Weekend Wrap for 29 August 2026
Welcome to the NSL Weekend Wrap for 29 August 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(opens in new tab).
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Health was where the church-state fault lines ran deepest this week. On Thursday night the Northern Territory became the last Australian jurisdiction to legalise voluntary assisted dying, which now means the practice is legal right across the country. It was a milestone three decades in the making — and the Australian Christian Lobby fought it to the end, when they received a consolation prize: a gag clause barring doctors from raising the option, and a twelve-month prognosis limit that critics say will lock out the very people the law is meant to help.
In Hobart, the competition regulator waved through the sale of the Hobart Private Hospital to Catholic operator Calvary Healthcare, which does not permit terminations, IVF, gender-affirming care or voluntary assisted dying at its sites. One Catholic code will now govern what is effectively a monopoly on private hospital care across the state's two biggest cities. Down the corridor in parliament, the deputy premier declared the Greens' conversion-practices bill "fundamentally flawed", putting himself at odds with his own premier. And the Catholic Education bullying report from last week still sits on the Rockliff government's desk, unanswered.
In Sydney, Operation Rosny turned to the Perrottet family, and The Saturday Paper named the fight it says the ICAC hearings are only skirting: an unprecedented Catholic grip on the city's rapidly filling — and enormously valuable — burial grounds. Hospitals, cemeteries, schools: in a single week, the Church's institutional interests were all in the frame at once. Scrutiny is the thing religious privilege is built to avoid, and this week there was a great deal of it.
The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, meanwhile, wrapped up its public hearings. Now comes the hard part: deciding how the state should define a religiously and ethnically loaded concept, and who gets to police the line. The evidence is in but the definitions are not.
News this week
QLD: Euthanasia laws are overdue for review. A former minister has ideas why (23 August 2026)
Queensland's voluntary assisted dying laws fell due for their statutory three-year review nine months ago, but the Crisafulli LNP government has said little about it beyond insisting it will make "no changes". Former LNP minister Jann Stuckey — a long-time VAD advocate now living with terminal cancer — suspects the silence is deliberate, and warns the review could hand the party's "hard-right Christian" faction, already gagged from reopening the abortion debate, an opening to wind the scheme back. Faith groups and the demand that church-run sites be allowed to refuse the practice shaped the original 2021 conscience vote; federally, telehealth restrictions remain the live barrier to access, particularly in the regions.
➧ READ MORE:
The Age(opens in new tab)
WA: WA education department turned down schools' pleas to use chaplaincy funding to directly hire wellbeing staff, documents show (23 August 2026) Documents obtained by the Rationalist Society under freedom of information reveal that Western Australian public schools have been asking to use federal wellbeing funds to hire their own staff directly, rather than through the approved religious labour-hire providers such as YouthCare and Scripture Union, whose roles require religious credentials. The department refused, citing policy, even as its own papers conceded the federal rules allow direct hiring and that demand is growing. Nearly $2.8 million was clawed back from 185 schools that could not source a worker. It gives a clear picture of how an outsourcing arrangement keeps religion embedded in secular schools.
➧ READ MORE:
Rationalist Society of Australia(opens in new tab)
National: One Nation senator says he's undecided if gay people deserve equal rights (25 August 2026)
One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts has declined to say whether he believes gay people deserve equal rights, telling a religious conference that he was "undecided" on the question and casting doubt on aspects of sexuality. The remarks, made to a faith audience rather than in the chamber, drew a sharp rebuke from Anna Brown, CEO of Equality Australia. Roberts is a reliable vote for the religious right's legislative agenda, from winding back anti-discrimination protections to opposing conversion-practices bans, and his choice of venue is its own kind of statement.
➧ READ MORE:
OUTinPerth(opens in new tab)
NSW: RSA questions NSW council over installation of marble Mother Mary statue (26 August 2026)
Liverpool City Council has installed a six-metre, five-tonne marble statue of the Virgin Mary in a public park, unveiled by the mayor as a "symbol of the Christian faith" and blessed by the Catholic Bishop of Sydney — with the amount of public money spent on it so far undisclosed. The episode puts a sharp point on the separation of church and state: whether ratepayers should be funding the erection of one religion's iconography on civic land, and whether a council owes residents a full account of what it cost. A small case that tests a large principle.
➧ READ MORE:
Rationalist Society of Australia(opens in new tab)
NT: NT passes voluntary assisted dying laws, legalising VAD Australia-wide (27 August 2026)
The Northern Territory parliament passed voluntary assisted dying legislation on Thursday night, making the NT both the first and last Australian jurisdiction to legislate for it (a watershed 1995 law was overturned by the Commonwealth two years later). The bill passed on a conscience vote, but with a gag clause that bars health professionals from raising VAD with patients and a twelve-month prognosis limit; attempts to remove both were voted down by a majority of government members. The Australian Christian Lobby, which campaigned against the law, said it was "deeply disappointing". VAD is now legal in every Australian jurisdiction, though the NT's is among the most restrictive.
