The faith of our fathers and my hope for Australia
My thoughts after Bondi
The massacre we witnessed at Bondi Beach this summer didn’t just take lives. It tore at our faith. Especially in the accepted wisdom that Australia is ‘…the most successful multicultural country in the world’. Seeing the cold-blooded murder of fifteen innocent people—by militant Islamists from our own suburbs—who can blame the chorus of sceptics?
Many of us fear we are losing the connective tissue that has bonded us as a nation; a shared culture that has sustained us as one of the world’s oldest continuing democracies. Now that Australia has laid those slain to rest, and the first waves of grief have passed, we must look at the painful questions that remain at Bondi.
The facts of December 14, 2025, defy an easy explanation: a foreign-born father and his Australian son, inspired by what seems to be a militant and separatist Islamic theology, gunned down Australians partaking in a Jewish festival on our iconic beach.
It would be easier to comprehend and explain if the two shooters were both non-citizens, from another place and culture, alien to our own. But this domestic evil was home-grown. While the father lived here on a visa, the son was Australian-born.
How did Australia get to this point?
It’s a question that the Royal Commission will examine closely. And I hope with an unyielding commitment to uncovering the hard truths that we must confront.
People—including me—are worried that not all Australians and permanent residents share our values of mateship, fairness, respect for others and the innate worth and dignity of every person in this country.
It’s a fair concern given the rise in Jew hatred over the two and a half years. Our country feels strangely different now, and not only because we have Jewish-Australian children attending school under armed guard. We are more divided and polarised than ever—politically and culturally—as the surge in religious antisemitism and machete violence makes clear. There are deeper forces at work that are dividing the Australian community into enclaves, and tearing at our fragile social cohesion.
How did this happen? I think immigration policy over the last forty years is part of the answer to the question. The unvarnished truth is that we have welcomed people into Australia who do not share our values and—in some cases—even despise our way of life and system of government.
Some even use violence to make the point, as the militant Islamists did at Bondi Beach, along with their criminal enablers who have graffitied and firebombed Jewish homes, schools, cars and synagogues. This is unprecedented in our history.
No wonder there is now widespread support for cutting migration and for a more selective migration policy. It matters who we welcome into Australia, because we’ve seen the failed experiments of mass migration overseas and the evidence is clear that uncontrolled and non-selective migration policy is the pathway to civic disorder.
The unhappy experience of the United Kingdom and Europe remind us of what happens when governments fail to enforce border controls and citizenship standards. You can’t treat a nation like an open-house party, and expect things to go well when anyone can walk through the door.
That might be a gloomy take. Perhaps. But let me share some hope. I still believe that Australia is capable of great social cohesion when we welcome immigrants who love Australia, who share our values and who want to integrate into our local communities and neighbourhoods.
Let me share a memory that gives me hope for my country, from the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, where I saw my father weave together a people from vastly different ethnic groups. And I will offer my thoughts on the kind of politics that will let us repair a fraying nation.
This hope is a gift from my father. At Bondi Beach in 2025, we saw how one man’s hatred was passed to his son. Decades earlier, in Ashfield, my father passed to me his love for others as he faithfully served his church community. His example is why I do not despair for our country and our future.
In Ashfield, I lived at the centre of a multi-ethnic community that practised a form of social cohesion motivated by Christian love. Growing up in the manse of a multi-ethnic church in Sydney, I saw the power of the Christian Gospel to bring together people from all nations and ethnic backgrounds.
From an early age, I had a front row seat (literally most Sundays) as I watched my father serve as the Minister of Ashfield Presbyterian Church from 1987 to 2011. Over a period of steady immigration growth, he transformed a largely Anglo-Saxon church to one that reflected the growing ethnic diversity of Australia.
This happened on two acres of land that was set aside in Ashfield by the Presbyterian Church during the late Victoria era. From 1886 to the present day, the church congregation has met and worshipped in the same red brick building that stands on the corner of Liverpool Road and Knox St (named after the Scottish Reformer, John Knox) in Ashfield.
Ashfield Presbyterian has always been a spiritual community shaped by world events. Commemorative plaques inside the church are a reminder of the First World War, and the young men that were cut down in faraway places like Pozieres. Although we were decades apart, we sat in the same red cedar pews during Sunday worship, as the fallen men and their bereaved families had done so only generations earlier.
As an inattentive boy, I sometimes stared at the walls during sermons, taking in the history around me. One memorial stood out because of the Latin inscription carved into the marble: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – or ‘It is sweet and proper that I die for my country’. Not until we studied Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ at school, did I appreciate the grief and bitter irony behind those words. It was a different age: people in the church had been touched by war in ways that we could never fully comprehend.
Those family plaques were outward symbols of unresolved pain that resonated more with the biblical Job than with us living in our post-Cold War peace and security.
