In November last year, Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor of The Australian – a newspaper for which I regularly write feature essays, opinion pieces and reviews – had a long feature in its ‘Inquirer’ section about Jordan Peterson’s Association for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). This is my response to Sheridan, whose robust, literalistic Catholicism continues to puzzle me. Sheridan related that, at an ARC conference in London last year, in conversation with Peterson, he asked him: “Do you yourself believe that Christianity is true, not just true in the sense that it gives us a helpful framework to understand how we function, but true that Christ is the son of God?” Peterson, he informs us, answered: “I’m certain that it’s true. I wouldn’t claim to be able to explain what that means because I don’t know what it means.” My immediate reaction was: how can an educated person responsibly state that he is certain of something being true, but doesn’t know what it means?

I’ve worked for the Christian Schools Australia (CSA) network as a finance and risk manager for a number of years. Close family members have also had decades of experience working in this network. So I’m talking here from both a personal experience but also a collective experience. It is a Christian duty and a moral human duty to speak out against injustice, regardless of the rejection that it may cause at times. And that’s why I am writing this piece about the discrimination that takes place in faith-based schools – discrimination that is funded by taxpayers. In faith-based schools, we have institutionalised discrimination, enabled through state-based exemptions to anti-discrimination laws and funded by the taxpayer while the broader community remains unaware.

Operating in a covert way is how Baynes says she prefers to pursue her “kingdom assignment” of achieving sustained transformation of the Gold Coast, a growing city in south-east Queensland often dubbed ‘sin city’. But that all changed in early 2022. In January of that year, Tate appointed Baynes – already his informal spiritual advisor since 2012 – to a ratepayer-funded advisor role. A few weeks later, Gold Coast media began reporting the controversy over Tate’s appointment of a ‘Spiritual Advisor’. Then, in March 2022, having discovered a video of a 2019 speech from an Apostolic Reformation Australia event, I revealed that Baynes was a passionate supporter of the Seven Mountains Mandate and had converted Tate to the ideology.

It is widely perceived that the United States is in relative, even absolute decline. There are many who welcome this prospect. Some assert, as David James did recently in this magazine, that US decline will lead to a better multipolar world order. Both sets of claims call for critical evaluation. It’s not difficult to see why observers might consider the US to be in at least relative, even absolute, decline. The competition has become keen over the past 30 years. China has grown very rapidly in wealth, power and influence in the so-called ‘Global South’. India has begun to grow in both wealth and confidence. The European Union has become, in those 30 years, a huge and affluent market.