Supporters of secular education and a secular State should be aware that in the last year a Roman Catholic Bishop, now Archbishop, M. Coleridge, of Canberra/Goulburn  launched the age old Roman Catholic Attack on the secular State, and by implication, secular systems of education.

 Bishop (later Archbishop), Mark Coleridge is reported in the Catholic Leader, of November 27, 2005, at page 5 at a Victorian Parliamentary Prayer breakfast, on November 17, 2005, as saying :

" Many people had  self defeating expectations of politics and politicians

" They expect the State, and hence politics and politicians, to deliver what they cannot deliver," he said:
"For the State can never be the kind of community through which true values are fostered and the common good achieved.'

"The State will always be the bearer of values, which it imperils. There is no way round this. To expect the State to be other than this is to fall victim of expectations, which are certain to provoke disappointment and anger in those who feel let down."

D.O.G.S. reject Mark Coleridge's attack. The six Australian colonies set up secular education systems in the nineteenth century which have been long recognised as the cornerstone of Australia's heterogeneous, liberal, democratic State.

Public Education systems, ( known in Victoria as the State or Government systems) were first and foremost set up for the public, common good. In this they differed from private, church schools which were and are set up first and foremost for the private good.

Public Education systems are endangered, not by the State, but more so directly and indirectly through the poisonous influence of church  forces.

Our Founding Fathers recognised that Church Schools, are set up and result in States within States . They are not established or run for the common good, but are have proved themselves to be a cancer in the Body Politic. Unanimous  United States Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s ( Engel v Vitale and Abington v Schempp ) recognised that a "union of  government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion."

The annual payment of billions of dollars per year to Church schools in Australia amounts to the union of government and religion at the public Treasury.

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