigenous people" would agree — and collected a "political courage" award for saying so. Days earlier, a poll commissioned by the Census — Not Religious? campaign, of which the NSL is part, found that when people are simply asked "do you have a religion?", 54 per cent say no, against the 43 per cent the census's own leading format records.
More again go to protection and exemption. In Western Australia, advocates warned that the Cook government's promised new Equal Opportunity Act — the one meant to finally give LGBTIQA+ people anti-vilification protection — is now being framed with the language of "balance", which in this context has only ever meant preserving the exemptions that let publicly funded faith schools and services reject gay and trans staff and students. Federally, meanwhile, the state was working out how to shield religious communities from hatred: the government adopted 35 of 54 recommendations from the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, including $41.9 million to secure Muslim faith sites, while the Royal Commission on Antisemitism spent the week hearing how universities should respond to antisemitism on campus. Two parallel exercises in defining and policing hatred of a faith, asked in the same week as the opposite question: when the law instead licenses a religious body to discriminate.
One thing, however, did move: in the Northern Territory — the last jurisdiction in the country without it — the Chief Minister set firm dates to introduce voluntary assisted dying, a reform the churches have resisted at every step — and still quietly obstruct inside the Catholic aged-care homes where residents can't get it.
News this week
National: Aged care providers defend anti-VAD stance (1 July 2026)
(A slightly older piece, not picked up previously.)
Some of Australia's largest residential aged care providers have defended their refusal to provide — or even to give residents information about — voluntary assisted dying, despite obligations under the Commonwealth Aged Care Act, which takes precedence over state law. The Medical Republic put the question to providers named in a Go Gentle Australia report that found nearly three-quarters of aged care providers either do not offer VAD or do not give residents clear information on how to access it, and that two-thirds publish nothing at all. Two Catholic providers were explicit. Calvary Health Care said it complies with the law by publishing that it does not provide VAD services; Mercy Health said it does not provide VAD "for moral reasons", adding that as "a Catholic provider of care" it declines both VAD and women's health services. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission is clear that a provider's decision not to participate does not remove its legal duty to support a resident's access, and Go Gentle chief executive Dr Linda Swan notes a resident cannot simply move once a facility has become their home. This is a clean illustration of the concern with faith-based institutional obstruction of lawful end-of-life care: the objection is asserted at the level of the institution, and it is the resident who loses the choice.
➧ READ MORE:
The Medical Republic
NT: Government confirms Northern Territory VAD debate (9 July 2026)
The Northern Territory's voluntary assisted dying bill now has firm dates. Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro told a Council on the Ageing seniors expo in Darwin that the bill will be introduced on 21–23 July and debated on 25–27 August, moving the government off its earlier "mid-year" formulation and setting up the vote that would make the NT the last Australian jurisdiction to legislate for assisted dying. The Territory was the first place in the world to pass a voluntary euthanasia law, in 1995, before the federal parliament overrode it; two inquiries have since recommended a fresh law. Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby has accepted most of her own committee's recommendations but confirmed the bill will carry two features clinicians have criticised: a prognosis time frame, and a "gag clause" preventing health practitioners from raising VAD as a legal option unless the patient asks first — a restriction doctors call unprecedented in health care. The religious contest is already forming: the Australian Christian Lobby is running a "born alive" campaign in the Territory, signalling that the religious right intends to fight both end-of-life and abortion ground there at once.
➧ READ MORE:
Go Gentle Australia
National: Losing our religion? Most Australians have no religion, census could show if question was changed (11 July 2026)
A poll commissioned by the Census — Not Religious? Mark 'No Religion' campaign — the joint campaign of which the NSL is part — has quantified how much the wording of the census religion question shapes the result. Using the ABS's existing format, where respondents pick from a list headed by the major religions, 43 per cent selected "no religion". But when the same population was first asked a plain "do you have a religion?" and only then offered a box to name one, 54 per cent said no — about two million more adults without a religion. The Essential Media survey, reported by the Guardian, lands a month before census night on 11 August, with the ABS having declined to change the wording for 2026 despite conceding that the current question "assumes you have a religion". Campaign spokesperson Michael Dove said the bureau had been "compromised by the lobbying from the religious groups".
