There is an oft-told joke about someone lost in a rural area who finally encounters a local and requests directions to their destination. The local thinks for a few moments and then replies: “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” Some of us who care deeply about the state of the world are fearful that the situation in Palestine might have passed the point of no return and that there are no viable, mutually acceptable paths back to a compromise. So much muddy water has passed under the bridge that it is hard to see how any agreement might be reached. At the root of the problem lie two radically different perceptions of what has occurred over the last 100 years in the so-called Holy Land.

The dismissal of the Whitlam government in November 1975 was the most devastating and potentially dangerous constitutional crisis in Australia’s political history. Although nearly 50 years have passed and millions of words have been devoted to Sir John Kerr’s ambush of Gough Whitlam, Australians have not had a full, factual and truthful analysis of how an elected Prime Minister was sacked without warning by an unelected Governor-General. Until now. Professor Jenny Hocking, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Melbourne, has revealed the results of years of dogged research and legal courage to reveal the shocking facts of what was a conspiracy involving Queen Elizabeth II and others to support and encourage an alcoholic Governor-General in his coup against an Australian Labor government.

On Christmas Day, an essay appeared in the online magazine UnHerd under the title ‘Our Godless era is dead: A second religiousness is sweeping the West’. The author was Paul Kingsnorth, an interesting individual whose personal journey has been colourful. He relates that he has converted to the Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church and that he believes a “new religiousness is sweeping the West”. I felt sufficiently provoked by his remarks to pen this response.

After a lively decade-and-a-half as a journalist, Kingsnorth gave up journalism in 2009 to co-found something called the Dark Mountain Project, which describes itself as “a network of writers, artists, and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself.” They decided, it seems, to make up a story of their own. Now, people make up stories all the time. The best of them are lasting and luminous. Many of them are pulp fiction or altogether incoherent and unpublishable. Kingsnorth’s is on the grand scale.

This article is based on a speech given at the Secularism Australia Conference on 2 December 2023 in Sydney.

In October, after a three-year campaign, I succeeded in removing prayer from the Governance Rules and ending the practice of starting council meetings at the City of Boroondara with an official Christian prayer.

We no longer engage in prayer at Boroondara. But with so many councils across Australia still praying, there’s a lot of work to do. In this presentation, I will just touch on the practice of reciting prayer in local government meetings, how it works and how we can get rid of it, drawing on my experiences at the City of Boroondara.