evidence against it. Henry Parkes, many times premier of New South Wales
(NSW) from the 1870s to the 1890s, of Chartist roots, is claimed as an exem-
plar, but any sustained reading of what Parkes wrote indicates a strong adher-
ence to an ideal of Britishness rooted in the seventeenth-century Puritan
Commonwealth. Worse still, Collins is able to place Alfred Deakin, the dom-
inant politicalfigure of thefirst decade of the Commonwealth of Australia,
within the Benthamite tradition, but only at the cost of making no mention of
Deakin’s debt to British philosophical idealism.
It can be argued that this portrayal of Australia as utilitarian owes much to
those who were critical of what they saw as its failings. In particular, religious
professionals and those with intellectual pretensions—and the two have often
overlapped—have enjoyed themselves by denouncing the shortcomings of
other Australians. The most notorious case was historian Manning Clark, son
of a Church of England minister, who devoted six volumes of hisHistory of
Australiato decrying the faults and weaknesses of the bourgeois British in
Australia. But he was only part of a long tradition in Australia of criticizing its
materialist failings, that stretches back to W. C. Wentworth, John Woolley,
J. D. Lang, and Henry Parkes. Although there may be some truth that a settler
society such as Australia is prone to the pursuit of‘filthy lucre’, one should
look carefully at those who denounce it as being so, and the agenda which
they are pushing. For example, advocates of liberal education in Australia
have long identified their enemy as utilitarianism in order to justify their
own particular programmes, especially with regard to university education,
although what they mean by liberal education is a moveable feast (Melleuish
2015b).
The idea that Australia is somehow uniquely secular, the product of a
modern, post-religious dispensation, is an illusion, brought on by an inad-
equate understanding of what religion, and the religious condition, means,
together with a dash of wishful thinking. Australia is not necessarily all that far
removed from the sorts of developments which occurred across societies of
European derivation following the Reformation. Like them, the primary func-
tion of government has moved from a preoccupation with military matters to
providing services for the civilian population; in nineteenth-century Australia
this meant, above all else, building railways and schools. A key feature of the
end of the confessional state has been the recognition of religious pluralism
which, as shall be argued, raised all sorts of problems once the state involved
itself seriously in education. Thisfirst came to a head during the French
Revolution when the French state took control of the French Church, stripped
it of its assets, and proceeded to make both welfare and education into matters
controlled by the state. Jews and Protestants were also given legal equality.
The immediate consequences were chaos and an enormous rift between
church and state (McLeod 2000). Western countries generally faced the
Utilitarianism contra Sectarianism