➧ READ MORE:
The Guardian
NSW: ICAC probes invoice links between Catholic schools and hard-right Liberal operatives (12 July 2026)
The New South Wales corruption watchdog is examining whether Catholic Schools NSW struck a secret agreement to hire Liberal Party operatives whose consulting fees were then used to bankroll a major branch-stacking scheme. The revelation, reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, sharpens the church-state stakes of Operation Rosny, the eight-week public inquiry that begins on 27 July. The Independent Commission Against Corruption disclosed the week before that the chief executive of Catholic Schools NSW, Dallas McInerney, had become a focus of its broader investigation into links between the hard right of the Liberal Party and fugitive property developer Jean Nassif; McInerney has since stood aside. Catholic Schools NSW is a publicly funded body responsible for the education of hundreds of thousands of students. The allegation now being tested is that its money found its way into the internal factional machinery of a political party. If it holds up, it is one of the clearest cases in years of public religious-education funding being turned to partisan ends.
➧ READ MORE:
The Sydney Morning Herald
NSW: Arts venue faces eviction from former Sydney church after religious groups protest LGBTQ+ events (14 July 2026)
Divine Playhouse, a queer-friendly arts venue that opened this month in a 150-year-old deconsecrated church in central Sydney, has been ordered by its landlord to stop "engaging in offensive trade" after Christian groups protested its opening. The building has not been a church since the 1930s; it has since been a school and a theatre, and the City of Sydney is weighing a proposal to redevelop it into apartments. The Catholic men's group Fit for the Kingdom and a Christian brotherhood calling itself the Prodigal Sons rallied roughly seventy people outside on opening night and demanded that the New South Wales government claw back the $100,000 Create NSW grant the venue received. The landlord's breach notice claimed the venue "insulted and mocked the sincerely held religious beliefs of millions of Christian Australians" and gave it two days to cease operating; weekend events were cancelled, a supporters' snap rally was postponed, and the venue's social media accounts were taken down. By week's end the Arts Minister, John Graham, had defended the venue's right to exist, the Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, had offered to help find a new home for the postponed events, and the operator, Heaps Gay, was preparing for a possible legal fight — while the Premier, Chris Minns, had officials checking whether the venue's programme matched its grant application. The secular question is in the breach notice: whether religious offence at the content of publicly funded art is a lawful reason to evict it.
➧ READ MORE:
The Guardian
The Age
Star Observer
National: Barnaby Joyce claims Australia is a 'Christian nation' and says many First Nations people would agree (15 July 2026)
One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce has declared Australia a "Christian nation" — "premised on Christian principles" — and asserted that "a lot of Indigenous people would tell you straight up and proper" that it is. He made the remarks while accepting a "political courage" award at an anti-abortion gala in Sydney organised by the activist Joanna Howe, whose June rally Joyce had headlined to push for reduced abortion access in New South Wales. The claim runs against both the constitution, which establishes no religion, and the census: Christian affiliation fell from 61 per cent in 2011 to 43.9 per cent in 2021, while "no religion" nearly doubled to 38.9 per cent over the same decade. Professor Anne Pattel-Gray, a Bidjara and Nguri woman and academic director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies at the University of Queensland, rejected Joyce's invocation of First Nations people, noting that Christianity was delivered to Australia through "colonial objectives, denial and theft" and used to justify violence against Aboriginal people. It seems we're now seeing a build-up in the religious right's push to redefine national identity in Christian terms and its parallel campaign to wind back abortion access — increasingly run through the same events and the same people.
➧ READ MORE:
The Guardian
VIC: Subsidisation of religious sites and private schools an "unjust burden" for ratepayers, says Victorian councillor (16 July 2026)
A Boroondara councillor has put hard figures to a subsidy that usually stays invisible: in the inner-eastern Melbourne municipality, about 1.8 per cent of all rates go to exempting religious sites and private schools from paying them. At a council meeting late last month, Councillor Rob Baillieu detailed the findings of a confidential report showing that 279 of the 801 rate-exempt properties in the area were religious sites and another 76 were private education, together representing $2.7 billion of the $5.44 billion in exempted property. Because those properties pay nothing, the burden shifts onto everyone else; Baillieu estimated that removing all exemptions would cut the median residential rates bill by about $75 a year. He called the arrangement "both inconsistent with the separation of church and state, and an unjust burden on ratepayers". The exemptions are set by state law under Victoria's Local Government Act, so councils cannot touch them, and a 2019–20 independent review that recommended a public-benefit test — which would likely have made religious schools rateable — was rejected by the state government.
