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In the News Weekly article entitled “Faith Untethered from Reason: Positivism Triumphs Over Natural Law”, I discussed the untethering of the law from the morality of traditional Christianity and from reason.

Since then, on 12 September 2025, I delivered a paper at the University of Notre Dame Australia’s Religious Liberty Conference, which developed that theme and included some additional examples of the phenomenon. This article has grown out of that paper.

The problem we face is more acute than that which St Paul warned the Colossians about in the Scripture quoted in this article – rather than our society relying on rational philosophy than on Christian principles, it is embracing laws that seem to bypass reason entirely. It is also abandoning tradition entirely.

Edmund Burke considered tradition to effectively be the wisdom of the ages – accumulated over time, tried, tested, adjusted and persevered with because they work.

In Western societies, tradition and Christianity have been symbiotic and perhaps for that reason, both are being junked.

The disconnect of law and law reform from tradition, Christianity and reason is very evident from current law reform movements: in New South Wales looking to remove or reduce the current protections for religious schools and universities, which enable them to operate; in the Northern Territory’s looking to join the rest of Australia in the legalisation and provision of (so-called) voluntary assisted dying (VAD); and the Commonwealth and NSW governments’ looking at removing (unenforced) laws prohibiting commercial surrogacy.

Moves to Remove, Not Improve, Religious Protections

As the numbers of Australians who identify as followers of religious traditions in the census continue to fall in Australia, attitudes towards religious people and organisations have hardened. In 2022, McCrindle published the results of a survey in a paper entitled, “The changing faith landscape of Australia”. It showed that about 30 per cent of Australians were cold to Christianity with 6 per cent passionately opposed to it, 13 per cent having strong reservation or no interest in Christianity, and 9 per cent having some issues with Christianity, which “isn’t for them”.

In the last year or so, Australia – NSW in particular – has witnessed an unprecedented rise in anti-religious behaviours, including a stabbing attack on an Assyrian bishop as he was celebrating the Liturgy and a spate of anti-Semitic behaviours.

These have included: the occupation of public university spaces; ostracism, jostling and insulting of Jewish students on public university campuses; the public disclosure of Jewish academics; the invasion and cancellation of classes of Jewish academics and the display of an anti-Semitic chart at a conference held at a public university; the 6 December 2024 firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne’s south-east; a hoax plot to target Sydney’s Great Synagogue and the Sydney Jewish Museum with explosives, the mastermind of which appears to hold anti-Semitic views; an arson and anti-Semitic graffiti attack on a Maroubra childcare centre, 180 metres from Maroubra Synagogue on 21 January 2025; the dousing with red paint of the Dover Heights home of co-chief executive of Australian Jewry Alex Ryvchin on 17 January 2024; cars being set alight, the graffitiing of swastikas and anti-Semitic messages on homes, businesses, cars and the facade of a synagogue; a Jewish man being refused service at an Officeworks store in Elsternwick in Melbourne by a pro-Palestinian staff member in March 2024; and two Sydney nurses threatening to kill Jewish patients in February 2024.

Even if Iran has been behind some of these attacks, it appears that they were not behind all of them, and such egregious behaviour has extended to other religious faith traditions. These include threats, referencing the Christchurch massacre, being posted in relation to several Muslim mosques in Sydney and St Charbel’s College in Punchbowl receiving an anonymous bomb threat on 4 April 2024.

In this climate, one might think that the Commonwealth might finally look at complying with its obligations under international human rights law to protect religious believers and their organisations from discrimination, or the state of NSW might do so. Instead, there is no sign of any progress on this by the federal government, and the NSW Law Reform Commission’s May 2025 consultation paper “Review of the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 (NSW)” seems to be more enthusiastic about removing the current protections for religious schools and universities than improving protections to enable religious people and their organisations to live their faith.

The Northern Territory’s Plans for VAD

In 1995, the Territory enacted the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 (NT) (ROTI Act), becoming one of the first places in the world to introduce VAD. It was permitted there until the Commonwealth Parliament exercised its powers over the Territory to forbid it. That prohibition has now been removed, and the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory issued a consultation paper titled “Voluntary Assisted Dying in the Northern Territory” in July 2025. The Territory is looking at reintroducing VAD.

