To say that Australia has sunk into a morass would probably be making a claim for understatement of the year. However, the repeated attacks on the rule of law show just how deep that morass is.

Probably best represented by the statue of Lady Justice, the rule of law demands that it be applied impartially, objectively and transparently to ensure that everyone is equal before it, thereby not being able to be manipulated to serve the ends of a powerful few. As Margaret Thatcher once famously declared, when this does not occur, the rule of the mob is substituted for the rule of law.

The whole notion of the rule of law, and the fairness and transparency (i.e. justice) it demands, seem to have been the real casualties of the Brittany Higgins saga and the Calvary Hospital takeover.

These sordid affairs have seen their antagonists captured by identity politics and/or an ends justifies the means mentality, thereby junking long-held ideals of the presumption of innocence, freedom of belief, and even basic fairness.

As far as the Higgins matter is concerned, one would expect persons in government, and above all the prime minister, to do their utmost to uphold fundamental principles of our justice system.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison, under cover of parliamentary privilege, made a point of apologising to Brittany Higgins personally following the allegations she raised against Bruce Lehrmann, even though those allegations had yet to be proved in court. Morrison had no compunction in trashing the presumption of innocence to embrace toxic identity politics. Seemingly for him, the end justified the means.

So, too, can the same be said for Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Secret text messages published by the Australian showed Gallagher was involved in the story before Ms Higgins’ interview on Channel Ten’s The Project. The text messages also show Higgins’ boyfriend David Sharaz telling Ms Higgins that Anthony Albanese had inserted himself in the story a month after it became public. Seemingly, all this was done with the intention of bringing down a government, notwithstanding Gallagher’s holier-than-thou denials about what she knew and when in Senate hearings.

Then there is the disgraceful lack of due process and transparency in the awarding of taxpayer-funded compensation to Ms Higgins (rumoured to be around $3 million) to settle her claim against the federal government. This was despite no finding of wrongdoing being made against anyone and without the opportunity for those accused of wrongdoing, including former Liberal ministers, to test the allegations made against them. Add to that the fact that we taxpayers, who are footing the bill for this payout, are not allowed to know its amount.

And if that weren’t enough, the Sofronoff inquiry has revealed that the Director of Public Prosecutions for the ACT, Shane Drumgold SC, may well have strayed from acting as an objective ‘minister of justice’ to acting as Higgins’ lawyer, which is untenable, since it undermines the public’s trust in the criminal justice system.

As Janet Albrechtsen wrote, that trust is based on the notion that the administration of justice is committed to a fair trial and the search for truth. What emerged from Drumgold’s evidence was a recurring theme that he sought to protect the complainant – Ms Higgins – from harm while apparently unconcerned about the risk to the defendant – Mr Lehrmann. It appeared that Drumgold was prepared to get a conviction at any cost.

The attempt by the ACT government to compulsorily acquire the Calvary Hospital is a similarly sinister attack on the rule of law.

As the Archbishop of Canberra-Goulburn, Christopher Prowse, wrote, never before has a government – commonwealth, state or territory – sought to acquire the assets, operations, staff and clients of a church agency with the effect of ceasing its ministry.

This would have to be one of the greatest assaults on the principle of private property ever seen in Australia, and could set a very dangerous precedent. What prevents any government making a similar grab for education or welfare services to meet their own agendas?

The hard-left ACT government suspended usual parliamentary procedure to ram through special legislation for the compulsory acquisition of the hospital with no declared compensation.

Greg Craven put it best when he declared that this is the classic case where a so-called progressive government professes human rights while punishing the wrong sort of rights. Gender and equality freedoms are priceless, while religion and conscience are plain embarrassing.

According to the ACT government, your faith is a set of abstract ideas that you intellectually assent to and that’s it. Thus, schools should not reflect faith and hospitals should not follow conscience.

It is precisely because of the notion of Christian service that the Church has established hospitals, schools, aged-care facilities, and, in doing so, these institutions must therefore stick to fundamental tenets of belief, such as the sanctity of human life – which, by the way, is a belief not restricted to those of the Christian faith.

Whether you profess the Christian faith, any faith or none, it cannot be ignored that religions generally, and the Catholic church in particular, have worked throughout the centuries for the common good. The church for over two millennia has established hospitals, care facilities, schools, universities. The Christian faith and its principles have given us our legal system, with its notions of stability, fairness, equality and tolerance.

Therefore, in this country, in line with the ideal of freedom of belief, the state has supported religious works that benefit the public. Not any more, it seems. As Craven states, the Calvary saga illustrates that an anti-religious ‘progressive’ regime in the ACT will stop at nothing to destroy politically incorrect religious institutions of care, even if that means assaulting legal principle.

So can the rule of law be saved? The principle of equality before the law is under threat in the proposed indigenous Voice to parliament.

Voting No to that, in my opinion, is a good place to start.