The New Zealand Association of

Rationalists & Humanists

Max Wallace

Max Wallace was a former student at the University of Auckland and the University of Waikato, where he graduated with a Masters Honours degree in 1976. Family circumstances caused him to return to Australia, where he completed a PhD at Macquarie University. Thereafter he taught sociology and politics in Canberra for twenty years. Max joined the NZARH in 2003. In 2007 he published “The Purple Economy: supernatural charities, tax and the state”. In 2008 he helped organise conferences in Sydney and Wellington around the question of whether Australia and New Zealand could be characterised as ‘Christian nations’. The papers from that conference were published in 2010 as “Realising Secularism”. The book was launched by MP Keith Locke in the New Zealand parliament. Max helped bring a 2011 case to the Australian High Court to question the $400M federal funding of religious chaplains in state schools. He argued that Australia and New Zealand should be republics with constitutional separation of church and state, and that charity law which facilitates the use of taxpayers’ money to subsidise what citizens believe, is inappropriate in the 21st century. In 2008, the NZARH awarded Max the Charles Southwell prize for his activism.