This is despite the Territory’s own experience of VAD and the fact that, as the paper recognises, the NT has “considerable challenges in delivering health care” and challenges in the provision of palliative care and aged care.

In the brief period the ROTI Act operated, “the gatekeeper roles designed by (the ROTI Act) failed to protect depressed, isolated and demoralised patients”. Of the seven people who sought VAD under the ROTI Act, three were socially isolated, four had displayed symptoms of depression, and two were provided with inadequate information about their true medical condition and their treatment options. All facts not mentioned in the paper.

Without adequate health care, accessibility to pain management, availability of palliative care and access to quality aged care, there is a great risk that those who opt for VAD will not be exercising a real choice. Rather than their terminal illness, it is the circumstances in which they find themselves, from which they seek escape.

The risk of misdiagnosis – which is known to have occurred during the operation of the ROTI Act – remains, because specialists are still in inadequate supply in the Territory. However, neither the 2024 Expert Panel Report that preceded it nor the paper identify these issues as militating strongly against introducing VAD in the NT at least before these problems are addressed.

Plans for Commercial Surrogacy

Commercial surrogacy is illegal in New South Wakes. It is also unlawful, under NSW law, if it takes place overseas. The penalties are fines or imprisonment for two years, or both. There are very good reasons why this is so.

They have been recognised by the Commonwealth Government on the surrogacy.gov.au website on the page, “Issues that have arisen from engaging in surrogacy overseas” (see below).

There have been many verified and widely publicised examples in recent years of issues for surrogates, children and commissioning parents. Examples are below.

Surrogates
– trafficked internationally and forced into surrogacy arrangements.
– made to sign surrogacy agreements without understanding the terms.
– health and well-being – before, during and after the birth of the baby – not considered or compensated in surrogacy arrangements.
– paid only a very small portion of what commissioning parents paid to surrogacy clinics.
– removed from their families and confined in accommodation of the provider of surrogacy services.
– not paid at all when they didn’t give birth to a live child or when the commissioning parent refused to accept the child.
– with multiple embryos implanted and then forced to have selective abortions.
– prosecuted and jailed after laws changed with little or no notice.

Parents
– discovered in later years that clinics used the wrong egg or sperm to create an embryo or implanted the wrong embryo.
– paid large sums for surrogacy arrangements where services were then not provided.
– experienced difficulties collecting their children after laws changed with little or no notice or when national crises (such as war or natural disaster) have occurred.

Children
– denied their human right to preserve their identity (including being unable to access information about their biological family because of inaccurate records of the surrogate and donors).
– left parentless, and sometimes stateless, when commissioning parents rejected them or changed their mind.
– trafficked for abuse, servitude and sexual exploitation.

The well-known “Baby Gammy case” is just one example of the issues that can arise with commercial surrogacy. In that case, Justice Thackray of the Family Court of Western Australia observed that:

“This case should also draw attention to the fact that surrogate mothers are not baby-growing machines, or ‘gestational carriers’. They are flesh-and-blood women who can develop bonds with their unborn children … The appalling outcome of Gammy and Pipah being separated has brought commercial surrogacy into the spotlight. Quite apart from the separation of the twins, this case serves to highlight the dilemmas that arise when the reproductive capacities of women are turned into saleable commodities, with all the usual fallout when contracts go wrong.”

Despite these problems, no one has ever been prosecuted under these laws in NSW or under their equivalents in any other state, and both the Commonwealth and NSW governments are reviewing their surrogacy laws – and the trajectory is towards permitting commercial surrogacy.

Last year, the Equality Legislation Amendment (LGBTIQA+) Act 2024 (NSW) passed, and it amended s18(2) and s23(2) of the Surrogacy Act 2010 (NSW) in a completely irrational way. It allows people who illegally use commercial surrogacy overseas to obtain a parental order.

So, we can say with confidence from these few examples that those who favour reason, tradition and Christian morality are not the group exercising power in Australia today. This is something we need to recognise and act with haste to correct.

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Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Adobe.