One Law for All

What Binds A People Is Justice, Not Sameness

Stand in any line at a Medicare counter, a polling booth, a courtroom. The promise holding those strangers together is small and enormous at once. The same rule applies to each of them. By right, the woman in the hijab and the man in the suit answer to the same law. Equal treatment under one law is what lets people who share nothing else trust the same country.

Pauline Hanson offered a different glue.

At the National Press Club she said the country holds together because it is ‘predominately a Judeo-Christian society’. She named radical Islam a ‘social cancer’ she would ‘get rid of’. She called transgender Australians a ‘subversive insurgency’ and said the movement ‘must be dismantled’ (Hanson, 2026). Beneath each claim sat one idea. A people holds together when its members are the same.

The tradition she names to defend this country was built on the opposite. It does not bind a people by sameness. It binds them by one law.

One Law For The Citizen And The Stranger

Israel did not come out of Egypt as one tribe. A ‘mixed crowd’ went up with them (Exodus 12:38, NRSVue), a people of different bloodlines bound for one land. God did not weld them together by making them alike. God gave them one law and bound every one of them to it, the native and the foreigner without distinction.

The command is repeated until it is impossible to miss. ‘You shall have one law for the alien and for the citizen’ (Leviticus 24:22, NRSVue). ‘You and the alien who resides with you shall have the same law and the same ordinance’ (Numbers 15:16, NRSVue). The judges are charged the same way. ‘Give the members of your community a fair hearing, and judge rightly between one person and another, whether citizen or resident alien’ (Deuteronomy 1:16, NRSVue).

This is the glue. Not one blood, not one tongue, not one prayer. One justice, applied to all alike. The prophet reduces the whole law to it. ‘What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’ (Micah 6:8, NRSVue). A people is held by doing justice, not by being the same.

The Country Already Keeps It

The country Hanson fears for already lives this way, and it holds.

Eighty-four per cent of Australians agree multiculturalism has been good for the country (O’Donnell, 2025). The national measure of social cohesion has held steady for three years, through inflation, housing stress and war abroad (O’Donnell, 2025). The single thing most tied to belonging is not shared culture. It is financial security (O’Donnell, 2025). People with a stake, able to pay the rent and trust their street, hold to the country most firmly.

What frays the bond is the treatment her program prescribes. Among migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds, 45 per cent report discrimination, and their sense of belonging sits at record lows (O’Donnell, 2025). Scripture said as much long before the survey ran. Oppress the stranger and the bond tears. ‘You shall not oppress a resident alien … for you were aliens in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 23:9, NRSVue).

A Fair Judge, Not A Ranked People

Hanson would take apart the umpire. She would sack the Sex Discrimination Commissioner. She would strip back the Human Rights Commission. She would abolish SBS and cut the ABC. These bodies are the modern form of the old command, the fair hearing for citizen and stranger alike.

The one law is the promise. The practice falls short of it, and scripture is the first to say so. The prophets condemn judges who take bribes and rule for the strong against the poor. ‘Partiality in judging is not good’ (Proverbs 24:23, NRSVue). The same failure marks this country. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are about 2 per cent of the population and 27 per cent of those in prison, around twelve times more likely to be jailed than other Australians, a gap the Law Reform Commission found the justice system itself produces, beyond any difference in offending (Australian Law Reform Commission, 2017). This gap between the one law and the daily practice is the reason to strengthen the equal-treatment machinery, not to scrap it. Hanson would scrap it.

Remove the impartial judge, and you do not get unity. You get a ranking. The largest group sets the terms, and everyone else learns the law will not stand for them. You keep the name ‘Judeo-Christian’ and discard the content. The content was never sameness of creed. It was one law, binding the strong and the weak together. Strip the equal hearing from a diverse people, and you have abandoned the tradition you claim to defend.

The Threat She Names, And The False Witness

Hanson named radical Islam the danger at the centre. The agency charged with watching tells a different story. Of the terrorism matters ASIO investigated in the prior year, fewer than half were religiously motivated (Burgess, 2025). The rising threat the Director-General expects to keep fighting is nationalist and racist extremism, and the radicalised are mostly young and Australian-born (Burgess, 2025). The New South Wales parliamentary inquiry found right-wing extremism poses a particular threat to LGBTIQA+ people and women (Parliament of New South Wales, 2026).

So she names the persecuted as the threat and leaves the real one unnamed. Scripture has a word for this. ‘You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with the wicked to act as a malicious witness’ (Exodus 23:1, NRSVue). The prophet names the move plainly. ‘Ah, you who call evil good and good evil’ (Isaiah 5:20, NRSVue). Calling the victim the aggressor is the oldest false witness there is.

Look hardest at the people she calls an insurgency. Transgender Australians are a tiny share of the country, with no official count (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2026). They are among the most assaulted people in it. In one national survey, 63 per cent reported verbal abuse, and 22 per cent reported physical assault for being trans (Bretherton et al., 2021).

