Who Defines Belonging?

CPA Australia, David Hardidge, and the Limits of Professional Dissent

This article is longer than I originally expected it to be.

It began as a relatively narrow examination of a disciplinary dispute inside CPA Australia. But as I put detailed questions to the parties, worked through the documents, and followed the implications of what those documents appeared to show, the inquiry opened into something larger: what CPA Australia means when it promises members an “authentic voice”; how far a professional ethics code can reach into an internal policy disagreement; whether the financial and reputational burden of professional discipline can itself encourage self-censorship; how an institution judges bias when it already holds substantive positions on the disputed subject; and what “independence” means when professional discipline is administered inside the organisation whose policy is also part of the dispute.

David Hardidge has been willing to answer detailed questions and supply supporting material. CPA Australia was likewise given a detailed right of reply, including questions about Professional Activity, evidence of bias, viewpoint versus conduct, public interest, external benchmarking relationships and tribunal independence. On 17 September, CPA Australia replied that because the case remained ongoing it was not appropriate to comment and that it would provide no further commentary and might not answer specific questions. I do not treat that response as confirmation of Hardidge’s account. Where his concerns go beyond what the available evidence establishes, I have treated them as questions rather than conclusions.

The additional work has made this a substantial article. I think that is preferable to forcing a complicated issue into an argument simpler than the evidence allows.

Earlier this year I traced how private philanthropy, international advocacy frameworks and institutional relationships helped shape an Australian policy and legal pathway around the definition of sex. In Who Funds the Redefinition of Sex?, the point was not that every person or organisation in that chain was acting improperly. It was that institutional influence can be real, consequential and entirely visible while still sitting several steps away from the ballot box.

This article asks a narrower question inside a different institution: a professional body, a formal Belonging framework, external benchmarking relationships and a professional ethics code.

At the centre is David Hardidge, a Fellow of CPA Australia and the elected President of its Queensland Divisional Council. According to case materials supplied by Hardidge through the Free Speech Union of Australia, a CPA Australia Disciplinary Tribunal has sustained two complaints arising from comments he made during an internal Council discussion about belonging. Hardidge says a Severe Reprimand was imposed together with an order that he pay more than $22,000 in CPA Australia’s costs. He advises that his appeal period expires on 28 September 2026. As at 22 September, the matter therefore remains live.

This article is not an argument that LGBTIQ+ Australians should be exposed to discrimination in their workplaces. They should not be. Nor is it an argument that every sincerely held opinion expressed in a professional setting must be beyond criticism or consequence. Professional bodies are entitled to enforce genuine standards of conduct, and elected office-holders are not exempt from them.

The question is more exacting: when an elected representative is asked to deliberate on a contested internal policy, where is the line between applying a neutral professional standard and treating the substance of disagreement as evidence of professional misconduct?

The Man at the Centre

Hardidge is not an outsider to the profession. CPA Australia’s current 2026 office-bearer page lists him as President of the Queensland Divisional Council. He is also Queensland’s member of the Council of Presidents, which CPA Australia says advises the Board on strategic issues and opportunities while drawing on the views of members.

That representative function matters. It is entirely plausible that Hardidge understood himself not simply to be expressing a private opinion, but also to be giving voice to concerns shared by at least some members who hold traditional or dissenting views on sex, gender and DEI. What the public record does not establish is how many members shared those concerns or whether he was formally instructed to raise them.

None of that makes his position beyond scrutiny. His language was strong, but the frustration behind it also matters to the setting. This was not a member launching an unsolicited public attack and then insisting that a professional body had no right to respond. It was an elected office-holder participating in the representative governance structure CPA Australia itself created, discussing a policy framework placed before that Council for consideration.

What Happened in the Room

The discussion took place at the Queensland Divisional Council meeting on 21 January 2026. According to the agenda material supplied in response to my questions, the Council was asked to note the Belonging Statement, Belonging Policy and Belonging Strategy 2025-2027, discuss an accompanying paper, and decide whether a Divisional Council Belonging Champion should be created for consideration at its March meeting.

That context matters because the proposed role was not merely a declaration that people should be treated decently. The discussion paper raised practical governance questions about what a Belonging Champion would do, whether the role would focus on Council meetings or broader divisional activities, how the person would report back to Council, how nominations would be called and how someone carrying the title on behalf of the Council should be selected.

Hardidge says there was no comparable Divisional Council Champion for areas such as tax or artificial intelligence and no established precedent telling councillors exactly what the role and responsibilities would be.