Another First World War plaque spoke more directly to the Christian hope by quoting David from Psalm 139:18 – ‘When I awake, I am still with thee’. And that was the common thread between the generations at Ashfield: a shared Christian faith in the hope of the Gospel that endured through the trials of war and depression.
This was the legacy passed down over more than a century of faithfulness. And that legacy of spiritual and physical capital meant that the Ashfield church was uniquely positioned for an experiment in cross-cultural ministry over a century later.
The sudden surge in Chinese immigration to Australia after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989—and its steady growth over the following decade—meant that my father’s ministry looked very different from the parish work in 1885.
Although the founding church members would not have imagined a Korean, Chinese and Samoan congregation gathering in the same building, I have no doubt they would have shared the ministry vision.
Many members of the founding church were migrants themselves; John Hay Goodlet, a Scottish settler and prominent business leader in Sydney, gave generously to the Ashfield congregation, matching donations pound-for-pound for the church construction. But our generational linkage goes beyond the migrant story.
There was a deeper spiritual symmetry linking us to the past: it was a foundational Christian belief that the message of the gospel transcended ethnicity and nationality.
Almost two thousand years earlier, the Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatian church (now Ankara in modern day Türkiye) and declared to them that:
…There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:28).
At Ashfield Presbyterian Church, we might have said in the same spirit: there is no Anglo-Saxon or Chinese, no Korean or Greek, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.
It wasn’t a perfect community. No Christian believes in an earthly utopia given our fallen sinful nature, so church unity required grace, love and perseverance. But Ashfield did demonstrate that it was possible for people of different backgrounds to cohere around a common Christian faith and worldview.
Christianity is transnational—for all peoples—and my father and his congregation were simply living in obedience to Christ’s command to ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...’ (Matt 28:19).
Perhaps that’s why he felt compelled to remove flags from the church—being citizens in the City of God meant only a modest patriotism in the City of Man. If Christianity was truly for all nations, why cause any confusion for a visiting foreigner? To my father, sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ was more important than declaring an earthly allegiance to the country—even as a proud Australian with a deep love for our place and people. The gospel transcends the nation-state even as we love our earthly home, and retain living obligations to our country.
As a boy and teenager, I met people at church from China, Korea, Indonesia, India, Africa, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Italy and many other places from around the world. None of this seemed odd to me.
I was taught that the message of Christ was global—that it leaps national borders, moving through man-made barriers, even when governments try to stop and suppress it. If immigration brought people to Australia, they needed the good news, too.
My father discovered many Chinese migrants were open and receptive to the Christian message of salvation, having been starved spiritually by the dead hand of atheistic communism in China. Thus, international visitors—including university students—were welcomed by the Ashfield church.
One student from China made a profession of faith at Ashfield Presbyterian, and was baptised by my father. Upon his return to China, he was thrown in jail by the authorities for his newfound Christian faith.
Later, he returned to Australia, where he now works in Christian ministry among the diasporas. It is no surprise that my parents praised his courage and endurance as a model of Christian faithfulness.
Our Chinese brother’s welcome is how the gospel grafted people into our small community. It was an openness to the foreigner that transcended national or ethnic boundaries. I found this same spirit of openness returned to me when I worshipped in churches in Jordan, Israel, Papua New Guinea and the United States.
During a visit to Israel, I heard a sermon from a young Arab-Israeli man in a small Lutheran church in Jaffa in 2019. Converting to Christianity had cost him personally, and he spoke with passion. He greeted me with the same warmth that he generated in the pulpit preaching the Word. In moments like that, I felt at rest and peace, no matter the distance from my own family and home.
That warmth is what the Ashfield church offered many new migrants in the early 1990s, and so immigration shaped the contours of the church’s outreach and ministry: an English language school began during the week, along with an Easy English service early on a Sunday morning.
The Bible—the foundation stone of the Western canon and the English language—was taught to new migrants, who worked hard to grow in their mastery of English.
Multiple Presbyterian congregations met in their own language. There was a Korean and Chinese service and, for a while, a Samoan one. Sundays were days where grace and love were put into action, congregations rubbing shoulders with each other, as they shared the church and hall facilities.
Out of the church kitchen came the delicious smell of Chinese and Korean food: for many years, the smell that I identified with Sunday lunch was oriental in flavour.
But none of this community coordination could have occurred without a common commitment to Jesus Christ, best expressed in the Apostle’s Creed – the earliest universal expression of the Christian faith that dates from around 340 AD.
The Presbyterian church is distinct in its own way within the Protestant tradition, originating first in Scotland during the Reformation, and then coming to Australia with British settlement. It is a smaller denomination within Christianity (at least in Australia), but it is committed to a vibrant, biblical faith best expressed in the Westminster Confession.
