World Youth Day wash up

In the United States the outright gift of vast sums of taxpayers’ money to a church is held to be a breach of separation of church and state and therefore unconstitutional.

So how can Australian federal and state governments give tens of millions of dollars to a church when there is a separation of church and state? The answer is there is no constitutional separation of church and state in Australia. In 1981 the High Court interpreted s.116 of the Federal Constitution to mean there is no separation. A High Court challenge to WYD funding came to nothing. There is no section in the NSW Constitution separating church and state. Cardinal Pell was wrong.

Accordingly, there is no problem for a government to give any amount of taxpayers’ money to a church in the future. Strictly speaking, the constitutional monarchy that is Australia, unlike the republic of the United States, is not a fully realised democracy. It is a soft theocracy where church and government purposes coincide to garnish taxpayers’ money and resources where governments perceive it will afford an electoral advantage, both structurally through tax exemptions, and functionally through grants, given there is no constitutional bar. WYD 2008 was just one more, expensive example.

But there was another cost of WYD which went unnoticed. By staging the event in Sydney, the church added significantly to greenhouse gases generated by the majority of the 110,000 visitors who flew vast distances to participate. Had WYD been held in North America or Europe the greenhouse gas footprint would not have been so large.

In April 2008, three months before WYD, the Pope announced seven new sins. Number four was “polluting the environment”.