The proposed role also needs to be understood within CPA Australia’s broader Belonging framework. CPA Australia’s December 2025 Board update says the Member Belonging Commitment was developed by the Council of Presidents throughout 2025 and launched in December. The downloadable Commitment says CPA Australia will consider establishing a Member Belonging Champion on each Divisional Council “to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion”. The current Belonging webpage is less clear: at the time of writing it contains both that wording and, immediately alongside it, a separate commitment to establish such a Champion.

Whatever explains that apparent duplication, the public material does not presently speak with one voice on whether establishment remains something to be considered or has become a settled commitment. That ambiguity makes the Queensland Council’s January discussion more, rather than less, relevant.

The Council was therefore not simply being asked whether people should feel welcome. It was considering a new titled role inside an elected representative body as part of a wider organisational program explicitly committed to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. If the Champion carried the title of the Queensland Divisional Council, how far would that representative function extend? Would the position speak only within Council meetings, across divisional activities, or more broadly on behalf of members? And what would happen where councillors or members did not share some of the underlying assumptions within the framework?

Hardidge says he allowed the other councillors present to express their views before giving his own. His contribution was direct and unmistakably critical. An extract from the approved meeting minutes supplied to me records that he agreed with the concept of belonging but described DEI as a “toxic concept”, recasting the initials as “Division, Exclusion and Indoctrination”. He expressed his belief in the immutability of biological sex, said he dealt with male and female as the relevant categories while acknowledging that others held different views, questioned the way the gender pay gap was being presented, and said he did not identify with any of the identities depicted at a Belonging launch.

The supplied tribunal material adds one further detail to the wage-gap discussion: it records Hardidge as suggesting, by way of critique, that an organisation could reduce an average gender pay gap by employing more men in entry-level positions. Some readers will dislike that formulation; others will understand the frustration of a member who believes diversity language has shifted from an aspiration toward a set of institutional expectations. I do not need to settle that rhetorical question for him. The professional question is what transformed those views, expressed in that governance setting, into breaches of a professional accounting ethics code.

The Promise of an Authentic Voice

In the course of answering my questions and supplying further material, Hardidge drew attention to another part of the Belonging framework that matters to how he understood the discussion. CPA Australia defines belonging as creating an environment where every individual feels valued, respected and empowered to share their “authentic voice”. Its Belonging Strategy likewise says its people are empowered to be their authentic self.

Hardidge says he took that commitment seriously. Although he accepts that his language was strong, he says he understood himself to be bringing his own convictions and experience into the discussion and, as Council President, demonstrating the candour that CPA Australia’s language about authenticity appeared to invite.

That does not turn “authentic voice” into an exemption from professional standards. An institution can encourage authenticity while still regulating harassment, intimidation, dishonesty or genuine impairment of professional judgment. But it sharpens the question at the heart of this case: does an invitation to bring one’s authentic self extend to a member whose authentic convictions include disagreement with some of the assumptions inside the institution’s own Belonging framework?

“Bring your authentic self” is easy to affirm when the self being brought agrees with the framework. Its harder test comes when the authentic voice says no.

The Rules Already in the Room

CPA Australia’s Belonging architecture is not one document. Its Belonging Policy was approved on 9 December 2024 and took effect from 1 January 2025. The policy applies to volunteers and commits CPA Australia to a safe and inclusive culture. Through its six diversity pillars it includes a Pride pillar that speaks of LGBTQIA+ inclusion, visibility and active allyship. The Belonging Strategy 2025-2027 separately identifies workforce composition, gender pay gap and pay equity, inclusive leadership and other focus areas.

The Member Belonging Commitment is a separate instrument. CPA Australia’s December 2025 Board update says it was developed by the Council of Presidents throughout 2025. Hardidge became Queensland President on 1 January 2026 and did not hold Queensland’s Council of Presidents seat while that statement was being developed. That removes one tempting but unsupported argument: this is not a case of a man helping approve the Member Belonging Commitment and then objecting to it at another table.

There was also a professional-conduct framework already applying to him. The Code of Conduct for Volunteers aligns volunteer obligations with APES 110, requires councillors to avoid conduct that may discredit the profession, refers to the honest or impartial exercise of official functions and expects Council and Committee members to act in the interests of those bodies rather than be swayed by outside influences.

That history prevents an easy caricature. The objectivity and professional-behaviour rules were not invented by the Belonging team to deal with a dissenting councillor. CPA Australia had a legitimate basis for expecting impartiality and proper conduct from a Divisional Council President.

The serious question is therefore not whether CPA Australia possessed rules capable of reaching Hardidge. It plainly did. The question is how those rules were interpreted and applied to what he said in this particular representative debate.