That bedrock of biblical Christianity was the source of the grace, love and patience that overcame misunderstandings, cultural barriers and disagreements between the different members and ethnic congregations at Ashfield.
There were plenty of friction points—as you’d imagine in a diverse church community. But whatever cultural differences existed, all members of the Ashfield community started with the same worldview shaped by Christian theology. That was key to the unity that I saw at work in the church body.
If shared values can join a church together, they’re essential to a cohesive nation; so we must ask—what kind of politics will best help us hold together? Let me make two observations, one qualification, then share what the conservative side of politics can offer a fraying nation.
First, Australia has been a very successful nation for a number of reasons but foremost is that we have a unique cultural inheritance that allowed generations of Australians to flourish since British settlement. None of that was accidental but was the dividend of a social and political order shaped by Christianity.
Tom Holland maps out the sweeping cultural impact of Christianity across the West in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, while Glen Scrivener in The Air We Breathe links the impact of the Jesus revolution into our modern values of equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom and progress.
Both discuss the massive failing and hypocrisy of the established church, but the cultural legacy is undeniable. Scrivener makes this clear in his opening contention:
…we depend on values and goals—and ways of thinking about values and goals—that have been deeply and distinctively shaped by the Jesus-revolution (otherwise known as “Christianity”). These values are now so all-pervasive that we consider them to be universal, obvious and natural: the air we breathe.
The point that I take from both books is that our culture and institutions have been shaped by Christianity, and our social cohesion has been built on a common set of values that have arisen from a Christian worldview.
Not all worldviews and cultures share the same values, so we can’t take our inheritance for granted. That’s why immigration is so important, because the cultural character of a nation shapes its trajectory.
One immediate challenge is the emptiness of secularism in the face of militant Islam, and its inability to provide a basis of social cohesion beyond a judgemental insistence on cold abstract values like diversity and inclusion.
The institutional hostility to Christianity and its diminished place in our history, education system and national life cannot not come without cost. You can’t exhaust and cannibalise your cultural inheritance without political consequences in a democracy that only works with shared commitment to common values. But that is where we find ourselves, and that is the challenge that is now expressing itself in our fraying social order.
Indeed, without the larger story of Christianity to sustain the project of secularism (it was a Christian Bishop, St Augustine, who first developed the idea of the sacred and the secular), we face more division and polarisation, as we are cut off from the wellspring that has watered Australian democracy.
It was not by accident that our Constitution begins with the words, ‘Humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God…’ It reflected the prevailing Judeo-Christian cultural worldview at the time of Federation in 1901, and was advocated by a Catholic—again demonstrating that our Australian religious tradition, while stumbling into sectarian division at points, has been one of tolerance and cohesion.
Today, for many, the preamble’s reference to the Almighty seems quaint and otherworldly but it should prompt us to ask ourselves: can we cohere as a nation without a common worldview to unite us? The Bondi Beach shootings press this question with a new urgency as we consider our response. We cannot ignore the implications in immigration policy, as militant Islamic teaching bloodies our streets.
Second, it’s time that we re-engaged with public theology and its implications. Two foundation stones of Western politics are vital. We believe in the value and dignity of every single person because of the Creation story at the heart of the Judeo-Christian worldview—that all are created in God’s image, and therefore of equal value (Gen 1:1). Many people assume this idea as a secular truth without understanding its origin.
We also believe in the sacred and the secular as distinct spheres, as well as the separation of church and state because of theology drawn from the New Testament. When Jesus was challenged on whether it was lawful to pay taxes, he asked whose likeness and inscription was on the coin for the tax. They replied that it was Caesar’s image on the denarius.
Jesus’s reply has long shaped the Western understanding of our obligations within the secular and sacred realms:
Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21).
Christians are taught to pay taxes, respect the courts and parliaments, obey authorities—even serve in government, as far as their conscience and commitment to Christ allows.
What they cannot do is render unto Caesar the free exercise of their conscience and self-censor their religious convictions, as was demanded by the Albanese Government when it proposed far-reaching hate speech laws. Nor can they submit their conscience to mob rule on questions of life and death, which in our Parliamentary system, are rightly treated as conscience votes.
The picture within militant Islam is very different. I won’t attempt to interpret strict fundamentalist Islamic theology here, except to note that we start from a very different view of humanity, as well as church and state. How else can we explain the Jew hatred and the utter contempt for Australian government authorities among militant Islamic preachers? I simply note that we should take Dr. Mark Durie seriously in The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom and study Islam for ourselves, as well as the differences and implications in public theology.
Meanwhile, the trap on both the Left and Right of politics is to discriminate on the basis of ethnicity. That is the consequence of what happens when you cut people off from the foundation stone of Western politics. This is why retaining a divine view of humanity—that we are all created equally in God’s image—helps us avoid the grievous error of racism.
