Weekend Wrap for 8 August 2026
Welcome to the NSL Weekend Wrap for 8 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.
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Census night is Tuesday. With the forms already in more than a million households, the loaded religion question the ABS itself concedes "may lead respondents to a particular response" is now doing its work — and this week the Bureau took the unusual step of pleading with everyone to ignore the fight over how to answer it. But that fight is precisely the point: a national headcount that nudges people toward a religion they do not hold misreports the country to itself.
Money was the other theme of the week, and religion kept turning up next to it. Faith groups spent the week lobbying the Prime Minister and Treasurer to carve their donors out of Labor's charity tax changes — a reminder that the "advancement of religion" as a privileged category is defended hardest when the tax bill lands. In Sydney, the ICAC's Operation Rosny entered its second week still circling Catholic Schools NSW, the taxpayer-funded body whose alleged donations sit inside a Liberal branch-stacking inquiry, complete with intercepted texts about "filthy schools money".
In Macquarie Street, the Minns government confirmed it will not extend serious-vilification protections to LGBTQIA+ people, despite its own review recommending it. The state has been busy strengthening protection against religious and racial vilification; it has now declined to do the same for sexuality and gender.
And the Catholic bishops used their annual Social Justice Statement to warn against "us and them" politics — worth reading alongside the same week's evidence of a Catholic schools body inside a corruption inquiry, and a religious coalition lobbying to keep its tax breaks.
News this week
VIC: RSA welcomes recommendations from parliamentary inquiry into coercive control in cults (2 August 2026)
The Rationalist Society's response to the Victorian cults inquiry draws out the thread most coverage missed: alongside criminalising group-based coercion, the committee urged removing the Basic Religious Charities category from federal charities law — the exemption that lets many high-control religious groups escape the governance and reporting standards every other charity meets, and leaves the ACNC unable to remove a "responsible person". This is lined up against the Productivity Commission's 2024 finding that there is no policy rationale for keeping the category, on which the government has still not acted. The charity-transparency companion to this week's news that faith groups want their donors exempted from Labor's charity-tax changes.
➧ READ MORE:
Rationalist Society of Australia
NSW: NSW government ignores findings of its own inquiry into LGBTQIA+ hate speech (4 August 2026)
The Minns Labor government has confirmed it will not act on recommendations — from a review it commissioned — to extend serious racial-and-religious-vilification-style protections to LGBTQIA+ people under NSW law. The review had recommended widening hate-incitement protections; the government declined. The decision throws the unevenness of the state's vilification regime into relief: after a year in which NSW moved to strengthen protections against religious and racial vilification, largely in response to antisemitism, it has now decided not to offer the same shield to people targeted for their sexuality or gender identity. ACON and other groups condemned the call.
➧ READ MORE:
QNews
OUTinPerth
National: Catholic Church warns against rise in 'us and them' politics (4 August 2026)
Australia's Catholic bishops used their annual Social Justice Statement to call for a renewed focus on social cohesion and to warn against a politics of division. It is a notable intervention in the same debate the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is formalising. It also sits awkwardly beside the week's other news: a publicly funded Catholic schools body before a corruption inquiry, and a religious lobbying push to preserve charitable tax breaks. The statement is a reminder that organised religion is an active participant in the cohesion debate, not merely its subject — and that its calls for unity land alongside its defence of its own privileges.
➧ READ MORE:
The Age
CathNews
National: Data diviners urge Aussies to keep faith in census and ignore digital crusades (6 August 2026)
With census forms already in more than a million households ahead of census night on 11 August, the Australian Bureau of Statistics issued a statement urging Australians to ignore the social-media battle over how to answer the religion question — a contest it framed as running between those urging people to record no religion (if they aren't currently religious) and a coalition representing a range of faiths. The plea is itself an admission that the question is contested. The Bureau retained the older wording — which it concedes "assumes you have a religion" — after cancelling the major 2024 test of a fairer alternative, and Census — Not Religious? polling puts the resulting under-count of the non-religious at more than ten percentage points. The ABS wants the argument to stop; the argument exists because the question leads.
➧ READ MORE:
The Age
National: Faith groups call for exemption from planned tax on charity donations (7 August 2026)
Religious leaders across the country are pressing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers to ensure that trusts channelling donations to faith-based organisations are exempted from Labor's planned overhaul of charity-donation tax arrangements. It is the latest round in a familiar fight: whenever the tax treatment of the charitable sector is reopened, the "advancement of religion" as a privileged category — and the flow of tax-favoured money to religious bodies — is defended hardest. The secular interest is in whether religious donors receive a carve-out unavailable to others, and whether "faith-based" status buys a tax position on its own terms.
