Why Australia Needs a Royal Commission That Looks Beyond Security
The opportunity to provide the Western world with a blueprint for survival.
Australia’s response to acts of terrorism is shaped by an understandable concern for public safety, social stability, and national identity. Such events carry profound human consequences and place immense pressure on the government to act decisively.
However, the prevailing response has been confined to security and ideological analysis. This obscures a deeper failure: the reluctance to engage with the constitutional architecture of separation, reflected in s116, that defines the relationship between belief, authority, and law. A Royal Commission is necessary to surface this neglected constitutional dimension and subject it to rigorous public examination.
The problem
Australia’s response to terrorism relies on procedural fixes — intelligence reviews, expanded policing powers, and coordination measures. These treat the problem as a failure of systems rather than a failure of foundations.
Yet public unease points to something deeper. The central challenge is not simply how acts of terrorism occur, but why Australia struggles to articulate limits on authority when belief is invoked to justify violence. This is not merely a security problem. It is a theological and constitutional one.
Theology, not ideology
Ideology presents systems of ideas shaped by opinions and programs that can be managed through standard policy tools. Theology, in contrast, addresses foundational questions—the nature of being, ultimate authority, conscience, and obligation—which require understanding rather than management.
Ideology concerns opinions and programs. Theology concerns being, authority, conscience, and obligation. Theology answers the question: what is a human person, and before whom do they finally stand? When theology asserts authority over conscience or law, the conflict is foundational, not administrative.
When tools designed for ideology management are applied to theological conflicts, the result is escalation without genuine resolution, because the foundational nature of our constitutional architecture resists such approaches.
The constitutional architecture Australia already assumes
Australia’s constitutional order rests on a theological architecture and common law — an architecture of separation, not fusion, between authority and conscience.
That architecture is most clearly expressed in the Christian claim that Jesus is fully God and fully human. Authority and personhood are held together without being collapsed into one another. Divine power does not override human freedom; it honours it. Moral agency remains real, and belief is meaningful only if freely chosen. Compulsion can force behaviour, but it cannot produce truth.
This design logic underwrites separation as Australia actually practices it:
- Conscience is real and cannot be compelled.
- Authority is real, but must be restrained.
- law governs conduct, not belief
This is not a denominational preference. It is the architecture that the Constitution assumes.
Revelation and intellectual honesty assent to the same architecture
This architecture may be adopted in two ways, but it remains one structure.
- By revelation: because it is true before God.
- By intellectual honesty: because it coheres, works, and makes constitutional order possible.
Even public rituals such as taking an oath on the Bible — by the Governor-General, Ministers, Members of Parliament, judges, or witnesses in court — presuppose this constitutional architecture. The same act may be grounded either in revelation or in intellectual honesty. These grounds are distinct and not fused, yet they converge in a single civic outcome: a binding pledge by a free moral agent under restrained authority.
Revelation and intellectual honesty are not competing foundations. There are two ways of recognising the same structure. The Constitution does not arbitrate why the architecture is true; it assumes that it is.
The precedent Australia already knows
Before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Australia largely relied on assumptive virtue. Major institutions were trusted to be fundamentally safe, morally serious, and capable of handling wrongdoing internally. Allegations were often managed quietly, leaders were deferred to, and protecting institutional reputation was treated as a legitimate priority.
The Royal Commission revealed what this approach produced in practice: cultures of silence, repeated failure to report abuse to authorities, disbelief or intimidation of victims, and internal processes designed to contain disclosure rather than establish truth. The shock was not only the scale of the abuse, but how long institutions could appear respectable while systemic failures persisted.
When that silence finally broke, the result was deep public anger, lasting loss of trust, and widespread institutional failure. Only a Royal Commission — with public hearings, evidence, and clear standards of accountability — could restore confidence by replacing deference with transparency and truth.
The same dangerous pattern is now repeating—this time, with theology occupying an urgent and unspoken space.
A necessary contrast: Calvinism, Geneva, and how theology was treated
In John Calvin’s Geneva in the mid-16th century, theology was not treated as a private religion protected from state interference, nor as a neutral belief system alongside others. It functioned as the organising authority of the political regime itself.
Geneva was formally a republic, governed by magistrates and councils, but its legitimacy and law were explicitly grounded in Calvinist theology. Religious doctrine shaped civic law, public morality, and political authority. The Consistory — a religious body — exercised disciplinary power with the backing of the civil authorities. Dissent from doctrine was not merely a religious disagreement; it was treated as a threat to public order.
In practical terms, Calvinism in Geneva was not treated as “religion” in the modern constitutional sense. It functioned as a public authority. Obedience to doctrine was a condition of civic belonging. Heresy, blasphemy, and theological dissent were punished by the state because theology and governance were fused.
What matters for present purposes is that this fusion was recognised through understanding. Calvinist theology was understood as Christian and was therefore naturally extended to assumptive virtue. At first, the differences were felt more viscerally than formally articulated, but over time, they were understood. Calvinism survives today as theology, but its political fusion does not — and can be recognised as such.
That capacity for recognition has not disappeared. We can still identify the fusion in Geneva precisely because we understand the theology involved.
The present difficulty lies elsewhere. In the pursuit of diversity, Australia has extended the presumption of virtue to unfamiliar theologies — treating them as if they operate within the same moral grammar simply because they appear religious, ordered, or morally serious. On the surface, they may resemble familiar Christian forms, yet their underlying commitments may not assent to separation at all.
This is the failure point. Where theology is operative, it cannot be managed; it must be understood. The task before Australia is to examine theology on its own terms, to determine whether it accepts the separation between authority and conscience that the Constitution assumes. Recovering that discipline is essential if the separation assumed by s116 is to be preserved.
Why a Royal Commission is essential
A security review asks: How did this happen? Those questions matter, but they are incomplete.
A Royal Commission must ask a deeper question: what constitutional architecture are we assuming — and where is it being rejected when belief is used to justify authority, or to incite violence?
Only a Royal Commission has the authority and scope to:
- Bring s116 into open, serious public discussion.
- Clarify the boundary between conscience and authority.
- Restore public confidence by naming and examining the structure Australia already lives by, rather than leaving it implicit and untested.
This is not about judging belief. It is about defending the conditions under which all belief and non, can coexist, and under which authority remains legitimate.
Bottom line
Australia cannot secure its future by merely tightening systems. True security requires confronting foundational issues, not just administering procedural fixes.
A Royal Commission is not an escalation. It is a restraint. If foundations are not guarded now, no amount of security architecture will hold: the consequences could be irreversible.