Every nation must pause to ask: Who are we becoming?
Australia stands at such a moment. We inherit a stunning land, a rich mix of cultures, a vibrant democracy, and a spirit of resilience. The language of the “fair go” still stirs something deep within us. But cracks are widening. Trust in government has fallen. Millions of Australians, including one in six children, live in poverty. Almost half of us will experience a mental health disorder in our lifetime. Younger generations see home ownership slipping further out of reach. The “fair go” is fraying. The promise of fair must become fairer.
That conviction is at the heart of my new book, Advance Australia Fairer: Towards Justice, Belonging, and the Common Good. I chose the title because it names the gap between the aspiration of our national anthem and the reality around us. Fairness is incomplete while millions live in poverty, while First Nations peoples wait for justice, while housing and health remain unequal, while migrants struggle to survive, and while ecological breakdown threatens our common future. To advance “fairer” is to insist that equity, truth, and sustainability become central to our shared horizon.
I’ve spent over twenty years in theological education and have written more than thirty books, including Salt, Light, and a City (Jesus Creed’s 2012 Book of the Year), Healing Our Broken Humanity (Outreach Magazine’s 2019 Resource of the Year), and World Christianity (shortlisted for the 2025 Australian Christian Book of the Year). In 2024, I received the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for my service to theological education. But Advance Australia Fairer is different from anything I’ve written before. This book is for Australians of every worldview: secular, spiritual, religious, atheist, agnostic, and searching. Anyone who cares about the common good and believes Australia can be kinder, more generous, and more just.
Reimagining the Good Life
For decades, the “good life” in Australia has been pictured as steady work, family connections, property ownership, and prosperity. But that image is eroding. Home ownership is out of reach for many younger Australians. Productivity is at its lowest in sixty years. Inequality deepens. The cost of living climbs.
In this book, I ask whether the good life can be reimagined. I define it as the shared flourishing of people, communities, and the earth: rooted in dignity, fairness, belonging, ecological care, and the relationships and institutions that allow every person to live with purpose, enough, and hope. The good life can’t be measured only in consumption. It must be about fairness, belonging, and sustainability: children safe, young people feeling hope, migrants included, elders cared for, and communities resilient.
Growing up in Blacktown, in the western suburbs of Sydney, in a working-class family, I was raised with the promise that hard work would secure stability. I’ve watched that promise crumble for many in my own generation and those younger than me. I’ve come to believe that the good life is about how we live together with fairness, dignity, and care for the earth.
A Book in Four Movements
Advance Australia Fairer unfolds in four parts, each building toward a practical vision for national renewal.
Part One: Naming Our Reality examines who we are becoming as a nation. I trace the shifting soul of Australia: the erosion of trust in institutions, the loneliness epidemic, the pressures of inequality, and the demographic transformation that has made us one of the most multicultural nations on earth. I explore the fault lines of poverty, housing stress, mental illness, democratic fatigue, and ecological crisis. And I listen for the wisdom we already carry: from First Nations knowledge systems stretching back millennia, from the resilience of migrant communities, from the everyday acts of generosity that hold our neighbourhoods together.
Part Two: Reimagining the Common Good asks what flourishing looks like when it extends to everyone. I argue that we need to move from consumerism to community, from individualism to belonging, from injustice to justice, and from private gain to the common good. I explore the role of story and spirit in public life, and tackle the hard question of how we move beyond “us and them” in a polarised age. Each chapter draws on Australian research, real stories, and grassroots examples of communities already doing this work.
Part Three: Building a Shared Future examines the practical infrastructure of national repair. I write about faith in the public square, arguing that the days of moral monopoly are over, and good riddance to them. What faith communities can offer is something precious: practices that form people for the long work of hope and repair, the discipline of showing up, the habit of examining your own conscience before judging others, the reminder that every person carries dignity. I also explore the slow miracle of repairing together, from reconciliation with First Nations peoples to ecological restoration, and I examine the politics of the common good: what it looks like when policy is guided by dignity, fairness, and the long view.
Part Four: Pathways of Hope offers practices that form us for the good life: listening, dialogue, service, contemplation, and courageous action. These are ancient and ordinary habits available to all of us: mothers and migrants, students and neighbours, tradies and teachers, elders and young adults, religious people and sceptics. I write about what a generous Australia looks like and what we can do, together, starting this week. The final chapter provides concrete, achievable steps for individuals, communities, faith groups, and institutions.
