Australia as a Christian nation

Though the not quite as severe as the religious right in America, Australia isn't without its own dominionist issues. Australia has a constitutional separation of church and state similar to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Despite this, several issues involving the nature of constitution monarchies as well as supreme court precedents continue to hold Australian separation of church and state issues under contention.

Australian Federal Constitution
The only section of the Australian Federal Constitution that mentions religion is section 116 which states


 * The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

Constitutional Monarchies
It remains unclear whether constitutional monarchies of the English Commonwealth are capable of having true separation of church and state, whilst the Queen being the titular head of government also remains the head of the Church of England.

Supreme Court Precedent
The issues of Church State separation reached the Australian supreme court in 1981 after efforts from prime ministers Sir Robert Menzies in the 1950s and Gough Whitlam in the 1970s to bring up the issue of subsidised funding for non-public schools. In particular Poorer Catholic schools.

In 1981 the supreme court ruled in favour of government funding of private schools. Supreme Court Justice Sir Ronald Wilson citing that


 * The fact is that s.116 is a denial of legislative power to the Commonwealth and no more … The provision therefore cannot answer the description of a law which guarantees within Australia the separation of church and state.

Since the supreme court ruling the Australian government has claimed to subsidise private schools based on a per student allotment of money. Despite their being religiously founded as well as being private commercial entities (some charging up to $20,000 per student per year in private school fees), this trend has led to private schools actually gaining more public funding than public schools, which remains a major point of contention in Australian culture.

Religious Parties
Over the last several years since the supreme court rulings, a number of explicitly religious political parties have sprung up in Australia. Whilst not being able to gain any kind of majority seating in the federal or state parliaments, they have started gaining footholds in some local councils.

In addition to the issues of s.116's legal scope, a loophole has also been argued that an independent or party should be able to run on the grounds of Christian morals and agenda without the government necessarily endorsing the religion.

Republic Referendum
Though the 1999 referendum to secede from the British Commonwealth as a republic failed, there has been some talk of a second republic referendum since the election of Kevin Rudd as prime minister in 2007. It is uncertain what effect seceding as a republic would mean to the scope of constitutional church state separation, or the supreme court rulings based on the current scope, but at this point it would seem that the government is far too entrenched for it to make a clean break over a single referendum.