Legislators are charged with an office to formulate and review public policy as it potentially becomes legislation. They must consider arguments for and against each piece of potential legislation in order to discharge their office. Classically, there are six filters that must be passed in order for an idea to be considered ‘logical’. These are listed and briefly described below and followed by the three general categories of all legislation which should be used to determine public policy.

Many of the world’s most prolonged and heinous injustices have historically gone on unchallenged because they were concealed from public view. Only when a professional journalist was able to bring the injustice into public view was the injustice stopped. We think of U.S. forces freeing Nazi prisoners of war in the Buchenwald and Dachau Concentration camps that shocked U.S. soldiers uncover the horrors of Dachau Concentration Camp at the end of WW2 not just Americans, but the world when accompanying journalists reported on what they saw. (One wonders whether America would have entered the War earlier if they had seen such brutal photos earlier?)

Who can forget the 1972 Associated Press photographer Nick Ut’s photo of Kim Phuc fleeing naked across a Vietnamese bridge? When the 1973 Pulitzer Committee awarded Nick its prize, it signalled the end America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. These samples illustrate why a free-press is essential to the execution of proper justice, and just how powerful images are.

Finding Truth Matters, home  >  Public Policy  > IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A JUST WAR?IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A JUST WAR? A Biblical Perspective on Just War By Dr. Andrew Corbett, originally 10th October 2006, Legana, Tasmania; updated 29th August 2025. Is there...

The world is increasingly becoming a global village. We now have entire media networks dedicated to potentially delivering news as it happens from anywhere in the world. Sadly, those of us in the more affluent parts of the world usually don’t get the most important news offered to us. Instead, we often get dished a diet of celebrity appearances, entertainment updates, political scandals, media commentary and sporting match results. To quote Neil Postman, despite the potential of our News media to inform us and even call us to action, we are “amusing ourselves to death.”

It seems that the Christian response to the claim of rapid climate change is polarised between the extremes of outright denial on the one hand and apocalyptic alarm on the other. And these responses often have more to do with theological biases rather than real science.