The election campaign was fraught. Reports of violent interactions at booths have circulated in recent polls.

Advertising campaigns were aggressive, with more mysterious front groups emerging to push talking points that official actors were not prepared to utter themselves. Perhaps most worrying was the growing activity by religious actors. Australia was lucky that enough of our voters could see the threat posed by the Trumpian chaos of the current Liberal Party; now is the time to tackle these challenges before they do any more damage to our democratic project.

The hardest problem to confront in this list is that of coercive Christians activating around the Coalition parties, in addition to their micro parties. Determining the line between beneficial religious commitment and harmful intent is fraught.

The Exclusive Brethren cult, presenting in hordes around booths to campaign for the Coalition, although denied the right to vote by their own leaders, was one problem.

Another was the Christian Nationalist commitment signed by most Coalition candidates to ensure preference deals with the Australian Christian Lobby’s interlinked Family First Party.

The Church and State Conference, this year celebrating America’s greatness based in her Pulpits Aflame, has been touring Australia with the goal of marshalling American-style Christians to act as a political force.

How many Catholic school principals sent out a letter fostering votes for the Coalition?

An incipient issue is former MP George Christensen operating a registered foreign influence body channelling Spanish extremist Catholic culture war on social media.

The challenge lies in the fact that cultural Christianity has been the norm for most of European Australian history. Politicians adhering to non-Christian religions here are few, and problematic positions are likely more noticeable. It is harder to perceive the threats emerging within the dominant Christian tradition. When politicians belong to a version of Christianity that pursues (rather than aims to avoid) apocalypse, or perceives some community members as literally demonic, we need to know.

The Australian civic space has treated our leaders’ faith adherence as a private matter: we can no longer afford to do so. As communities, we have gradually worked to reinforce a separation of state from church. We accept that the moralities of faith traditions might prevent followers from choosing euthanasia, same-sex marriage or contraceptives and abortion. The Australian majority continues to work, however, to ensure that these options are not denied to people who follow other, or no, faith traditions.

The American definition of “ religious freedom” since the Cold War has encoded the idea that coercive Christians must have the “freedom” to impose their morality on politics and, thus, the majority. It has taken decades of work in America to mobilise the apolitical religious fringe to become the dominant motivated force in “conservative” politics. Now in parts of America, doctors are too afraid to treat pregnancy crises. LGBTQIA people are genuinely considering where they might seek asylum. These outcomes do not reflect majority opinion, but the minority has seized the levers of power.

Further, Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon have been tracking Zionist actors in Australia working through front groups to promote prejudice and information chaos. Bacon illustrated the connections between this activity and the Christian Nationalism of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

Australians urgently need to be debating how we tackle the undermining of democracy and equal rights, since the solutions will not be straightforward.

A bill of rights is one crucial measure. The right of the majority not to be governed by the moral dictates of any one church, or coalition of churches, can be protected. Access to reproductive justice and the right to choose to die before suffering becomes intolerable are matters than can be enshrined for those not bound by one definition of morality. The equal rights of LGBTQIA people should be defended, and nobody should be tortured by conversion practices.

Another measure Australians should discuss is how we allow groups to define themselves legally as churches and charities; we must strictly limit the benefits that accrue. Exvangelical writer and anti-cult advocate Clare Heath-McIvor recommends that a “net public benefit test” could replace the “public benefit test.” “Advancement of religion” should cease to be construed as a charitable purpose.” We should remove charity status from bodies of all kinds that function to harm our well-being. Many micro churches function as sites of coercive and high control cult-like activity. The privacy granted them by the label “church” can leave people vulnerable.

Heath-McIvor observed that in America, roughly a third of church leavers are defined as having some aspect of Religious Trauma Syndrome (a subset of Complex PTSD).

Other strategies that Australia ought to be debating will strengthen our integrity and accountable government more broadly.

It is not too late to hold the Murdoch Royal Commission. The impact of Sky News on free-to-air TV in news-desert regions needs to be discussed. Now Trumpist NewsMax is in Australia hosting a show by ACL and Family First’s Lyle Shelton.

The government should also consider boosting funding to public broadcasters and quality independent media. We need to counter the deteriorating standards of corporate news media with reliable information. One project should be an authoritative platform that collates relevant material about political candidates, so that their goals can be better understood by voters. Many of the coercive churches do not believe they are required to be honest with outsiders: it is too easy for people to elect a candidate without understanding how authoritarian, or toxic, their impact in government might be.

We need better donation reform. The Electoral Legislation Amendment’s changes to political spending should be refined: we must be able to prevent damaging movement of money without such legislation shoring up the duopoly’s grip on power.

The power of tycoons like Clive Palmer to swamp us with publicity must be dealt with as sharply as possible. (A ban on SMS campaigning would be welcome.) The Act must be refined to ensure that Australia is also protected from damaging individual or “political action committee” spending that functions in parallel to the regulated pathways. Palmer’s candidates contribute to conspiracist religious messaging.

This should be matched by greater donor transparency. Churches, civil society bodies and front groups ought to have mandated donation transparency, with the obligation to reject donations from shell corporations and pass-through entities. This should apply to historic organisations such as the Institute for Public Affairs, as much as to the Australian Christian Lobby, which has been labelled a hate group. We must enable real think-tanks to regain their credibility, by making it clear which bodies are accountable, and which are not. “In kind” donations — such as regular corporate media platforming — ought to be calculated.

The government must tackle the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill again, with a better drafted model. There will be another flurry of “free speech” fury from the disingenuous actors who plan to spread lies about trans people, abortion or the impact of renewable energy. The work is, however, crucial. As we saw in this election campaign, there are lavishly-funded individuals and bodies dedicated to metastasising front groups to spin disinformation.

These limits cannot be restricted to election season. Such bodies work consistently between elections to prevent informed debate. The Australian Electoral Commission must be bolstered, including its independence from political interference. We require greater protection for people who volunteer to work at polling booths to ensure that the heated rhetoric around politics does not lead to danger.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’ integrity platform must be invigorated, improved and extended, to protect us from political figures making harmful deals with interest groups.

Our major political parties need to take action to protect their branches and structures from being colonised by motivated groups with theocratic and conspiracist goals.

Many of these measures require bipartisan debate carried out in good faith to ensure that rights, privacies and freedoms are protected while the well-being of our democratic project is strengthened. That might seem impossible, since radicalised factions within politics and the community will distort any attempt to act. No local debate can take place without a frenzy of borderless rage swirling around the internet. The Voice, which should have been a bipartisan path to recognition and consultation, is exemplary of the challenges.

The Coalition is unlikely to give up the culture war obsession that is meant to distract from its lack of policy; most of the talent has long gone. That vacuum, however, makes it a tempting target for the same kinds of motivated strategists that have taken over the Republican Party. No single election checks their goals.

We will need more of us in the strong majority who voted against culture war and division to commit to political involvement. We can’t convert the extremists, but we can keep them marginal.

This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.