➧ READ MORE:
CathNews
National: RSA questions Prime Minister over his response to bishops' Census request (7 August 2026)
The Rationalist Society has written to the Prime Minister asking him to confirm what he told the Catholic bishops, who in March 2024 asked him to "reverse" the ABS's proposed change to the religion question. The Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet has referred the query to the ABS. Herein is laid out the sequence that secular advocates find damning: the government missed the ABS's deadlines, the Bureau was forced to cancel its "critical" 2024 test of a fairer question, and within weeks reverted to the leading wording — the one Census — Not Religious? polling shows undercounts the non-religious by 10.4 percentage points.
➧ READ MORE:
Rationalist Society of Australia
NSW: What we learnt from Rosny week two (8 August 2026)
The ICAC's Operation Rosny finished a second week still examining sections of the NSW Liberal Party, Catholic Schools NSW and Sydney business figures. The commission heard intercepted texts referring to "filthy schools money" and messages suggesting former energy minister Angus Taylor either "paid money to the Reformers … or was refusing to"; a second Liberal frontbencher was called, and evidence pointed to offers of money for preselection. Catholic Schools NSW — the taxpayer-funded body governing some 600 diocesan schools, whose undeclared donations the commission alleges were arranged and approved by its chief executive — remains at the centre of the inquiry. No findings have yet been made.
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The Sydney Morning Herald
The Guardian
Commentary and analysis
Rodney Nillsen: Fundamentalism in Australia's university system (31 July 2026)
An essay on what happens when religious colleges with fundamentalist attitudes seek — and win — official university and "university college" status through the national regulator, TEQSA. Nillsen frames it within the marketisation of higher education since 1988, but the church-state core is whether a public quality regulator should confer university standing on institutions built around doctrinal conformity rather than open inquiry. A useful widening of the "religion in public institutions" question beyond schools and into the accreditation of higher education itself.
➧ READ MORE:
Rationale Magazine
Neil Foster: Kirralie Smith - transgender vilification and sport (1 August 2026)
A religious-freedom law academic's analysis of the NSW Supreme Court's dismissal of Kirralie Smith's appeal in the transgender-vilification proceedings brought over her comments about trans women in women's sport. Smith is backed by conservative Christian legal interests, and the decision is already being framed by the Australian Christian Lobby and allied bodies as a religious-freedom and free-speech grievance. Reading Foster — who writes from within that religious-liberty tradition — is the clearest way to see how a vilification finding is being converted into a "religious freedom" cause.
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Law and Religion Australia
Trevor Cobbold: WA Private Schools Have a Huge Funding Advantage Over Public Schools (2 August 2026)
Cobbold sets out the latest ACARA figures for Western Australia: total income per student of $20,154 in public schools against $25,270 in Independent and $21,005 in Catholic schools, with government funding rising for private schools while public schools have been cut since 2009. It is the WA instalment of a state-by-state series making the same point — that public money flows disproportionately to well-resourced private and religious schools while the public system, which carries the overwhelming share of disadvantage, remains underfunded. The religious dimension is not incidental: much of the private sector this funding sustains is faith-based.
➧ READ MORE:
Save Our Schools
Compass (presented by Andrew Denton): Dying On My Own Terms (ABC, 2 August 2026)
The ABC's religion-and-ethics program follows two Canberrans navigating the end of their lives under the ACT's voluntary assisted dying laws — a human account of the choice that faith-based lobbying and the telehealth ban continue to constrain. Presented by Andrew Denton, whose Go Gentle Australia drives much of the VAD campaign, it is a reminder of what sits beneath the legislative fights: people making end-of-life decisions the law still hedges.
➧ WATCH NOW:
ABC iview
Michael Bachelard: Coercion, control and high demands: How cults squash their members' identities (3 August 2026)
Bachelard's long-form companion to the Victorian cults inquiry sets out what the 15-month inquiry actually defined — a "high-control" organisation — and the hard question its central recommendation raises: how you criminalise coercive control by a group's leaders without criminalising belief. It opens with a survivor kicked out of the religious group that raised her, then failed by a Centrelink office, a counsellor and a doctor who could not grasp what she was describing, and it notes pointedly that abolishing the basic religious-charity category would itself require legislation. The clearest account yet of why the inquiry chose conduct over doctrine, and where the government's response must go.
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The Age
Renae Barker: Religious identity and the Australian Census: Why the religion question still matters (7 August 2026)
A well laid-out primer, from a law academic who studies religion and the state, on why the census religion question generates such heat: what it asks, how it should be answered, and what the numbers do and do not mean. Published with days to run before census night, it sets the campaign fight in the longer history of a question asked at every census for more than a century — and is a useful corrective to the idea that arguing about the wording is a fringe concern. It is not; it is a fight about whether the country counts itself accurately.
