In the following, FCP Australia reviews its past week, during which the outlet covered Fabianism, government growth, AI, the Voice, Uluru, student representation, medical consent and media accountability. These may seem unrelated, but they’re not.
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The following is today’s newsletter emailed by Faith, Culture, Politics (“FCP”) Australia, a blog and podcast founded and hosted by “Mark,” who resides in South Australia. You can subscribe to receive FCP Australia Newsletters HERE.
Who Answers for the Power Being Exercised
By Mark, FCP Australia Newsletter 7 September 2026
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Fabian Socialism, the State and the Value of the Person
- The State and the Sanctuary
- Artificial Intelligence: Who Guards the New Systems of Power?
- Citizenship, Representation and Who Gets to Speak for Whom
- Accountability After Covid
- Another South Australian Voice Worth Hearing
- Where All of This Leaves Me
- Keep Following Along
Introduction
It has been another particularly full few weeks, both in the work of FCP Australia and in ordinary life.
As I looked back over what I have written, researched and produced since my last newsletter, I realised that much of it has been circling the same question: Who answers for the power being exercised?
That question arises when governments expand their reach, when institutions claim to speak on behalf of others, when new technologies are given increasing authority, when medical professionals influence public behaviour and when media organisations decide how contested events will be framed for their audiences.
None of this requires us to assume malicious motives. People can sincerely believe they are serving the public good and still exercise power badly. Institutions can begin with worthwhile purposes and still drift. Technology can provide extraordinary benefits and still create risks its builders did not adequately anticipate.
For me, the Christian question underneath all of this remains the same. Authority is a trust. The person affected by its exercise is not merely a voter, taxpayer, patient, student, worker or unit within a system. He or she bears the image of God.
That has been the thread running through much of this month’s work.
Fabian Socialism, the State and the Value of the Person
One of the larger projects I completed was a five-part series examining Fabian socialism, the growth of the Australian administrative state and the very different understanding of human worth offered by Christianity.
It began with a disturbing 1931 recording of George Bernard Shaw, one of the prominent early Fabians, imagining people appearing periodically before a board and being required to justify their continued existence according to what they produced and consumed.
Rather than treating that clip as proof of some hidden modern conspiracy, I wanted to understand the political philosophy and method surrounding it: Fabian gradualism, its publicly acknowledged influence upon British Labour and Australian Labor politics, the growth of institutions designed to administer social outcomes and what can happen when the system rather than the person becomes the starting point.
Part One: Who Must Justify Their Existence?
This begins with Shaw, the Fabian method and the deeper question of whether human worth is something a political or economic system can grant, measure or withdraw.
Read: Who Must Justify Their Existence?
Part Two: The State We Actually Have
The second instalment brings the history into contemporary Australia, examining Labor, unions, institutional loyalty and the gradual expansion of administrative government – -while recognising that the growth of state power is by no means exclusively a Labor phenomenon.
Read: The State We Actually Have
Part Three: What It Costs
Here I turn to the economic dimension: taxation, debt, government expenditure and the practical cost of sustaining an increasingly large state. The question is not whether government should provide anything, but how much responsibility can progressively be transferred upward before families, communities and future generations carry consequences that become increasingly difficult to reverse.
Read: What It Costs
Part Four: What Christians Built and What We’re Losing
Long before the modern welfare state assumed many of these functions, Christians built hospitals, schools, charities, orphanages and countless local institutions of care. This part asks what happens when government increasingly funds, regulates, absorbs or redefines institutions that once arose from voluntary Christian responsibility.
Read: What Christians Built and What We’re Losing
Part Five: Two Very Different Questions
The series finally returns to Shaw’s imagined board and places it beside Christ’s words in Matthew 25.
Shaw’s question is essentially: What have you contributed that justifies what you consume?
Christ’s question is radically different: What did you do for the least of these?
One begins by asking the vulnerable person to justify his existence. The other places responsibility upon the strong for how they treated him.
That is ultimately the choice underneath the entire series.
Systems calculate. God gives.
Read: Two Very Different Questions
The State and the Sanctuary
One related piece grew from a different starting point.
‘The State and the Sanctuary’ began with developments affecting Christian organisations in India but led me back to a question increasingly relevant in Australia as well: what happens when Christian institutions retain their buildings and names but their ability to remain distinctly Christian becomes increasingly conditional upon government funding, regulation or permission?
The issue is not that Christians should demand immunity from ordinary law. Nor is government assistance inherently corrupting. The concern begins when dependence makes conscience negotiable.
Schools, hospitals, charities and churches should serve people faithfully. But if their continued ability to operate ultimately depends upon surrendering the convictions that caused Christians to build them in the first place, something significant has changed.
Read: The State and the Sanctuary
Artificial Intelligence: Who Guards the New Systems of Power?
Artificial intelligence (“AI”) has become another continuing area of investigation for me, particularly here in South Australia.