➧ READ MORE:
ABC News(opens in new tab) (27 August)
ABC News(opens in new tab) (29 August)
TAS: ACCC approves sale of the Hobart Private Hospital to Catholic provider Calvary Healthcare (28 August 2026)
The competition regulator has approved the sale of the Hobart Private Hospital to Catholic operator Calvary Healthcare, making it Calvary's fifth Tasmanian hospital and handing the provider a monopoly on major private overnight hospital care in Hobart and Launceston. At its other sites Calvary follows a Catholic code that bars vasectomies, surgical terminations, gender-affirming care, IVF and voluntary assisted dying. Equality advocates warned those services would now cease at Hobart Private and asked the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner to investigate; the health department insists alternative providers will fill the gaps. It is a textbook case of religious doctrine reshaping who can access lawful medical care.
➧ READ MORE:
ABC News(opens in new tab)
OUTinPerth(opens in new tab)
National: Liberals wanted to extend the royal commission. But Jewish groups did not join the call (29 August 2026)
The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion wrapped up its public hearings on Wednesday — 340 witnesses across 62 days, more than 130 of them Jewish, and 20,000 written submissions — with Bondi rabbi Yehoram Ulman given the last word. Several high-profile Liberals, among them Julian Leeser, Josh Frydenberg and Angus Taylor, had pushed to extend the inquiry so that Anthony Albanese and other ministers could be compelled to give evidence; mainstream Jewish groups backed the commission's work but pointedly declined to join that call. Commissioner Virginia Bell shifted her final report four days, to 18 December, and confirmed much of the national-security evidence was heard in closed session, with parts to be released after the alleged gunman's criminal trial. How the state ultimately defines and responds to antisemitism remains the unfinished business.
➧ READ MORE:
The Age(opens in new tab)
NSW: Charles Perrottet becomes ICAC's main character amid claims of hidden payments and political hit jobs (29 August 2026)
ICAC's Operation Rosny this week turned to Charles Perrottet, brother of former premier Dominic Perrottet, and to payments made to his wife Anita. Among them: $347,000 for being a "sounding board" on the Catholic Cemeteries Trust, paid while the Perrottet cabinet was weighing — and ultimately declined to act on — a proposed merger of the Catholic-owned cemeteries with the state's. The inquiry into the conservative "Reformers" faction, allegedly funded by developer donations to shift the Liberals rightward, has already claimed Catholic Schools NSW chief Dallas McInerney. It keeps returning to the same terrain: publicly connected religious interests, and the money and influence that move around them.
➧ READ MORE:
The Guardian(opens in new tab)
The Sydney Morning Herald(opens in new tab)
TAS: Tasmania's Deputy Premier Guy Barnett potentially at odds with premier over conversion ban (29 August 2026)
Tasmania's deputy premier and attorney-general, Guy Barnett, has branded the Greens' draft conversion-practices bill "fundamentally flawed" and "amongst the most extreme of its type", claiming in a letter to an anti-trans group that it risks criminalising prayer and conversations within families — despite the bill's explicit carve-outs for both. His stance puts him at odds with Premier Jeremy Rockliff, who says he supports a ban but wants the "rough edges" knocked off, and has offered his party a conscience vote. Labor and several crossbenchers back the bill, so it may pass without government support. The Australian Christian Lobby is campaigning against it. Tasmania remains one of only three jurisdictions yet to outlaw the practices.
➧ READ MORE:
ABC News(opens in new tab)
Commentary and analysis
Karen Barlow: Exclusive: Cemeteries fight behind the ICAC hearings (29 August 2026)
Barlow's investigation argues that the Operation Rosny hearings are only touching the surface of what the "Reformers" were really about. Senior Coalition figures and a Sydney religious source point her to the "bigger whale": an unprecedented Catholic Church effort to keep control of Sydney's rapidly filling burial grounds, worth by some estimates billions of dollars. It is the piece that reframes the whole inquiry — from a branch-stacking scandal into a story about a church quietly securing a commercial and civic asset with the help of a captured party faction.
➧ READ MORE:
The Saturday Paper(opens in new tab)
John Warhurst: Why do problems with church governance persist? (29 August 2026)
Warhurst uses the Catholic Schools NSW evidence at ICAC to ask why a decade of promised governance reform inside the Catholic Church has produced so little. His answer turns on accountability and transparency — or their absence — in institutions that run on public money but answer largely to themselves. It's a measured, insider's diagnosis of the structural reason scandals keep recurring, and a useful companion to the Rosny reporting.
➧ READ MORE:
Pearls & Irritations(opens in new tab)
David Timbs: Catholic bishops' unfinished business (28 August 2026)
Timbs argues that Australia's Catholic bishops have never properly confronted the church's legacy of clerical abuse, and points to public acts of remorse made by the church in France and Peru as the kind of reckoning still missing here. It is a pointed reminder that institutional accountability is not only a matter for courts and commissions, but for the church's own leadership — and that, so far, they have chosen not to lead.