Eighty-Four Stories of Courage and Hope
One of the features I’m most proud of is the eighty-four case studies woven throughout the book. These are real Australian stories: a mosque and a church sharing a food bank, Aboriginal communities leading their own healing through the Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation, Climate for Change hosting kitchen-table conversations where people of faith and no faith discover shared ground, interfaith councils bridging divisions in Western Sydney.
The case studies include thirty secular NGOs and social enterprises, twenty-nine faith-linked initiatives spanning Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Baha’i, and multifaith collaborations, sixteen First Nations-led organisations, and six academic or research institutions. This diversity is intentional. It honours the many ways Australians are already working to advance belonging, fairness, ecological repair, and civic trust. The future we need is already being lived, in fragments and glimpses, by Australians who’ve chosen compassion over convenience.
For Everyone, from Every Tradition
I wrote this book with a deep conviction: we don’t need to believe the same things to work for the same world. The book draws on wisdom from Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and Indigenous traditions alongside secular humanism. I explore the Muslim call to zakat, the Jewish commitment to tikkun olam, the Buddhist practice of metta, the Sikh tradition of langar, and the Indigenous understanding of Country as kin. Every tradition, secular and religious, has something to contribute to the practice of building a fairer nation.
The book is grounded in extensive Australian research: Scanlon Foundation social cohesion data, ACOSS poverty reports, ABS health surveys, AHURI housing analysis, Productivity Commission findings, Lowy Institute polling, and much more. I’ve tried to let the evidence speak honestly about where we are, while allowing the stories of real communities to show us where we could go.
Written from Within Real Life
I carry the statistics in this book as stories of people I’ve sat with, shared meals with, and listened to. I feel the weight of these fractures in conversations with my own neighbours in Parramatta and in the questions my children ask about the future. I know what it’s like to feel both deeply at home and on the margins, and that tension shapes the way I write about belonging.
I write as a Christian, shaped by my tradition, but this book is written for everyone. I’ve tried to honour the wisdom of every tradition, secular and religious, because I’m convinced that we need the full range of human wisdom to navigate what’s coming. We don’t need to believe the same things to work for the same world. Cooperation requires a commitment to something larger than ourselves.
I’ve learned that imagination is born in the tears and resilience of those who’ve carried deep wounds. I often find myself challenged to listen more than speak, because it’s in others’ stories that I glimpse the Australia we could become.
Built for Conversation
Every chapter concludes with reflection questions designed for personal use, book clubs, community groups, faith communities, classrooms, or kitchen-table conversations. Appendix 1 provides a curated further reading list for each chapter, and Appendix 2 catalogues the eighty-four Australian stories of courage, solidarity, and hope featured throughout the book. I’ve designed it as a resource that can be returned to again and again, in whatever setting Australians gather to talk about what matters.
Who Should Read This Book
Advance Australia Fairer is written for anyone who loves this country and believes it can do better. Community leaders will find a framework for building social cohesion across difference. People of faith will find a vision of humble, servant-hearted public engagement. Educators and students will find research-grounded analysis of Australia’s social landscape. Policy-minded readers will find practical proposals rooted in evidence. And any Australian who has felt the gap between the country we sing about and the country we live in will find a companion for the work of repair.
An Invitation
Something is stirring in this country. You can feel it in conversations that refuse to settle for cynicism, in communities rebuilding after flood and fire, in the determination of people who’ve decided that indifference is no longer an option. It doesn’t make headlines. It rarely trends on social media. But it’s there, growing in the spaces between our anxieties: a hunger for something more generous, more honest, more alive than the cramped vision we’ve been offered.
The dream I name in this book is not utopian. It doesn’t require everyone to agree on theology, politics, or the meaning of a good life. It requires something both simpler and harder: that we take responsibility for one another. That we refuse to walk past suffering we have the power to ease. That we build institutions worthy of trust and communities capacious enough for difference.
We advance Australia fairer by doing what we can, where we are, with what we have. By showing up. By paying attention. By refusing to accept that cruelty and indifference are inevitable. By betting, repeatedly, that kindness matters, that people can change, that the future is still unwritten.
The invitation stands. Not to perfection, but to participation. Not to certainty, but to commitment. The road is long. The work is hard. The outcome isn’t guaranteed. But the company is good, and the cause is worthy.