The word ‘insurgency’ is not scripture. It is the script of a transnational anti-gender movement, a network moving money, messaging and model laws across borders behind ‘protect the children’ branding (Outright International, 2025). One European study traced US$1.18 billion flowing to anti-gender and anti-rights actors over five years (Datta, 2025). So when Hanson brands an assaulted minority an insurgency, she imports a foreign spirit of division and bears false witness against the people the law tells her to shelter.

A Name Better Than Sons And Daughters

The person who does not fit the male-female pattern is not new to the tradition, contrary to Hanson’s claim. Scripture has a word for them. The eunuch. A eunuch was not a transgender person in our sense, and the parallel is not exact. But the eunuch was the one whose body and life sat outside the order of husband, wife and child, and how the tradition treats the eunuch shows how it treats the person outside the pattern.

It does not cast them out. It gathers them in.

Isaiah sets the foreigner and the eunuch side by side, the two outsiders this series is about, and tells each of them they belong. God tells the foreigner joined to him not to fear being shut out, and tells the eunuch not to call himself a dry tree (Isaiah 56:3, NRSVue). Then comes the promise. To the eunuch God says, ‘I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters’ (Isaiah 56:5, NRSVue). The one who would leave no children is given a name longer than any bloodline, in a house meant to be ‘a house of prayer for all peoples’ (Isaiah 56:7, NRSVue).

Jesus speaks of the eunuch without contempt. He names three kinds. ‘There are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19:12, NRSVue). Born so, made so, or chosen. He states it as plain fact, including the person born outside the pattern, and asks no one to be ashamed.

Soon after Jesus ascends, the gospel runs to a eunuch. The Spirit sends Philip to a desert road to meet an Ethiopian, a foreigner and a eunuch, reading the scroll of Isaiah. The man asks for baptism. ‘What is to prevent me from being baptised?’ (Acts 8:36, NRSVue). Nothing prevents it. He is not told to change first. He is baptised on the road and ‘went on his way rejoicing’ (Acts 8:39, NRSVue).

Set this beside her word. She calls transgender Australians an insurgency to be dismantled. The tradition she invokes meets the person outside the pattern and gives them water, a welcome, and a name better than sons and daughters. One of these is scripture. The other is not.

What Holds Us

A people is not held together by praying alike or sounding alike. It is held by one law, applied to the citizen and the stranger without favour. Hanson offers sameness and calls it unity. What she would build, a ranked people with a weakened judge and named enemies, is the surer road to the fracture she warns against.

The tradition she claims already chose. ‘You shall have one law for the alien and for the citizen’ (Leviticus 24:22, NRSVue). The country holding to this law holds together. The country trading it for sameness comes apart.

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Sources

Australian Human Rights Commission. (2026). Sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex (SOGII). https://humanrights.gov.au/know-your-rights/understanding-human-rights/Australian-Human-Rights-Assessment-2026/sexual-orientation,-gender-identity-and-intersex-sogii

Australian Law Reform Commission. (2017). Pathways to justice: An inquiry into the incarceration rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (ALRC Report 133). https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/pathways-to-justice-inquiry-into-the-incarceration-rate-of-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-peoples-alrc-report-133/

Bretherton, I., Thrower, E., Zwickl, S., Wong, A., Chetcuti, D., Grossmann, M., Zajac, J. D., & Cheung, A. S. (2021). The health and well-being of transgender Australians: A national community survey. LGBT Health, 8(1), 42-49. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7826417/

Burgess, M. (2025, February 19). Director-General’s annual threat assessment. Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. https://www.asio.gov.au/director-generals-annual-threat-assessment-2025

Datta, N. (2025). The next wave: How religious extremism is reclaiming power. European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights. https://www.epfweb.org/node/1152

Hanson, P. (2026, June 17). Pauline Hanson’s full speech at the National Press Club [Speech transcript] (K. Braddish, Comp.). The Nightly. https://thenightly.com.au/politics/pauline-hansons-full-speech-at-the-national-press-club—c-22444111

O’Donnell, J. (2025). Mapping social cohesion 2025. Scanlon Foundation Research Institute. https://scanloninstitute.org.au/mapping-social-cohesion-2025/

Outright International. (2025). The global state of LGBTIQ people’s human rights in 2025. https://outrightinternational.org/our-work/human-rights-research/global-state-lgbtiq-peoples-human-rights-2025

Parliament of New South Wales. (2026). Measures to combat right-wing extremism in New South Wales. https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/tp/files/193254/Final-Report-Measures-to-combat-right-wing-extremism-in-NSW.pdf

Biblical quotations from the New Revised Standard Version, updated edition (NRSVue), with spelling rendered in Australian English.