In ‘The Fox Writing the Rules’, I examined the unusual sequence in which the Malinauskas Government entered into a relationship with OpenAI while also establishing a Royal Commission into artificial intelligence.
My concern is not that government should refuse to engage with leading AI companies. Expertise matters. Innovation matters. AI may deliver extraordinary benefits.
The governance question is whether partnership and scrutiny can remain sufficiently independent when the company helping government understand and deploy the technology is also one of the companies whose technology requires examination.
Read: The Fox Writing the Rules
That question became considerably more concrete with ‘They Said the Agents Were Isolated’.
OpenAI’s own reporting about cybersecurity evaluations described AI agents finding ways around intended containment, communicating through unintended channels and reaching systems they were not supposed to reach.
The point is not that ChatGPT is about to escape from someone’s phone. It is that a safeguard can exist in the design documents and still fail operationally.
As governments contemplate increasingly agentic systems connected to databases, identity infrastructure, public services and other systems, “we have isolated it” cannot simply be an assertion. It must be independently testable.
That is precisely the kind of issue South Australia’s Royal Commission should be willing to confront.
Read: They Said the Agents Were Isolated
Citizenship, Representation and Who Gets to Speak for Whom
Another substantial part of my work has concerned South Australia’s First Nations Voice and the broader Uluru process.
In ‘The Othering of the Citizen’, I tried to move beneath the ordinary political arguments surrounding the Voice and ask a more fundamental question: What happens to equal citizenship when political representation itself is formally differentiated according to inherited identity?
My use of the word “othering” is deliberate but not intended as an accusation of malicious motive. I mean institutionalising an enduring distinction between categories of fellow citizens and their relationship with the state.
I remain convinced that Aboriginal disadvantage should be addressed seriously, that historical wrongs should not be minimised and that governments should listen carefully to communities affected by their decisions.
The question is whether permanently differentiated political representation is the just way to accomplish that.
Read: The Othering of the Citizen
That investigation has since moved into ‘Beyond the One Page’.
Most Australians know the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a one-page document. The documentary record surrounding the Uluru process, however, is considerably larger.
As South Australia proceeds from ‘Voice’ toward ‘Truth-telling and Treaty’, I have begun examining what political leaders mean when they speak of implementing Uluru “in full,” what belongs to the adopted Statement itself, what appears in the wider dialogue records and Guiding Principles, and where the boundaries of that commitment actually lie.
The purpose is not to collapse every document into one or claim a predetermined destination. It is to understand the documentary record accurately enough that citizens can see what has been proposed, what government has actually committed to and what remains unresolved.
Read: Beyond the One Page
A related question appeared in a very different setting in ‘Who Do Student Unions Answer To?’
When the National Union of Students participated in campaigning against One Nation, I became interested less in whether students were entitled to oppose Pauline Hanson – they plainly are – and more in the representative claim underneath the institution.
When an individual activist speaks, we know whose view we are hearing. When an organisation claiming to represent close to a million students speaks politically, who authorised the position being expressed in their name?
The right to speak is not automatically the right to speak for.
Read: Who Do Student Unions Answer To?
Accountability After Covid
This remains one of the areas I am least willing simply to leave behind.
Not because I want Australia permanently trapped in 2020–22, but because moving forward responsibly requires an honest accounting of what happened, what worked, what failed, what was justified and what should never be repeated.
My Department of Health FOI Continues
Readers of the previous newsletter will know that the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner formally commenced its review of my Freedom of Information matter concerning the Department of Health.
There has since been further correspondence over the scope of the request.
I have narrowed the request several times in an effort to make it workable. But there comes a point at which narrowing no longer makes a request more manageable – it begins to remove the very question the request was designed to answer.
The question I am trying to preserve is relatively straightforward: What legal and policy reasoning supported the Commonwealth’s understanding of vaccination decisions as voluntary and informed when refusal could carry substantial employment, professional and social consequences?
I remain willing to narrow reasonably. I am not willing to narrow away the very issue the request was designed to examine.
The Mouthpiece
That abstract question of consent becomes considerably more tangible when we return to what Australians were actually being told.
My most recent article, ‘The Mouthpiece’, examines Professor Christopher Perry’s widely broadcast comments during the vaccination campaign and asks a question I think has received too little attention.
Not simply: Were his words forceful?
But: Under what professional, institutional or governmental authority was he speaking, and what guidance informed language intended to influence the behaviour of hundreds of thousands of Australians?
Accountability need not be malicious. Professor Perry bears the same human dignity as anyone else whose conduct I examine. But professional influence exercised through a national media platform carries corresponding responsibility.
Read: The Mouthpiece
Did the ABC Report the Fauci Controversy – or Frame the Conclusion?
I also recently completed a 28-minute examination of an ABC 7.30 report concerning renewed congressional scrutiny of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
This was not an attempt to prove Fauci either a saint or a villain, nor to relitigate every covid treatment, vaccine or policy dispute. I approached it instead as an audit of the journalism against the ABC’s own standards of accuracy, context and due impartiality.