Advance Australia fairer. Together.
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Advance Australia Fairer: Towards Justice, Belonging, and the Common Good is available now.
Amazon Australia link: https://amzn.asia/d/09o9VcIA
Amazon US link: https://a.co/d/0hPZkf59
A note on the words “fair” and “fairer.”
Advance Australia Fairer:
Reclaiming “Fair” as a Call to Justice
Few words in Australian public life carry as many layers as the word “fair.” It sits at the heart of our national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, and echoes through our most cherished cultural expression, the “fair go.” In recent years, a lively debate has emerged about what Peter Dodds McCormick meant when he placed “fair” at the close of his 1878 patriotic song. Some scholars argue the word carries racial connotations tied to whiteness. Others contend it’s a straightforward poetic convention meaning beautiful or just. The truth, as with most things worth examining, is more textured than either camp usually allows. And the answer we give shapes how we hear the anthem today, and what we believe it asks of us.
McCormick, a Scottish-born schoolteacher who emigrated to Sydney in 1855, composed the song after attending a concert at the Exhibition Building where various national anthems were performed.[i] He was frustrated that Australia had no anthem of its own and drafted the first verse on the bus ride home. In a letter to R. B. Fuller dated 1 August 1913, he described that moment of inspiration but said nothing about the meaning of “fair.”[ii] He left no diary entry, no marginal note, no published reflection explaining his choice of words. The Sydney Morning Herald, reviewing the song’s debut at the Highland Society on 30 November 1878, described the music as “bold and stirring” and the words as “decidedly patriotic,” predicting it would “become a popular favourite.”[iii] No reviewer mentioned racial overtones. So, we’re left to interpret across a gap of almost 150 years.
The most conventional reading draws on 19th-century British literary tradition. In the poetry and patriotic songs of that era, calling a country “fair” was standard language for beautiful or lovely. “Fair England,” “Fair Caledonia,” and dozens of similar constructions populated the verse McCormick grew up with in Scotland and carried with him to the colonies. Grammatically, Advance Australia Fair reads most naturally as an exhortation to advance beautiful Australia, or to let fair Australia move forward. The word functions as an adjective describing the land, consistent with the song’s celebration of “golden soil,” “nature’s gifts,” and a home “girt by sea.” McCormick wrote roughly thirty patriotic and Scottish ballad-type songs during his lifetime, and his surviving work is steeped in this tradition of poetic praise for land and nation.[iv]The original sheet music was dedicated “Respectfully to the Sons and Daughters of Australia,” and framed as a song of national pride.[v]
The academic challenge to this reading comes principally from Christopher Kelen, a writer and literary scholar whose paper “How Fair is Fair: The Colour of Justice in Australia’s Official Anthem,” published in the M/C Journal, offers the most sustained analysis of the word’s ambiguity.[vi] Kelen argues that three dictionary meanings of “fair” coalesce in the anthem’s usage: fair as beautiful, fair as just, and fair as white. He contends these meanings reinforced one another in 1870s colonial Australia, where the vision of a beautiful, just society was inseparable from assumptions about white British settlement. For Kelen, the song narrates the progress of civilisation across the continent, with the word “advance” carrying overtones of a military movement and the word “fair” describing the kind of polity being built: one that was white by design. He writes that the advance of “fair Australia” constitutes the European transformation of the continent, and that Aboriginal people are given no role in the song precisely because it describes a process that occurs at their expense.[vii]
It’s worth noting what Kelen’s argument does and doesn’t claim. He doesn’t assert that McCormick sat down with a deliberate intention to encode racial meaning into the word. His argument is cultural and structural: that the word operated within a society where whiteness, beauty, and justice were deeply entangled, and that the song’s broader content (its celebration of British settlement, its silence about Indigenous peoples, its original verses about Captain Cook and repelling “foreign invaders”) makes a purely innocent reading difficult to sustain. The ambiguity, for Kelen, is the point. The song doesn’t need to say “white” when every listener in 1878 already inhabited that assumption.[viii]
Other commentators have pointed to the broader political context. Australia’s first piece of federal legislation after Federation in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act, the legislative foundation of what became known as the White Australia Policy. A separate composition from the early 1900s, the “White Australia March,” used strikingly similar patriotic language, including the line “Australia, the white man’s land.”[ix] The Sovereign Union website has argued that the key words “Advance Australia” and “Fair” appear to have been drawn from the same ideological songbook.[x] Meanwhile, the SBS NITV journalist who compiled “10 Things You Should Know About Advance Australia Fair” observed that in a country which enshrined racial exclusion as its founding legislative act, the question about what “fair” meant was “probably not an unreasonable question to ask.”[xi] This contextual argument has genuine force. The song existed within, and was shaped by, a culture of white supremacy, even if its author may have intended nothing more than a compliment to the landscape.