➧ READ MORE:
Pearls & Irritations(opens in new tab)
Bernard Doherty: Who are the Brethren and what do they believe in? (24 August 2026)
With the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church facing allegations that its members mobilised far-right operatives during the federal election, Doherty offers a clear-eyed explainer on the secretive sect: its beliefs, its separatist practices, and its history of quiet political influence. It is helpful background for a group that has spent decades avoiding scrutiny while wielding more of it than its low profile suggests.
➧ READ MORE:
The Conversation(opens in new tab)
Barbara Miller: Beneath the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion's calm surface lies a deep tension (27 August 2026)
Miller's analysis of the royal commission's nine hearing blocks captures what the transcripts cannot: the raw pain of witnesses, the bitter contest over what counts as antisemitism, and the awkwardness of a public broadcaster being asked to run "positive stories about Israel" as a remedy. With the report now due in December, she lays out the near-impossible task ahead: defining a contested concept without licensing the state to police legitimate political speech.
➧ READ MORE:
ABC News(opens in new tab)
Paul Gregoire: NSW Premier Considers Arming Private Jewish Security in Public, Despite Police Disapproval (22 August 2026)
Gregoire lays out Premier Chris Minns's push to let the Community Security Group — a Jewish organisation whose guards are already armed at synagogues and schools — carry firearms at public events too, over the repeated objections of NSW Police, whose deputy commissioner told the antisemitism royal commission that arming one community would breed "friction" and that protecting the public is the job of police alone. Labor and Greens MLCs warn of sanctioning "private ethnic militias". Strip away the security framing and it is a sharp church-state question: whether the state should hand one faith community a coercive privilege extended to no other.
➧ READ MORE:
Sydney Criminal Lawyers(opens in new tab)
Opportunities for action
NT / National: With voluntary assisted dying now legal nationwide, the remaining national fight is telehealth access. The House defeated Kate Chaney's telehealth bill on 11 August, but Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young's Criminal Code Amendment (Equal Access to Voluntary Assisted Dying) Bill 2026 is before the Senate, where the numbers are more open. Email the Attorney-General and your senators via Go Gentle Australia's telehealth campaign(opens in new tab).
TAS: Write to your Tasmanian MPs on two live church-state fronts. The Greens' draft Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill 2026 is heading for debate, opposed by Deputy Premier Guy Barnett and the Australian Christian Lobby; and the ACCC's approval of Calvary Healthcare's takeover of the Hobart Private Hospital has prompted Equality Tasmania to ask the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner to investigate the likely loss of any legal healthcare services with which Calvary disagree on religious grounds. Find and contact your local members via the Tasmanian House of Assembly member list(opens in new tab).
NSW: Watch Operation Rosny. This week the ICAC inquiry turned to Charles and Anita Perrottet and to the Catholic Cemeteries Trust; a taxpayer-funded Catholic-education body remains at its centre. The public hearings are open and livestreamed. See the ICAC Operation Rosny page for hearing details(opens in new tab).
NSW: Make a submission to the NSW Law Reform Commission's Anti-Discrimination Act review — submissions close 2 October 2026. The review reaches the religious exemptions that let publicly funded faith schools discriminate against LGBTQIA+ staff and students. Make a submission or complete the survey via the NSW Law Reform Commission(opens in new tab).
QLD: Watch the review of Queensland's human rights and anti-discrimination framework, led by Peter Flanagan KC. A discussion paper and call for submissions is due on 30 September 2026, with the consultation period running through October. The review reaches the state's Human Rights Act and anti-discrimination protections — exactly the ground the Australian Christian Lobby has said it will fight to keep religious exemptions on. Read the terms of reference and subscribe for the submissions window via the Queensland Department of Justice(opens in new tab).
National: Have your say in Go Gentle Australia's 2026 National Voluntary Assisted Dying Survey, which gathers public views to inform the defence and improvement of VAD laws around the country. Complete the survey via Go Gentle Australia(opens in new tab).
National: Sign the Census – Not Religious? campaign's petition to fix the Census religion question for future censuses. Census night has passed for 2026, but the leading question the ABS's own documents concede "may lead respondents to a particular response" will be back in 2031 unless it is changed. Sign the Change.org petition(opens in new tab), and read why the wording is loaded(opens in new tab).
National: Push back on the $1.2 billion Choice and Affordability Fund. Private school organisations are campaigning to extend the fund beyond 2029 — money available only to Catholic and Independent schools, outside the needs-based model. Support the AEU's For Every Child campaign(opens in new tab).
National: Support an Australian Charter of Human Rights & Freedoms. The Human Rights Law Centre runs a site for supporters. Visit the Human Rights Act campaign website(opens in new tab).
Our activities
NSL was a partner in the joint 2026 Census – Not Religious? Mark 'No Religion' campaign, which ran through census night on 11 August and has now concluded. The petition remains open: visit the campaign website(opens in new tab) to learn more, or sign the Change.org petition(opens in new tab) 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(opens in new tab) and on YouTube(opens in new tab)!
More coming soon!
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