Imagine a country where the titular ruler of the “secular” country is also the head of a centuries old supernatural tradition * where two Prime Ministers, from opposite sides of politics, state there is a separation of church and state in the country, while, constitutionally, there is not * where Christian crosses feature in the national flag even though a significant proportion of the country have no religion and there are many other faiths * where a census question misrepresents the degree of religiosity in the country * where the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Governor-General celebrate the proposition that Jesus Christ reigns over their country on a National Day of Thanksgiving * where the Parliament prays every session that Jesus Christ will return thus ending the parliamentary democracy which they are elected to represent * where a Christian archbishop who has sworn to ‘serve God’ is made Governor-General to ‘serve the state’ and no one fully analyses the contradiction * where a Governor-General, at the suggestion of a private citizen, uses his authority to include a reference to ‘God’ in a verse in the National Anthem * where a significant number of members of Parliament use parliamentary offices to attend private Bible study meetings * where the publicly available Hall in the Parliament is used by fundamentalist Christians to decry homosexuality * where tens of millions of dollars of public money are given to a supernatural tradition (the largest land holder, the largest private employer, in the top five of organizations by wealth were it a for-profit organization) so that the global leader of the tradition may visit the country * where religious organizations (all tax-exempt) run commercial businesses (also tax-exempt) making them into multi-billion dollar organizations while the number of their adherents has been in free fall for decades * where these same organizations increasingly become arms of government through very lucrative contracts to provide services * where their private schools, especially the wealthiest, collectively receive billions in public money, and details of how the money is allocated is made behind closed doors and reports about it are kept confidential, while public education is allowed to slowly wither * where a former leader of the republican movement, and possible future Prime Minister, decides in his mature years, to convert to Christianity some time prior to his preselection for a parliamentary seat * where that same republican movement has never advocated separation of church and state as part of a republic * where the correct answer in a government citizenship test for immigrants is that Australian values are Judeo-Christian not secular – yes, this is the soft theocracy called Australia… … where the relevant dot points above are not connected in first year university political science textbooks, the history of how this came to be is almost totally ignored by the country’s historians and blindsided journalists rarely think to ask questions about it.

The Purple Economy is the first book anywhere to fully take religious institutions to task for the massive unearned benefits they receive from the countries that house, clothe, transport and feed them for free or at least at discount rates. And why do they have these benefits? Because they believe in a supernatural deity.