Yet the absence of direct evidence matters. No contemporary review from 1878 interprets “fair” as referring to skin colour. No correspondence from McCormick hints at it. The White Australia March appeared more than two decades after the anthem was composed, so claims of direct influence run in the wrong chronological direction. The EBSCO Research summary of the anthem captures the interpretive balance well, noting that “fair” in the title can be read as meaning beautiful, but that many Australians also see it as referring to fair skin or white people.[xii] Both readings coexist, and honest engagement with the anthem requires sitting with that tension.
This is the ground on which I chose the title Advance Australia Fairer for my book about justice, belonging, and the common good.[xiii] I chose it because it names the heart of our national challenge. The anthem’s words capture an aspiration for equality, fairness, and progress. They point toward something Australians have always longed for: a society where the “fair go” is real, where dignity belongs to everyone, where the land itself is honoured. That aspiration is worth claiming, even as we acknowledge the enormous gap between promise and reality.
To say “Advance Australia Fairer” is to take the most generous reading of “fair” and push it further. It’s to say: if our anthem calls us toward fairness, then let’s get there. Let’s close the gap between the song we sing and the society we’ve built. Fairness remains incomplete while more than 3.7 million Australians live in poverty, while First Nations peoples wait for justice, treaty, and truth, while housing and health remain unequal, while migrants struggle for security, and while ecological breakdown threatens our common future.[xiv] The comparative “fairer” insists that equity, truth, and sustainability must become central to our shared horizon.
Any honest use of the word “fairer” must begin with the people who’ve called this continent home for more than sixty thousand years. First Nations Australians carry the longest continuous cultures on earth, and their story is inseparable from the story of this land. To advance Australia fairer while sidestepping that truth would be to repeat the very silence the anthem has always been criticised for.
The history is well documented and demands acknowledgment. Colonisation brought dispossession, frontier violence, forced removal of children, destruction of languages, and systematic exclusion from the civic life of a nation built on Aboriginal land. The White Australia Policy, the very legislation some scholars link to the anthem’s context, was part of a broader architecture of racial exclusion that shaped law, culture, and daily life for generations. These wounds haven’t healed because they haven’t been fully faced. The Stolen Generations are within living memory. Incarceration rates for Indigenous Australians remain among the highest in the world. Life expectancy gaps persist. Housing, health, and educational disadvantage continue to mark the daily experience of too many First Nations communities.
Acknowledging this history is essential, but “fairer” asks for something deeper than acknowledgment. It asks for a posture of listening and learning. First Nations peoples hold knowledge systems of extraordinary sophistication: ecological intelligence refined over millennia, kinship structures that sustain community across vast distances, practices of land management that scientists now recognise as essential for climate adaptation. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders, elders, and communities have been offering this wisdom to the nation for decades. The question has always been whether the rest of Australia is willing to receive it.
Listening to First Nations voices means centring Indigenous leadership in the decisions that affect Indigenous lives. It means supporting truth-telling processes like the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria, where survivors and communities speak their experiences into the public record. It means honouring the Uluru Statement from the Heart as an invitation extended with extraordinary generosity: a hand outstretched by the people who’ve borne the deepest costs of our national story. It means walking alongside communities like the Aboriginal Carbon Foundation, where ancient fire practices and modern carbon science combine to heal Country and create economic opportunity on Aboriginal terms.
A fairer Australia is one where reconciliation is lived in local councils, classrooms, and workplaces, where the oldest cultures on this continent are treated as a source of national strength and public wisdom. The path forward requires patience, humility, and the courage to sit with uncomfortable truths. It requires settlers and newcomers alike to understand that the land we share holds stories far older than our own, and that those stories contain lessons we urgently need.
To advance Australia fairer is, first and fundamentally, to listen to the people whose sovereignty was never ceded and whose wisdom has sustained this land since long before any anthem was written.
