The Premier of NSW Is Injecting Christ Back into the Sphere of Politics
In interfaith NSW, one faith should usurp all others, according to government ministers...
Fifty local Christian leaders, “from archbishops to pastors”, gathered at NSW parliament on 8 August 2025, to launch the Christian Alliance Council of NSW, and to stand “united in Christ alongside the state’s civic leaders”, which included both major party leaders. An accompanying press release is clear that the meeting was in aid of raising the majority religion, so it’s not forgotten.
NSW premier Chris Minns, opposition leader Mark Speakman and former PM Tony Abbott were in attendance. So, it appears the premier has returned to his prior predilection with the Christian faith, after his huge preoccupation with antisemitism, which led to an inquiry into whether he passed new criminal laws based on a spate of crimes that NSW police doubted the legitimacy of.
The crusade to see the influence of the Christian faith reassert its dominance in an increasingly multifaith Australia is usually the pursuit of Coalition MPs of faith, who are referred to as the Christian right. But Minns appears to traverse the political divide in terms of his belief that religion should play a role in what many constituents consider is the rightfully secular sphere of politics.
In the leadup to the March 2023 election, Minns and his predecessor, then NSW premier Dominic Perrottet, were concerned about raising religion up a notch in terms of its political influence in the state of NSW. This then saw NSW Labor create the NSW Faith Affairs Council, which first met in November 2023. However, this faith advisory body fails to include any nonreligious members.
The campaign to reinstate religion into the sphere of politics and further to ensure that Christianity remains the chief faith in this state was not commenced by premier Minns, however, and those politicians and lobbyists involved in this push would like to see Christian morality to once again become the major force shaping public life and politics in NSW.
Making Christianity great again
“In NSW, we rightly celebrate many important religious traditions,” said premier Minns in an 8 August press release. “Yet while most people in our state are Christian, this faith must not be forgotten. Today’s gathering is a wonderful and long overdue celebration of Christian heritage.”
The event was hosted by NSW multicultural minister Steve Kamper. The minister’s portfolio was expanded early on in the current parliamentary term to include religion, and the leaders from the various faiths making up the NSW Faith Affairs Council have a direct line to Kamper.
“The power of faith can move mountains,” Kamper said at the meeting. “Our state is made stronger by Christians.”
Christian Alliance NSW has been around since 2022. The body represents 65 churches and has around 10,000 members. The organisation seeks to build a broader multidenominational community in order to promote events that celebrate cultural diversity, promote unity and serve the common good, explains the organisation’s website.
Writing for the Rationalist Society of Australia, Si Gladman reported that the Christian Alliance’s Facebook page had labelled the event “historic” and that it was “just the beginning”, as the organisation seeks to unite the adherents of various Christian denominations with the ultimate aim of “renewing the relevance of faith across our state”.
“Today marks a historic unity of Christian, political and community leaders,” event coordinator Paul Sedrak said, as he “reflected on the milestone” before a room packed with Christian adherents in NSW parliament, which included the leader of both major parties, and an ex-PM. “In Jesus Christ, what unites us is far greater than what divides us.”
O come all ye faithful
According to Gladman, “political support for the Christian Alliance group is another example of the privilege and access afforded to faith-based community groups in NSW” under Minns. The executive director of the Rationalist Society too raises his organisation’s concern around a special body representing the various belief systems of the public not having a nonreligious representative.
Documents obtained by the Rationalist Society of Australia show that the 19 member Faith Affairs Council has been utilising its direct access to government decisionmakers. This has included council member Better Balanced Futures chief executive Murray Norman attempting to influence education policies, so that religion and scripture are entrenched in school life.
Gladman recalled that Minns and other government members attended the launch of Faith NSW in 2023, which is an interfaith lobby group that, while not directly linked to the Faith Affairs Council was certainly birthed out of the same zeitgeist. Norman is also the chief executive of Faith NSW, and is apparently, a key driver in instilling faith back into NSW political and educational spheres.
Religious privileging
The proselytising of Minns, however, is more subdued than that of the religious freedoms crusader former PM Scott Morrison. Although, as it turns out, the pair are old travel buddies as both Minns and Morrison both went on a junket to Israel together in the earlier years of this century, when they were a Labor ministerial adviser and Liberal party secretary, respectively .
At the end of 2017, just weeks after same-sex marriage became law, Morrison, then treasurer, vowed to enact religious discrimination laws, as those of faith, and in particular, Christians, were under attack in the public sphere, which was a theme going back to his 2008 maiden speech in parliament, and as top minister, he then spent years attempting to enact religious privileging laws.
Morrison’s Religious Discrimination Bill sought to establish religious protections and liberties. It went through three iterations, with each new bill less extreme, which was to the chagrin of former Liberal Nationals MP George Christensen. Morrison dropped the bill in the end, as he’d agreed to prohibit the expelling of gay students from schools but balked at the same for transgender kids.
The annual Church and State Summit on the Gold Coast attracts conservative MPs and Christian lobbyists, who espouse the Seven Mountains Mandate, which calls on Christians to infiltrate political and cultural institutions and gently sway them in the direction of Christian doctrine. This involves seven spheres: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government.
The South Australian Liberals terminated the membership of 150 recently joined members in mid-2021, as they were found to be Pentecostal Christians seeking to influence the party in this manner. At the same time, another 400 recently joined members were asked to show cause as to why they shouldn’t too be dropped from party membership that stood at around 5,000 members all up.
Then NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham ran the NSW state religious freedoms crusade over 2020-21, with a bill that antidiscrimination law experts underscored sought to raise the attribute of religion over all other attributes. This bill went to committee and the majority recommended supporting the laws. But the bill was ultimately rejected in the upper house.
So, while the current push to insert faith back into NSW politics being progressed by senior Minns Labor government ministers appears a lot more subdued, the recent launch of the Christian Alliance Council of NSW at state parliament, does tend to hint at the same end goal as Morrison’s crusade, which is the supremacy of the Christian religion in Australian politics.
