Director's Newsletter

21 August, 2026

Dear Supporters,

I am very pleased to report on a successful 2026 Colloquium. The room was at capacity for the powerful keynote address delivered by Senator Ralph Babet on the Friday evening, on the topic ‘Politics needs Christ’. And the following day twelve papers were presented to a mostly full room from 9:00am through to 5:00pm.

The content of the talks was excellent and I am very grateful to all the presenters who took the time to prepare their respective papers. The recordings of the talks will be available on the Christopher Dawson Centre YouTube site shortly. We will also be preparing a volume of the proceedings featuring the papers presented, to be available early next year.

Support for 'Children Born Alive Protection Bill'

Given the good work that Senator Babet undertook (along with Senators Matt Canavan and Alex Antic) in seeking to give specific legal protections to babies born alive after attempted abortion, I am pleased to see that Llew O'Brien, member of the House of Representatives seat of Wide Bay, has now introduced a private members bill to again take up this issue.

The Human Rights (Children Born Alive Protection) Bill 2026, had its first reading on Monday and I encourage you to read the Bill and Mr O'Brien's speech, which you can find at https://llewobrien.com.au/human-rights-children-born-alive-protection-bill-2026-first-reading-speech-in-the-federation-chamber-17-08-2026/ . I encourage you to contact your federal members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate to support this important Bill.

Restoring Justice

The Christopher Dawson Centre is proud to support the upcoming event ‘Restoring Justice: Building a Society for Virtue and Wisdom’, with American judges Amul Thapar and Andrew Oldham. This is being organised by the Chesterton Academy of Melbourne, and will take place on Friday 4 September, 6:30pm at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne Campus.

Judge Thapar is a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and a convert to Catholicism from Hinduism. He is author of the book The People’s Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories that Define Him. Judge Oldham is a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and has dealt with a number of cases in the area of religious liberty and church autonomy.

Tickets are $35 and can be purchased through: https://app.tickets.org.au/Chesterton/CAMSept2026

Use of the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ is no longer fit for purpose

In this Newsletter I would like to share a few thoughts of how to best understand the contemporary political situation in Australia, and indeed across Western nations. This relates to concerns the very way we conceive and frame political discussion and disagreement. (I will shortly expand on these thoughts in a longer paper to be published on the Dawson website.)

My contention is that the use of the concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ to speak of different political positions is no longer fit for purpose (if it ever was) and in fact greatly impedes our political debate and conversation.

The use of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ in politics can be traced back to the time of the French Revolution (1789-1799), when the Third Estate (constituted by the people) declared themselves as the National Assembly and sought to develop a new constitution. It was in this context during debates over the role of the monarch in the new constitution that the origins of the political concept of ‘left’ and ‘right’ can be found. Those sitting on the ‘right’ of the speaker’s chair supported the king having an absolute veto over legislation passed by the national assembly, and those on the ‘left’ of the chair disagreed. In this way the ‘right’ became a term to designate support for tradition and continuity with the past and ‘left’ with radical change, and the overthrow of tradition and custom.

The radical problem however is that as Western society and culture has changed, the use of these concepts has lost their foundational reference point, and as a result they have effectively become a kind of free-floating tribal or ideological identity. They have no clear metaphysical or anthropological foundation, which means there is never a definitive set of principle for which they stand.

There is a similar problem with the use of the terms, ‘conservative’, (those who seek to conserve or preserve tradition) and ‘progressive’ (those who seek to move beyond the bounds of tradition), which arguably are interchangeable with that of ‘right’ and ‘left’. Again, these terms where first employed within a particular cultural and social context, which no longer exists. And so, as with ‘left’ and ‘right’, ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ are terms that have had specific metaphysical or anthropological foundations, which would give them settled and definitive meaning.

What exactly do conservatives want to conserve? And what do ‘progressives’ want to progress?

A New Way Forward

Continuing to use the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’, or ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’, therefore only works to radically impede our political engagement. So how do we best characterise the different political positions we find expressed in contemporary political discussion and debate?

When we speak about politics; about the how society ought to be governed; about what laws ought to exist; we are always already presupposing some truth claim about the nature and purpose of human existence. Politics involves governing human beings; we therefore cannot but approach political questions on the basis of some particular understanding of the human person, which we take to be true.

In fact, what we are confronted with in contemporary politics or policy positions are actually claims grounded in a particular metaphysical or theological understanding about the human person. Now of course the overwhelming majority of the population including politicians do not explicitly approach political matters in this way. They do not explicitly approach political questions from first principles, rather they just unconsciously or unreflectively take it that their understanding of reality and human nature is ‘true’, that there is simply a ‘given’ or uncontested way of understanding these things.

They do not appreciate that our political disagreements are actually grounded in our deeper metaphysical or theological disagreements. And that this should be the basis for referring to or distinguishing between rival political positions, not ‘left’ and ‘right’.

Theorists of the Enlightenment concerned about societal fragmentation in the face of increasing disagreements over Christianity sought to separate politics from deeper metaphysical and theological questions. But this project was a matter of simple self-delusion, a modern form of Plato’s ‘noble lie’. There can be no such separation of politics from metaphysics or theology, all that happens is that one continues to rely on metaphysical or theological positions in advancing political arguments without acknowledging this to be so.

One cannot speak about taxation, healthcare, agriculture, energy or education policy or law and order, etc, without always already relying on some particular truth claim about human nature, our very nature and purpose.

Politics is therefore ultimately a conflict between rival equally ultimate metaphysical or theological conceptions of the human person! In this respect I would contend that the true dividing line in politics, properly understood is not between ‘left’ and ‘right’ but between those who believe in objective truth, specifically as it involves the human person (Christians, Platonists, and Aristotelians etc) and those who reject this (Atheists, Materialists, Marxists etc).

The Contemporary Political Situation

I believe that this issue in part helps to explain the increasing volatility of politics in Western nations. The approach of ‘left’ and ‘right’, or more specifically ‘ideology’, has allowed for a situation where politics can be and has been increasingly detached from the objective truth of reality. The framing of Western politics in ideological terms was only ever going to end in tragedy, and this is where we have been headed. Our political debate has been so lost in ideology and so detached from reality that the West has now brought itself to the brink of literal annihilation, specifically through unsustainable fertility rates.

What I believe we are seeing in the increasing rejection of mainstream political parties, is the rejection of this detachment of reality. They are rejecting politics framed in terms of ideology. People want a return to ‘common sense’ or a grounding in objective reality. They want their everyday problems solved, like housing affordability, cost of living, roads without potholes, education without ideological indoctrination and affordable energy etc.

Yet they have lacked a way to break free from the ideological way of conceiving of politics in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’. We can now do this by reference to rival anthropologies (conceptions of the human person) which either embrace the objective truth or reject it.

With Best Wishes to All,

Alexander Sidhu

Director of the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies

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