Conservative MPs and religious lobbyists have been quick to celebrate what they describe as a "backdown" by the Victorian government regarding the commitment to replace parliament's daily Christian prayers with something more appropriate. 

While Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes appeared to suggest in her speech to parliament this week that she did not want to waste any more of her time on the issue in the upper house, it's not yet 100 per cent clear that the Allan government is walking away from its promise. After all, many Labor MPs are among those currently boycotting the prayers in the lower house, too. So we have asked for confirmation.

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2 Aug: The Rationalist Society of Australia has told Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan it would be “very disappointing” if the government backed down from its commitment to replace parliamentary prayers at the first sight of public controversy organised by conservative religious lobby groups. Executive Director Si Gladman has today sought confirmation from the government on whether it will deliver its promise to replace parliamentary prayers with something more reflective of the Victorian community. Read the full article

2 Aug: Melbourne Archbishop Peter A Comensoli has welcomed news that the Victorian Government has abandoned the idea of scrapping the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the state’s Parliament. “It is pleasing that both major political parties in Victoria are now agreed on retaining the practice of reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the Victorian Parliament each sitting day,” Archbishop Comensoli said in a statement yesterday. Read the full article

2 Aug: Darwin Bishop Charles Gauci has raised his concerns that doctors and nurses in the Northern Territory will be coerced into referring their terminal patients to euthanasia providers, following the release of a major report. Bishop Gauci has promised to not run a “scare campaign” against future voluntary assisted dying (VAD) legislation, while advocating for clearer provisions for doctors morally opposed to assisted suicide. Read the full article

1 Aug: Conservative Christian lobbyists are celebrating after the Victorian Attorney-General signalled that she will be backing down from her commitment to replace the state parliament’s daily Christian prayers with something more inclusive and reflective of the community. In a debate on the prayer issue in parliament on Wednesday evening, she accused the Liberal Party of using the issue to drive division and “convince people that the government are anti-religion”. Read the full article.

1 Aug: The longstanding tradition of reciting the Lord's Prayer in Victoria's parliament before each sitting day isn't going anywhere, with the government turning its back on finding a replacement. On Wednesday night, the upper house debated a petition to retain the Christian prayer in the Legislative Council after it gathered almost than 11,000 signatures. Read the full article

1 Aug: Speaking with The Catholic Leader, Queensland Senator Paul Scarr said the religious freedom debate was more than just a political issue. Senator Scarr said freedom of religion was a fundamental tenet of Australian life and the proposed amendments put it under threat. He said schools would be especially affected, saying the changes would mean “religion starts and ends with religious instruction classes”. Read the full article

31 Jul: The Rationalist Society of Australia has asked the minister responsible for the charities sector to implement the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to remove Basic Religious Charities in order to restore public confidence in the nation’s charities system. In a letter to Andrew Leigh, Executive Director Si Gladman expressed support for the Commission’s finding that enacting the reform would help deliver a “more transparent and consistent approach to regulating charities”. Read the full article

31 Jul: The federal government has ramped up pressure on NSW, Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia to sign on to the next school funding agreement as it rushes out the blueprint for the next decade of primary and secondary education. The states, which have been holding out on reaching a deal amid calls for higher levels of commonwealth funding for public schools, will now have until September to agree to the proposed 2.5% federal increase, or keep the old agreement. Read the full article

31 Jul: The Albanese government is yet to announce its appointment of a special envoy to combat Islamophobia, but some in the Muslim community question the need for one at all. In early July, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced two envoy roles to tackle the rise of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the wake of the ongoing war in Gaza. Read the full article

31 Jul: The leader of Project 2025 is stepping down from his role amid a power struggle over potential government staffing if Donald Trump wins in November. Paul Dans, the director of the project housed at the Heritage Foundation, “will be departing the team”, according to a statement to the Guardian from Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage Foundation. Read the full article

30 Jul: A controversial tableau in the Olympics opening ceremony denounced by Christian and conservative critics as an offensive parody of The Last Supper was in fact inspired by a 17th-century Dutch painting of the Greek Olympian gods, art historians have said. Read the full article

Filippo Menozzi: The US philosopher and literary critic, Fredric Jameson, once claimed that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. As quotes go, this one captures an important aspect of our times, which is that we seem unable to imagine a world different from the present. Political scientists describe the age we are living in as “post-political”. This controversial concept refers to a noted lack of political alternatives on a global scale. Read the full article

Simon McCarthy-Jones: The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, just announced that he’s a “big believer in the principles of Christianity” and “a cultural Christian”. Musk’s reasons are moral and political – he believes Christianity can boost both happiness and birthrates. Musk joins many western conservative thinkers troubled by a rapidly changing world. Some of these thinkers have embraced Christianity to combat these changes. Yet they often struggle to accept Christianity’s central supernatural claims, like Christ’s resurrection. Read the full article

David Hastie: There are secularists who wish to see Special Religious Education (SRE) expunged from public schools. They operate, I am quite certain, from high ideals. But if one of those ideals is democratic pluralism, they have profoundly misunderstood SRE. From the very beginning, SRE was not primarily about religion — it was about civic order and stability. Read the full article

Miles Pattenden: The outspokenness of the response from some Christian commentators has been predictable, but is also, in my view, dismaying. For one thing, it distracts from reasonable and rather more damning criticism of the sheer tedium of the whole performance, which was less high art than it was bad taste. Read the full article

Rachel Withers: United Australia Party Senator and Parliament’s top shitposter Ralph Babet has been busy lately — not that much of it has had to do with representing the people of Victoria. Between the attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump, a Tenacious D joke, the likely replacement of 2024 Democratic nominee Joe Biden with Kamala Harris, and the Olympics’ “demonic and deranged” opening ceremony, there’s been a lot to post about. But it doesn’t appear much of it is directed at an Australian audience. Read the full article

Alastair Lawrie: This is a tale of three political promises, all made in the wake of the religious freedom review in late 2018, but with three very different outcomes, including one yet to be determined. Read the full article

Andrew Jakubowicz: Is multiculturalism still the best public policy to sustain social cohesion in Australia? Is “social cohesion” creaking under inter-communal tensions over the war in Gaza, as some critics complain? A year ago, the federal Labor government instigated an independent review of the national multicultural framework. Read the full article

Adam Wakeline: This shift in mindset, from the medieval to the modern, is the subject of Paul Strathern’s Dark Brilliance: The Age of Reason From Descartes to Peter the Great. Strathern covers the major figures and events of the era, painting a sweeping picture of the century and the monumental changes it brought to intellectual and cultural life in Europe. Dark Brilliance has remarkable breadth, touching on every field of knowledge from calculus to cooking. Read the full article

Mariana Alessandri: For philosophers like me, the recent resurgence of the ancient philosophy of Stoicism makes sense. Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius used logic and habit to overcome their anger and dissolve their sorrows. Their wisdom reached not just their contemporaries, but twenty-first century seekers who suffer from road rage or social anxiety or bouts of melancholy. Read the full article

Rachel Leingang: You’ve probably heard of Project 2025 – either from Democrats such as the vice-president, Kamala Harris, warning of what it could mean for US government, or from Republicans such as former president Donald Trump claiming they have nothing to do with it. The project is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, a prominent rightwing thinktank, to dismantle features of the government it believes conflict with conservative ideology and to install extreme, conservative policies in a potential second Trump term and beyond. Read the full article

Caroline Riches: United States Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has told Christians that if they vote for him in November, they won't have to do so again. But one US policy expert argues that this statement is not about dictatorship threats or even policy pledges, but something much more abstract. Read the full article