Why APES 110 Matters Beyond CPA Australia

The significance of APES 110 also deserves more context. The Accounting Professional and Ethical Standards Board says APES 110 is based on the International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants and sets five fundamental principles: integrity, objectivity, professional competence and due care, confidentiality and professional behaviour.

Nor is APES 110 peculiar to CPA Australia. Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand also says the Code applies to its Australian members. The underlying IESBA Code is recognised, adopted or converged with in more than 130 jurisdictions, including 18 G20 economies.

That does not mean CPA Australia’s interpretation in Hardidge’s case automatically becomes the interpretation of another professional body or another jurisdiction. It does mean the questions raised here about objectivity, bias, public interest and professional behaviour sit inside an ethical architecture with reach well beyond one Queensland Divisional Council.

The Complaints and the Tribunal

The material supplied to me identifies two complaints. Complaint 1 alleged that Hardidge breached subsection 112 of APES 110, the principle of Objectivity, by allowing his professional or business judgment to be compromised by bias and/or by undertaking a Professional Activity where a circumstance or relationship unduly influenced his professional judgment. The complaint expressly tied that alleged breach to comments made at the Queensland Divisional Council meeting about the Belonging Statement.

Complaint 2 alleged a breach of subsection 115, Professional Behaviour. It said Hardidge had acted inconsistently with the profession’s responsibility to act in the public interest and/or in a manner that impaired or might impair the integrity, objectivity or good reputation of the profession, again in relation to his comments at the Council meeting.

Hardidge says he received a Casebook of more than 330 pages. According to the materials supplied through FSUA, the matter proceeded to a formal Disciplinary Tribunal, both complaints were sustained, a Severe Reprimand was imposed and he was ordered to pay more than $22,000 in costs. CPA Australia has declined to confirm or contest those particulars while the matter remains ongoing. As at 22 September 2026, I have not located a published determination under Hardidge’s name. Those outcome details therefore remain attributed to Hardidge and the supplied case material unless and until a formal determination is published or CPA Australia addresses them.

The extracts supplied from the tribunal record are nevertheless central to understanding the issue. On Complaint 1, the material records the tribunal identifying Hardidge’s description of DEI, his views on biological sex and gender, and his gender-pay-gap comment before concluding that his statements were compromised by bias and that his personal views and biases unduly influenced his professional judgment in undertaking a Professional Activity. On Complaint 2, the material records the tribunal as assessing his conduct against the standards expected of a person representing CPA Australia and finding the conduct capable of adversely affecting the integrity, objectivity or good reputation of the profession.

What, Precisely, Was the Professional Activity?

The first complaint puts an important phrase at the centre of the case: Professional Activity.

The current APES 110 Code of Ethics defines a Professional Activity as an activity requiring professional skills undertaken by a member, with examples including accounting, auditing, sustainability reporting or assurance, tax, consulting and financial management. Professional judgment involves applying relevant training, professional knowledge, skill and experience to the facts and circumstances of the particular activity.

It would be too strong to argue that a Divisional Council discussion obviously falls outside that definition. APES 110 says the skills necessary for a Professional Activity vary with the activity and can include interpersonal, communication and organisational skills as well as technical knowledge. The Code is broader than technical accounting work alone.

But that breadth makes precision more important, not less. What was the Professional Activity Hardidge was performing when he expressed a view on whether an elected Council should establish a Belonging Champion? What professional or business judgment was he required to exercise? And what evidence showed that judgment had actually been compromised rather than simply informed by a strongly held worldview?

Objectivity cannot mean the absence of conviction. Every person entering a policy discussion brings prior beliefs, experiences, moral judgments and assumptions about the world. APES 110 itself defines objectivity in terms of not compromising professional or business judgment because of bias, conflict of interest or undue influence. The point is to prevent bias from improperly distorting the judgment required, not to require a human being to enter governance discussions without a worldview.

CPA Australia’s strongest available case can nevertheless be put fairly. Hardidge was not speaking simply as a private member; as President he was participating in the governance of a CPA body considering whether to establish a new role. The Volunteer Code and APES 110 applied to him, and a strongly predetermined hostility to DEI could, in principle, be relevant if it prevented impartial consideration of the proposal. A tribunal is not required to find separate abuse, intimidation or dishonesty before it can infer bias from a member’s own reasoning or words.

That is why the key question becomes more exacting: what in Hardidge’s reasoning or decision-making showed that his judgment was actually impaired, rather than simply that he held and expressed a strong view? Did the reasons identify a refusal to consider relevant evidence, a closed mind about the proposal actually before Council, a conflict of interest, misuse of office, or some other feature demonstrating that the judgment required by the role had been compromised? Or did the substantive conclusions themselves do most of the work in establishing bias?

