‘This was a vacuous election. No one truly won the campaign, and no one emerged victorious in the battle of ideas. Neither major party offered a compelling vision for Australia’s future. As Liberal candidate Henry Pike admitted after election day, the campaign “became a blur of competing handouts and taxpayer-funded concessions.” It was, in short, a mess.’

‘Applying Christian theology and ethics to international relations is now an acutely important activity. The hopeful realism of Reinhold Niebuhr offers one way of recovering a Christian approach to the crisis that is hurtling towards our civilization at a terrifying speed. Niebuhr’s anthropological pessimism provides a foundation for his notion that nations can, and should, work towards a fragile justice.’

‘Families are the foundation for coherent political communities. Indeed, they are the foundation for nations. Nations are usually tied together by a set of common origins based on history, geography, traditions, and blood ties. A person’s ties to their nation are usually familial ties, primarily shaped by the home they grow up in.’