➧ READ MORE:
ABC Religion & Ethics
Martin McKenzie-Murray: 'We are the civil ones': One Nation's Victorian launch (8 August 2026)
McKenzie-Murray's dispatch from One Nation's Victorian campaign launch — candidates unveiled for November's election, reporters from the ABC, The Age and Guardian barred at the door, and Rebel News installed as house media. The church-state interest is in what the party is becoming a vehicle for: a home, as one Labor strategist puts it, for the "disparate actors" of the anti-lockdown and grievance movements, several steeped in conspiracy politics, led by a figure whose momentum the piece says stalls whenever she strays into religious-right territory such as banning abortion. With the Australian Christian Lobby running its own Victorian election campaign, November is shaping up as a test of how far the religious and social-conservative flank can organise.
➧ READ MORE:
The Saturday Paper
Opportunities for action
National: Census night is Tuesday 11 August 2026 — if you are not religious, mark 'No Religion', and tell others why the wording matters. The 2026 religion question is the one the ABS's own documents concede "may lead respondents to a particular response", retained after the Catholic bishops lobbied the Prime Minister and the Bureau cancelled its 2024 test of a fairer alternative. The wording is locked for this census, but the answer is yours. Census night: Tuesday 11 August 2026. Sign the campaign's Change.org petition asking the ABS to fix the question for future censuses, and read why the wording is loaded.
National / NT: The Northern Territory's voluntary assisted dying bill is due to be debated in late August 2026. Introduced on 23 July with all 17 CLP MLAs committed to passing it, the Rights of the Terminally Ill bill will make the NT the last Australian jurisdiction to legislate for VAD. Two contested features remain: a 12-month prognosis limit and a "gag clause" barring practitioners from raising VAD unless a patient asks first. The Australian Christian Lobby is running a parallel campaign in the Territory. Debate expected late August 2026. Go Gentle Australia is tracking the NT process, and Territorians can email their local MLA.
VIC: The Victorian parliament's Inquiry into Anti-LGBTIQA+ Hate Crimes reports by 1 September 2026. Proceedings are open and broadcast live. Report due 1 September 2026. Details on the inquiry page at the Victorian Parliament.
NSW: Watch Operation Rosny — ICAC's public hearings continue into their third week. A second week of evidence has kept a publicly funded Catholic-education body inside an inquiry into party donations and branch-stacking, with intercepted texts about "filthy schools money" and a second Liberal frontbencher called. The hearings run for roughly eight weeks from 27 July, are open to the public and are livestreamed. See the ICAC Operation Rosny page for hearing details.
NSW: Make a submission to the NSW Law Reform Commission's Anti-Discrimination Act review — submissions due 2 October 2026. The Commission has released its second consultation paper, on procedures and compliance, together with a community summary, a survey and an Easy Read paper. The broader review reaches the religious exemptions that allow publicly funded faith schools to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ staff and students — which is why the Australian Christian Lobby and Freedom for Faith are mobilising to protect them. Secular, humanist and human-rights voices that want those exemptions narrowed should lodge a submission. Submissions close 2 October 2026. Make a submission or complete the survey via the NSW Law Reform Commission.
National: Ask the Attorney-General to lift the telehealth barrier to VAD. Labor's national conference backed a conscience vote to remove the Howard-era criminal-code provision that stops doctors discussing VAD by phone or video — but after religious leaders urged him to hold firm, the Prime Minister has said he opposes the change, and the Attorney-General is resisting. The barrier falls hardest on people in regional and remote areas. Email the Attorney-General via Go Gentle Australia's telehealth campaign.
VIC: Back the cults inquiry's belief-neutral approach in the government's response — due by late January 2027. The Legal and Social Issues Committee's final report, tabled on 29 July, recommends criminalising group-based coercive control by 2029 after a Victorian Law Reform Commission review, on a conduct-based model that explicitly declines to define a "cult"; it also calls for removal of the Basic Religious Charities exemption from federal charities law. The government has six months to respond, and the ACL and Freedom for Faith will press to narrow or resist any coercion law that could reach high-control religious groups. Government response due by ~29 January 2027. Read the report and inquiry details on the Victorian Parliament website.
VIC: Watch the November 2026 Victorian state election as a church-state contest — enrol by 8pm Tuesday 3 November. One Nation launched its Victorian candidates this week — barring the ABC, The Age and Guardian from the event — while the Australian Christian Lobby is running its own Victorian election campaign of candidate forums. Between them, the religious and social-conservative flank is organising hard ahead of the 28 November poll. Roll closes 8pm Tuesday 3 November 2026; election day Saturday 28 November 2026. Check your enrolment and find election details at the Victorian Electoral Commission.
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. The Australian Education Union's For Every Child campaign is the natural vehicle for a reply before this becomes a 2028 election commitment. Support the AEU's For Every Child campaign.
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.
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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