➧ READ MORE:
Rationalist Society of Australia
WA: Calls for clear timeline for anti-vilification protections (16 July 2026)
The prosecution of a Perth man over a year-long campaign of defamatory flyers targeting LGBTIQ people — he was fined $4,000 for leaving obscene articles in letterboxes — has renewed pressure on the Cook government to close a gap in Western Australian law: the state still has no vilification protections based on sexuality or gender identity, a generation after it criminalised racial vilification. Perth's Deputy Lord Mayor, David Goncalves, and the advocacy group Just.Equal are pressing for a clear timetable for the promised new Equal Opportunity Act, which the Attorney-General says will be introduced this year. Just.Equal's Brian Greig warned that the government has begun describing the reform in terms of "balance" — a word, he noted, that never arises in relation to racism or sexism, and that "always means caving in to the religious right". The concern is that the new Act will keep the special religious exemptions that allow publicly funded faith schools and services to refuse to hire, or to sack, LGBTIQ staff, and to turn away students — exemptions a 2021 Law Reform Commission report recommended removing, and that successive premiers have promised (and failed) to repeal.
➧ READ MORE:
OUTinPerth
National: Royal Commission on Antisemitism holds five days of university hearings (13–17 July 2026)
The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion held its fourth block of hearings in Melbourne over five days, examining antisemitism at Australian universities and how institutions have responded. Vice-chancellors, including the University of Sydney's Mark Scott, appeared alongside the University of Melbourne and other institutions, and academics from the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A) told the commission that Jewish and Israeli students and staff continued to feel unsafe on campus. The alliance urged universities to adopt a formal definition of antisemitism and enforce it through their codes of conduct and disciplinary processes, and asked the federal government to review the French Model Code that governs free speech and academic freedom at universities. Commissioner Virginia Bell, who observed that some witnesses who had already given evidence were later subjected to antisemitic abuse, is weighing institutional responses against the competing claim of academic freedom. For us, the interest lies less in the particular grievances than in the governance questions the commission is shaping: how a public inquiry defines hatred of a religious and ethnic group, whether a contested definition should be written into university rules, and how that sits alongside free expression. The commission received more than 20,000 submissions and runs in parallel with the government's response this week to the separate Islamophobia review; its final report is due by 14 December 2026.
➧ READ MORE:
J-Wire
Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion
National: Government to adopt two-thirds of Islamophobia report recommendations (18 July 2026)
The federal government has accepted 35 of the 54 recommendations of the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, whose report was handed to it late last year. The response includes an education task force and $41.9 million to improve security at Muslim faith-based sites, and the Prime Minister said prejudice against Muslims had "no place in Australia". The measures mirror the government's earlier funding for the security of Jewish institutions, and sit alongside the separate Royal Commission on Antisemitism now holding hearings — two parallel exercises in which the state treats the protection of a religious community as a question of social cohesion and public safety. The main point of interest is not in the goal, which is uncontroversial, but in the shape of the machinery being built around it: how governments define hatred of a faith, whom they fund to counter it, and whether the standards applied to one religious community are applied evenly to all. The Envoy said the response was "just the start", and that he would keep advocating for the recommendations left unadopted.
➧ READ MORE:
SBS News
Commentary and analysis
Andrew Phelan: Subsidised but unaccountable: the religious charity gap (29 June 2026)
An older piece, previously missed, run because it names the accountability side of the tax-and-charity-privilege story. Phelan's target is the "basic religious charity" (BRC) exemption in the ACNC Act, which lets a religious charity take the full financial benefits of charitable status — income tax exemption, fringe-benefits and GST concessions — while being uniquely excused from answering the financial questions, lodging annual reports or meeting the governance standards every other charity, however small, must observe. The Productivity Commission has recommended repealing it and found that repeal would not offend section 116 of the Constitution, distinguishing the practice of religion (protected) from the financial administration of large incorporated institutions (not). Phelan marshals the examples: the ACNC could pursue Hillsong only because it was not a BRC and had reporting obligations to breach; the Plymouth Brethren mobilised thousands of election volunteers as a charity with no duty to disclose its finances; and the Catholic bishops' 2020 promise to publish full accounts remains unhonoured. His conclusion is that the exemption "is a shield and it is being used as one" — and that Assistant Minister Andrew Leigh's own trust-and-transparency framework points to repeal.