On the extracts supplied from the tribunal record, the reasoning appears to rely substantially on what Hardidge believed and said about DEI, biological sex and the gender pay gap. Those extracts do not reveal a separate explanation of how those views impaired the professional or business judgment he was required to exercise beyond the tribunal’s conclusion that his personal views and biases unduly influenced it. That does not establish that the full reasons or Casebook contain no further explanation. It is one of the questions I put directly to CPA Australia. CPA declined to answer while the case remains ongoing.

How Does a Member Disagree?

There is a wider question underneath the technical language of APES 110, and it is one many Australians who hold traditional, conservative or Christian convictions will recognise. In everyday employment, corporate and professional life, is there still meaningful room to hold beliefs about sex, gender, family, equality, conscience or the limits of diversity programs that differ from an institution’s preferred framework - and to express those beliefs honestly when the subject itself is put forward for discussion?

That question does not amount to a claim that every employee or professional has a right to say anything, in any manner, without consequence. Employers and professional bodies can legitimately act against harassment, intimidation, dishonesty, threats, unlawful discrimination and conduct genuinely incompatible with professional responsibilities.

Hardidge’s “Division, Exclusion and Indoctrination” description was strong because his concern was strong. He says his experience led him to believe that DEI had moved beyond protecting people from unfair treatment and had become a framework capable of requiring assent to contested positions. Readers can disagree with his formulation. The more important question is whether the strength of that criticism itself demonstrated professional impairment.

The setting remains important. Hardidge was not making an unsolicited public attack on colleagues or clients. He was chairing an elected Divisional Council discussion in which councillors had been asked to consider CPA Australia’s Belonging framework and whether the Queensland Council should create a Belonging Champion. Questions of representation, remit and accountability were part of the discussion. Disagreement was not incidental to the meeting; it was part of what the Council had been asked to do.

The important distinction is therefore not simply between speech and some separate act of misconduct. It is between demonstrable professional impairment and the mere existence of a strongly held disagreement. If Hardidge’s words showed a closed mind, a refusal to consider the proposal fairly, misuse of office or some other failure of judgment, that matters. But if the disciplinary conclusion rests principally on the fact that he described DEI negatively, affirmed the immutability of biological sex and questioned a gender-pay-gap proposition, without identifying how those views impaired the judgment he was required to exercise, the issue becomes much larger than one councillor’s tone.

A genuine culture of belonging has to contain enough room for disagreement about belonging itself.

That is why the standard should be tested in both directions. If a councillor had spoken just as strongly in favour of the Belonging framework, described opposition to DEI in equally categorical terms, or argued that traditional beliefs about sex and gender were harmful, would those convictions have been treated as evidence that professional judgment had been compromised? There may be circumstances in which either speaker could cross a legitimate professional boundary. But if “bias” is discovered principally when someone reaches the institutionally unfavoured conclusion, objectivity has ceased to operate as a neutral standard.

This is not special pleading for conservative or Christian belief. The principle has to protect people whose convictions I do not share as well as those I do. An LGBTIQ+ accountant should not be demeaned, excluded or professionally disadvantaged because of who they are.

A Christian, socially conservative or otherwise dissenting accountant should likewise not have to conceal sincerely held convictions merely because those convictions conflict with the prevailing institutional view. The legitimate boundary should be demonstrable professional misconduct or impairment of professional judgment, not the mere existence of disagreement itself.

The Quiet Pressure to Censor Yourself

There is another consequence worth considering, even if it can never be measured neatly: self-censorship. Professional cultures are shaped not only by written rules but by what members observe happening to others. If a senior elected office-holder can face a disciplinary process, reputational damage, defence costs and a substantial costs order after expressing a dissenting view in an internal governance discussion, other members may reasonably ask whether speaking candidly is worth the risk.

For Hardidge himself, however, the chilling effect is no longer entirely hypothetical. Whatever view one takes of the Tribunal’s findings, he now knows from direct experience that raising objections of this kind inside a CPA governance discussion can lead to formal disciplinary proceedings, significant legal exposure and professional sanction. I cannot know how he will approach every future discussion, but it would be unrealistic to pretend that such an experience has no bearing on whether, when or how forcefully he might raise similar concerns again.

That distinction matters. A chilling effect does not require CPA Australia to have intended to silence dissent, nor does it require Hardidge to abandon his convictions. It can operate more subtly: the consequence attached to one act of expression alters the calculation surrounding the next.

That does not establish that CPA Australia intended such an effect, nor does Hardidge’s experience prove that other members have already been silenced. But institutions should care about the possibility. A culture can become conformist long before anyone issues an instruction to conform, simply because people learn which views appear professionally safe to express and which ones carry consequences.

