In my opinion, yes, but let's face it, according to a 1981 High Court judgement, we absolutely don't have separation. And this has come up today on a discussion among the Committee of the Sydney Atheists.
You see, in one of our first podcasts, we discussed Exo Days. Exo Days are an outreach program kicked off by Hillsong Church so that school kids in nominally secular state schools can be evangelised to, without an explicit evangelistic title. It's kinda stealth recruitment, if you will. Well, it turns out that "Big Exo Day" is sponsored by our beloved Federal Government. For which, see screenshot:
Regular readers (of which I'm sure I must have at least one) will remember the World Youth Day fiasco, where one of the world's richest organisations was shovelled money by the ton in order to have a big godfest in Sydney. Well, this really isn't much different except in terms of scale. Hillsong is probably Sydney's richest religious organisation, perhaps excluding the big two, and is certainly the most aggressive self-promoter, and apparently the Federal Govt is shovelling yet more of our tax dollars into one of their outreach programs.
This makes me not happy, because let's face it, we pay a lot of tax.
So, the question is this. We don't have a formal separation of Church And State. As a progressive, western "secular" democracy, shouldn't we get one?