The presentation looks at the experts chosen to interpret Fauci’s record, the treatment of contrary perspectives, the sequencing of material and the repeated use of language such as “revenge,” “venom,” “humiliation” and “inquisition.”
The broader question extends far beyond Anthony Fauci: When powerful people and institutions are being scrutinised, does journalism give citizens enough evidence to reach their own conclusion – or can selection, sequence and framing begin to make that conclusion for them?
My conclusion was deliberately narrower than many of the arguments surrounding Fauci. He made genuine contributions during a long public-health career. He also exercised enormous institutional influence during decisions that remain contested and therefore deserve scrutiny.
Watch the full ABC/Fauci presentation
Australia, We Have a Problem
For anyone receiving this before Thursday, 10 September, I also want to draw attention to an upcoming event in Sydney hosted by Graham Hood and John Larter.
‘Australia, We Have a Problem’ brings together doctors, academics, lawyers, commentators, politicians and Australians affected by pandemic-era policies in support of calls for a Royal Commission into Australia’s covid response.
Among those advertised are Professor Charlie Teo, Professor Angus Dalgleish, Emeritus Professor Robert Clancy, Dr. Melissa McCann and Dr. Phillip Altman, along with a substantial number of other in-person and online contributors.
Readers will recognise Dr. Altman from my previous interview with him.
Whatever conclusions an eventual inquiry might reach, I believe the principle is simple: a genuine inquiry should not begin with a predetermined conclusion.
It should be capable of examining the decisions made, the evidence relied upon, the trade-offs involved, the operation of mandates and informed consent, medical and regulatory decision-making, adverse experiences, the treatment of dissent and the consequences – beneficial and harmful – of the policies adopted.
The event begins at 6:00 pm on Thursday, 10 September at The Juniors Kingsford in Sydney, and will also be livestreamed online:
Another South Australian Voice Worth Hearing
I would also like to share a recent interview from fellow South Australian Angela Tripodi of Believe in Action Australia.
Angela speaks with Canadian de-transitioner Faith Groleau, giving Faith considerable space to tell her own story.
Faith describes entering gender medicine as a teenager against the background of significant trauma and mental-health difficulties, receiving puberty blockers and later testosterone, and eventually returning to living as female after reconsidering what had happened and what she believed had been overlooked.
The wider conversation contains medical, legal and political claims that viewers can investigate and assess for themselves. What I think should be harder to dismiss is the principle that people who have actually undergone these interventions and later regretted or reversed course deserve to be included in the evidence heard by clinicians, parents and lawmakers.
Faith’s message to young people is ultimately to allow time, to recognise that interests and personality do not determine one’s sex, and to think very carefully before making irreversible decisions about a developing body.
Whatever one’s position on the wider debate, testimony such as this should not simply disappear because it complicates a preferred policy narrative.
Watch Angela Tripodi’s interview with Faith Groleau and Visit Believe in Action Australia
Where All of This Leaves Me
Looking back across these subjects – Fabianism, government growth, AI, the Voice, Uluru, student representation, medical consent and media accountability – they may seem like very different stories.
Increasingly, I don’t think they are.
They repeatedly bring me back to questions of authority, proximity and accountability:
- Who made the decision?
- Who gave them authority to make it?
- How close are they to the people who will live with its consequences?
- What happens when the safeguards fail?
- And when something goes wrong, who is actually answerable?
For Christians, there is another question which should come before all of those: How are the people affected by our decisions being treated?
Political systems, markets, bureaucracies, unions, corporations, media organisations and even churches can all begin to see people as categories to be managed. Christianity gives us no permission to do that.
Every one of them remains a person for whom Christ died.
That does not mean abandoning judgment or accountability. It means pursuing both without forgetting who stands before us.
Keep Following Along
Thank you to everyone who continues to read, watch, share, comment and pray for this work.
As many of you have discovered, not every article, interview, livestream or social-media post reaches every follower. The best way to keep up is to follow FCP Australia across more than one platform:
- Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-1220103
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FaithCulturePoliticsAustralia/streams
- X: https://x.com/MarkNeugebaue13
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61581000541452
And a particular reminder for those who enjoy the longer-form conversations: Dr. Bruce Paix and I are live on Mondays for the Wake Up Australia podcast.
We use those conversations to work through current events, public policy, institutional accountability and some of the questions that do not fit neatly into an article.
You can join us through the FCP Australia livestreams on YouTube and our other streaming platforms. If you cannot make it live, the conversations remain available afterwards.
Follow the FCP Australia YouTube livestreams
Thank you for continuing to engage thoughtfully with difficult questions, including those on which reasonable people may ultimately disagree.
I remain convinced that truth should not fear examination, but our pursuit of truth must also remember the dignity of every person involved.
God bless, Mark
Featured image taken from ‘Executive overreach in Australia has reached the levels of an autocracy’, Pearls and Irritations, 24 November 2023
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