I’m not interested in anchoring my title in the negative connotations of “fair.” The racial reading has scholarly legitimacy as cultural analysis, and it names something real about the era in which the song was written. But the word ‘fair’ also carries an aspiration that’s deeply good: beauty, justice, equity, the dream of a decent society where everyone has enough to live on, meaningful work, and a place to belong. That’s the thread I want to pull, while recognising our history of racism in this country and utterly rejecting and condemning any racist attitudes toward First Nations peoples and anyone else. The title Advance Australia Fairer is an act of reclamation. It says: this word belongs to all of us now. Whatever “fair” once meant in the mouths of colonists who excluded First Nations peoples from the national imagination, the call to fairness can become something larger, something more honest, something more generous.
To advance Australia fairer is to insist that the good life grows from shared tables, honest reckoning, and the slow work of learning to see strangers as neighbours. It’s carried together by communities secular and sacred alike. It’s a vision for Australians of every belief and no belief, Indigenous and migrant, young and old. It holds that fairness must be lived in housing policy and health funding, in truth-telling and ecological care, in the way we welcome newcomers and honour the oldest living cultures on earth.
The debate about what “fair” originally meant will continue, and it should. Honest societies examine their symbols. But alongside that examination, we can choose to fill the word with the meaning it deserves: a commitment to justice, belonging, and the common good that includes every person who calls this land home. That’s the Australia I want to help build. That’s what “fairer” means. And it begins now, with us, together.
Bibliography
Australian Council of Social Service and University of New South Wales. Poverty in Australia 2023: Who Is Affected. Sydney: ACOSS/UNSW Poverty and Inequality Partnership, 2023. https://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/entities/publication/8de4ffb8-c77c-4ed3-b89f-2f177b7ca790.
Fletcher, Jim. “McCormick, Peter Dodds (1833–1916).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986. Accessed March 2026. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mccormick-peter-dodds-7323.
Hill, Graham Joseph. Advance Australia Fairer: Towards Justice, Belonging, and the Common Good. Sydney: Eagna Publishing, 2026.
Kelen, Christopher. “How Fair is Fair? The Colour of Justice in Australia’s Official Anthem.” M/C Journal 5, no. 3 (July 2002). https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1964.
McCormick, Peter Dodds. Letter to R. B. Fuller, 1 August 1913. Quoted in “Advance Australia Fair.” Wikipedia. Last modified March 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Australia_Fair.
Sovereign Union: First Nations Asserting Sovereignty. “‘Advance Australia Fair’ and ‘The White Australia Policy.’” Accessed March 2026. https://nationalunitygovernment.org/content/was-advance-australia-fair-written-white-people.
“10 Things You Should Know About Advance Australia Fair.” SBS NITV, 31 January 2017. https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/10-things-you-should-know-about-advance-australia-fair/x0tp1zwbs.
Ungvarsky, Janine. “Advance Australia Fair.” In EBSCO Research Starters: Music. Ipswich, MA: EBSCO, 2019. Accessed March 2026. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/music/advance-australia-fair.
“Advance Australia Fair.” Songfacts. Accessed March 2026. https://www.songfacts.com/facts/andrew-fairfax/advance-australia-fair.
[i] Fletcher, “McCormick, Peter Dodds (1834–1916),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5.
[ii] McCormick, letter to Fuller, 1 August 1913, quoted in “Advance Australia Fair.”
[iii] Fletcher, “McCormick, Peter Dodds.” See also “Advance Australia Fair,” Songfacts.
[iv] Ungvarsky, “Advance Australia Fair,” in EBSCO Research Starters: Music.
[v] “Advance Australia Fair,” Songfacts.
[vi] Kelen, “How Fair is Fair? The Colour of Justice in Australia’s Official Anthem.”
[vii] Kelen, “How Fair is Fair?”
[viii] Kelen, “How Fair is Fair?”
[ix] “‘Advance Australia Fair’ and ‘The White Australia Policy,’” Sovereign Union: First Nations Asserting Sovereignty.
[x] “‘Advance Australia Fair’ and ‘The White Australia Policy.’”
[xi] “10 Things You Should Know About Advance Australia Fair,” SBS NITV.
[xii] Ungvarsky, “Advance Australia Fair.”
[xiii] Hill, Advance Australia Fairer.
[xiv] Australian Council of Social Service and University of New South Wales, Poverty in Australia 2023: Who Is Affected.