Beyond politics, we’ve taken a dangerous step away from the wellspring of our Western inheritance. Children are taught a diminished view of our history, and to question the ideas at the heart of our civilisation. But this comes at a cost.
For once we deviate from that biblical principle of equality, we end up mainstreaming antisemitism, ethno-nationalism and other forms of racial hatred. These are trends that both the centre-right and centre-left political parties must deal with over the coming years, given the growth of racism online and in the wider culture.
Here, I need to make an important qualification. I am not advocating for Christian nationalism, a biblical theocracy or the imposition of a Christian culture through legislative means.
I say that as a believing Christian who affirms the Apostles’ Creed. Christian nationalism is not taught by Jesus in the New Testament. His kingdom is in the world to come, so we are taught to hold earthly power lightly. Instead, Christians are taught to respect and obey authorities (Romans 13) and to pray for those in government, while leading ‘…a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way’ (1 Timothy 2:2). That’s why I pray for my Prime Minister and his government, as should every believer.
Many Christians fall short of this teaching—including me—but our calling is one of obedience and perseverance. We are dual citizens in the City of God and the City of Man, and that means living on earth as ‘sojourners and exiles’, as the Apostle Peter wrote in his first letter to the dispersed ancient church. Our earthly home is temporal, and zero-sum power politics is not the faithfulness to which Christ calls us. That is why Christian nationalism is an unsustainable political project, and contrary to mainstream Christian teaching and theology.
If faithful presence in our communities is what Australian Christians are called to, perhaps one of the most helpful texts come from the Old Testament, where Jeremiah called upon the Jews exiled in Babylon to settle down and to be a blessing as a community:
Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jeremiah 29:4-7).
This vision of faithful presence is what my parents modelled to me. I see Christians live it out all over Australia—along with our Jewish friends who share the book of Jeremiah with us—and build up our country for the blessing of all people, regardless of faith, ethnicity or background.
I’ve attempted to live it too. That is why I chose to serve in the Australian Army, and why I now serve in the Australian Parliament. To protect, build and strengthen our country. That is why family is so central to my life and political vision: it is where faithful presence in our local community begins.
I want all families to invest in the lives of their communities. I believe home ownership helps here. That’s why I support private property and home ownership—for the building of families, and productive citizens.
I want people to be dynamic and imaginative as they make their contribution to their community and nation.
That’s why I believe that open markets and rule of law are essential for the flourishing of small business and the productive endeavour that is central to our national prosperity.
It’s also why I am a Liberal. And why I believe the conservative side of politics ultimately has better answers for a fraying nation.
I’m not a Liberal because I believe in some horizonless form of abstract liberty that we are all moving towards as history pushes us forwards.
Or that theoretical free markets will always find the right price.
Or that I have an inherent right to be a bigot, shorn of my responsibilities and obligations to my neighbours.
I’m a Liberal because I believe that Christian freedoms that have served Australia so well—those of conscience, speech and association—are best protected through the platform of my party.
When those freedoms flourish, all others flourish too.
I’m a Liberal because I believe in family, faith, freedom—that loving my neighbour and working with them is the best way to secure our peace, prosperity and security.
Liberalism is not an intellectual philosophy for me. It’s a practical construct for working through disagreements with our political opponents, and finding compromise that protects even the dissenting voice.
I’m not a small government ideologue. Government has an important role in our lives, especially at times of crisis. It’s there to articulate those values that can bind us together. It’s there to uphold justice, to ensure a fair go—to protect the weak and oppressed from exploitation. But it is not absolute, and must be limited in scope and authority.
That’s why our Westminster system of government is the time-tested democratic construct for working out those interpersonal negotiations and securing peaceful settlements. And for securing our freedoms as individuals.
Our system involves compromise, understanding and open-handedness which is why grace, love and patience in our local communities is so essential to the health of our nation.
This is a vision of good government we must conserve. Our peaceful democracy is a gift that took hundreds of years to build. But as we learned at Bondi, it’s vulnerable, and if people no longer support its framework, it can quickly be lost.
That’s why we need to insist on our national values for those who join us as migrants. This is where our government must lead. These are essential for social cohesion—our shared values provide the threads that hold national success, and bind us as one.
Australia, as a nation of many different ethnic backgrounds, must look back to the values and stories we once loved, and let them join us together, if we are to have a future.
Well that was interesting to read but why did you vote today for a law that will make me a criminal if I criticise the religion that motivated the Bondi killer. You were the last person that gave me hope in the Liberal party. As soon as I heard of your vote I signed up for One Nation.
Bye.
You let me down today. I believed what you said this week and you did the opposite. As a lib voter for 40 years I will never vote for you again as you don’t share my conservative values. Good luck to you.