➧ READ MORE:
Pearls & Irritations
Bakchos (Blak and Black): The Constitution, the Census and the Limits of the Christian Claim (15 July 2026)
The companion to Barnaby Joyce's "Christian nation" claim, and a model of how to answer it. Writing from Wiradjuri, Jewish and humanist perspectives, Bakchos makes four arguments on separate evidence: that section 116 of the Constitution deliberately established a secular Commonwealth on top of colonies that had inherited an established church; that the census shows a Christian plurality in structural decline rather than a majority (61 per cent in 2011 to 43.9 per cent in 2021, with "no religion" nearly doubling); that whether "Christian" is doing theological work or standing in for an ethnic preference is a genuinely open question the essay declines to resolve more cleanly than the evidence allows; and that the "monoculture" Pauline Hanson demanded has been rejected in the polling even by voters who want lower immigration. Its sharpest observation is that the Christianity still growing in Australia is a migrant Christianity — Filipino, Vietnamese, South Sudanese, Samoan, Indian — which sits awkwardly with the Anglo-Celtic picture the "Christian country" claim assumes.
➧ READ MORE:
Blak and Black
Rodney Croome: Hopes for new Tasmanian ban on conversion practices (15 July 2026)
With the consultation on Tasmania's draft Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill closing on 31 July, Croome (of Equality Tasmania and Just.Equal) traces the decade-long path that produced it, and explains why the delay was about getting the model right rather than any shortage of political support. He is candid about the 2023 government bill that "would have allowed more conversion practices than it prevented", with a narrow definition, wide exemptions and a consent loophole that ignored the impossibility of consenting to practices built on false claims. The Greens' bill, drafted with survivors across fourteen versions, borrows the NSW approach of defining not only what a conversion practice is but what it is not — the provision meant to reassure religious families and ordinary pastoral care while still criminalising coercive harm — and hands oversight to the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner. It is the clearest available guide to why this bill matters and what a strong ban actually looks like, and it lands while the Australian Christian Lobby runs an active campaign against it under the banner of "parental and religious freedom".
➧ READ MORE:
QNews
James Thorpe: LGBTQI+ artists have been targeted for 'insulting Christianity'. To queer people, this feels particularly cruel (15 July 2026)
Probably the sharpest framing of the Divine Playhouse affair. Thorpe — a night-time industries advocate who grew up in the church — argues that liberal democracy rests on a bargain: we give up the power to silence those who offend us in exchange for the freedom to speak when our own ideas offend others. Queer people, he notes, have kept their side of that bargain for generations while being told their lives were sinful. He is unsparing about the double standard: taxpayers fund religious schools that teach his relationships are wrong, and religious institutions enjoy tax concessions that subsidise speech he finds offensive, yet no one suggests those be withdrawn on the ground of offence. Fewer than half of Australians identify as Christian, Christianity arrived with colonisation on a continent that held the oldest continuing cultures on Earth, and it does not own the national story. If "insulted and mocked" becomes a mechanism for eviction, he warns, every artist who challenges power is next.
➧ READ MORE:
The Guardian
Trevor Cobbold and Ian Morgan: Fully Funding Private Schools is No Way to Increase Equity in Education (17 July 2026)
A rebuttal to the Greenwell–Bonnor proposal to fully fund private schools on condition they charge no fees and open their enrolments. Cobbold and Morgan argue that Catholic and Independent schools, despite their resource advantage, perform no better than public schools once social composition is accounted for, so drawing disadvantaged students into them would not lift equity. Along the way they make the secular case plainly: full public funding of private schools would likely deepen religious segregation by encouraging more faith-based schools; and any move to fund private-school capital should keep the assets in public ownership, precisely so they cannot be transferred to a related entity to dodge liability — "as in the case of Christian Brothers transferring schools to Edmund Rice Australia for $1". Their remedy runs directly through religious privilege: end the $1.2 billion Choice and Affordability Fund, remove tax-deductibility for building funds, and strip the payroll-tax and local-government-rates exemptions — the same exemptions a Boroondara councillor costed this week.
➧ READ MORE:
Save Our Schools
Opportunities for action
National: The Census — Not Religious? campaign is running a petition calling on the ABS to "fix the Census question on religion so we can all rely on accurate data". View and sign the petition on Change.org.
NSW: The NSW parliament's education committee will hold an urgent inquiry into Redeemer Baptist School, examining coercive control, the school's finances, unpaid teaching staff, the movement of children into the homes of the principal and headmaster, and the adequacy of government oversight of the school's registration and funding. Terms of reference and a submissions process are expected soon!
