• Paul Monk wrote on the need to renovate democracy in the 21st century and examined whether Ancient Athens provided the right answers.
• Yvonne Marsh considered whether Australia’s compulsory voting system remained the best way to decide referendum questions. 
• Clare-Heath McIvor wrote on the Christian nationalist forces behind the re-election of Donald Trump and the threat posed by right-wing Christian movements to Australian politics.

That the liberal democracies are floundering has been widely observed. That’s not to say that the new autocrats are offering a better, more attractive model of governance. But it is to say that, from the United States to the democracies of Western Europe – not least Britain and France, where it all began – the mechanisms of popular sovereignty and accountable government that we upheld, throughout the 20th century, against Nazism and communism, are malfunctioning. They need renovation. The question of the hour is: On what lines? How is this to be done?

There has been much speculation about why the 2023 referendum on the Indigenous Voice proposal failed. Recurring themes include lack of bipartisan support, misinformation and lack of understanding by voters. I suggest there may have been another stopper in the process worth considering: the voting system itself. How different would the final numbers have looked if voting in the referendum had not been compulsory? The outcome may or may not have been different, but the numbers might have told a different story.

As ‘ex-vangelicals’ around the world deconstruct the faith of their formative years, one topic repeatedly comes up – that of white GOP Jesus. It’s the image of the Christian deity remade from a Middle Eastern refugee who railed against religion, politics and capitalism to a white American capitalist religio-political figure mandating the Christian pursuit of power and dominion. It is truly perplexing in terms of Biblical scholarship, but far from harmless. At no time in history has this been more obvious than the re-election of Donald Trump.

An article appeared in my local newspaper in Tasmania recently on the issue of smacking children. I’m sure you’ve seen similar ones every now and then. It included a smattering of comments and observations describing how people have different views about what laws or attitudes we should have about smacking children. But it was without a coherent thread of argument, and therefore failed to provide any real progress on the issue.

Legal efforts to suppress misinformation are ongoing. Around the world, many countries are considering legislation to suppress specific types of misinformation or require online platforms to suppress it. Such laws are always controversial. They encounter some well-known practical and ethical problems – and some surprising ones. Most obviously, censorship restricts people’s right to free speech – an important natural freedom protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law.