TAS: The Tasmanian Greens' draft Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill 2026 is open for public consultation until 31 July, ahead of its introduction to parliament later this year. The bill would be the most comprehensive conversion-practices ban in the country, and the religious organisations that have opposed such laws in every other jurisdiction now have a four-week window to lodge submissions. Secular, humanist and human-rights voices that support a strong ban — one that protects genuine religious expression while criminalising coercive practice — should make sure they are heard. Submit your view via the consultation website.
National: With faith organisations now running a coordinated campaign to lift the religion count, the 2026 Census religion question (Census night is 11 August) is contested ground. Australians who do not hold a religion can ensure the data is accurate by marking "No Religion". The NSL is part of the joint Census — Not Religious? Mark 'No Religion' campaign. Learn more at the campaign website.
National: Go Gentle Australia has published Know Your Rights: VAD in Aged Care, together with a searchable database covering 70 of the largest residential aged care providers, after finding that two-thirds of providers publish no public information about voluntary assisted dying — despite VAD being lawful in all six states and the ACT. Faith-based providers are a substantial part of the sector, and a resident who discovers only on admission that their provider will not facilitate VAD has effectively lost the choice. Supporters can look up their own or a family member's provider and press those that are silent to publish their position. Read the guide and search the provider database at Go Gentle Australia.
NT: The Northern Territory government's voluntary assisted dying bill remains on track for introduction mid-2026, leaving the NT as the last Australian jurisdiction without VAD. The bill is expected to depart from several recommendations of the 2025 inquiry, including a 12-month prognosis limit, and will be decided on a conscience vote. Meanwhile the Australian Christian Lobby has opened a "born alive" campaign in the Territory, signalling that the religious right intends to contest end-of-life and abortion ground there simultaneously. Secular voices supporting safe, accessible VAD with adequate safeguards should watch for the bill's introduction. Go Gentle Australia is tracking the NT process.
TAS: Tasmania: Equality Tasmania, Women's Health Tasmania, and Working It Out have formally written to the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner requesting an inquiry into the proposed sale of Hobart Private Hospital to Calvary Health Care. If you are a Tasmanian who supports continued access to gender-affirming and other healthcare services that Calvary's Catholic ethical guidelines would prohibit, consider contacting the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner's office to support the call for an inquiry or following Equality Tasmania's campaign.
National: Dying With Dignity NSW has an opportunity for people to send a message to Attorney-General Michelle Rowland and ask her to make changes to improve VAD availability (by using telehealth). For people in regional areas and those who are unable to travel it is more difficult, or even impossible, to access VAD. This could be easily fixed by excluding VAD from telehealth prohibition. Visit their campaign here.
National: Go Gentle Australia's 2026 State of VAD Report made a compelling case for a straightforward amendment to the Commonwealth Criminal Code: remove the restriction that treats electronic communication and telehealth discussions about voluntary assisted dying as potential facilitation of suicide. This one-line fix would allow dying people — particularly those in regional and remote areas — to consult with VAD practitioners via telehealth rather than being required to travel repeatedly for in-person appointments. A central Queensland man died waiting for VAD access because of bureaucratic prescription mail rules. This is a discrete, fixable federal legislative problem. Contact your federal member or senator to call for the amendment.
National: The Rationalist Society of Australia is running a Change.org petition calling on the Australian War Memorial to take direct responsibility for the Anzac Day Dawn Service and end the imposition of Christian worship on a national commemoration. Read and sign the petition at change.org.
National: The Australia Institute are calling on federal parliament to pass truth in political advertising laws that are nationally consistent, constitutional and uphold freedom of speech. View the petition at The Australia Institute
National: The Human Rights Law Centre are running a website for those who want to support an Australian Charter of Human Rights & Freedoms. Visit the Human Rights campaign website here
National: The Australian Education Union is running a campaign calling for “For Every Child” to receive fair education funding. Support the campaign here.
NSW: The Human Rights for NSW alliance is running a campaign calling for NSW to pass a Human Rights Act.
Our activities
NSL is involved in the joint 2026 Census - Not Religious? Mark 'No Religion' campaign aiming to improve the accuracy of census religion data. Visit the campaign website to learn more, make a donation to support the campaign, or sign the Change.org petition calling on the ABS to change the leading religion question in the Census.
As always, the full videos of presentations and panel discussions from the 2023 Secularism Australia Conference (co-organised by NSL and other groups) are freely available for viewing on the Secularism Australia website and on YouTube!
More coming soon!
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