For someone who holds traditional Christian, conservative or otherwise dissenting convictions, that pressure can become deeply personal. Self-censorship does not necessarily mean abandoning a belief. More often it means learning where not to express it: remaining silent in meetings, declining to challenge propositions one believes are false, avoiding subjects likely to attract complaint, using institutional language one privately rejects, or gradually separating one’s professional identity from convictions central to one’s understanding of truth, conscience and the human person.

There is an important distinction here. Professionalism properly requires restraint, courtesy and judgment; no employee or professional has an unlimited entitlement to express every personal belief in every setting. But where an institution itself places contested questions of sex, gender, identity, equality or diversity before its members, asking those with dissenting convictions to participate while making one direction of disagreement professionally hazardous creates a different problem.

The pressure need not take the form of an instruction to “believe this or lose your job”. It can operate much more quietly. People observe the consequences attached to disagreement and adjust themselves accordingly. They retain their convictions privately while learning which parts of themselves are safer not to bring into the room.

This concern is also central to the way the Free Speech Union of Australia frames the wider significance of cases such as Hardidge’s. In a recent discussion, FSUA director Dr Reuben Kirkham described the “chilling effect” as the most prominent wider aspect of professional cases of this kind: people observe what happens to others and decide that speaking openly is no longer worth the risk. I include that perspective not as independent proof of what CPA Australia intends, nor as an endorsement of every argument in the wider interview, but because it puts plainly the concern raised here: professional discipline can influence far more people than the person formally disciplined.

What If the Dissenter Believes the Policy Causes Harm?

There is another part of Hardidge’s concern that deserves more careful treatment than the blanket proposition that “DEI is harmful”. Diversity, equity and inclusion are not one policy, one intervention or one set of propositions. Many initiatives pursue worthwhile objectives: removing unjust discrimination, widening genuine opportunity, improving accessibility and ensuring that people are treated with dignity.

But it does not follow that every intervention placed under the DEI label is effective, neutral or beyond reasonable criticism. Serious research has identified circumstances in which diversity interventions can fail to achieve their stated goals or even produce unintended effects. In a major 2022 review in the Annual Review of Psychology, Patricia Devine and Tory Ash examined hundreds of studies and concluded that enthusiasm for, and investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs reliably achieve their goals. They also concluded that the literature is too complex to support decisive claims about best practice.

Experimental evidence provides an even clearer example of possible backfire effects. In a 2011 study published in Psychological Science, Lisa Legault, Jennifer Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht tested different approaches to anti-prejudice messaging. They found that messages emphasising external pressure and social obligation produced greater explicit and implicit prejudice than no intervention, while approaches supporting personal autonomy produced more favourable effects.

A broader 2021 review in the Annual Review of Psychology examined 418 prejudice-reduction experiments and warned that much of the evidence base relies on short-term interventions, that long-term effects are often unclear, and that publication bias may exaggerate apparent success. The authors concluded that much of the existing research remains poorly suited to firm evidence-based recommendations.

The point is not that every diversity initiative causes harm. It is that the possibility of ineffectiveness, backlash and unintended consequences is recognised within serious research. A professional who questions a DEI initiative is therefore not necessarily opposing equality or inclusion; they may be disputing whether the intervention actually achieves what it promises.

Hardidge’s concern goes further still. He is not only questioning whether particular diversity interventions work; he also disputes some of the substantive propositions contemporary DEI frameworks can carry, particularly around sex and gender. Part of that opposition, he says, comes from knowing young people and families whom he believes have experienced harm. That personal account is his and cannot establish a general medical conclusion. But the underlying field is genuinely contested.

Queensland commissioned an independent review of Stage 1 and Stage 2 hormone therapies in public paediatric gender services, examining both evidence and ethical considerations. In July 2026, Children’s Health Queensland’s settlement with child psychiatrist Dr Jillian Spencer publicly acknowledged that the issues she had raised about the Queensland Children’s Gender Service were matters of legitimate professional and public debate and that clinicians play an important role in raising concerns about patient safety and clinical practice.

None of that establishes that CPA Australia’s Belonging framework causes medical harm. It establishes something narrower but important: a professional who questions contemporary propositions concerning sex, gender or institutional DEI is not necessarily objecting from ignorance or animus. There can be empirical, legal, ethical, medical and conscience-based reasons for disagreement.

That matters when a professional ethics code invokes the public interest. Two people can sincerely believe they are protecting the public interest while reaching opposite conclusions. One may believe inclusion requires affirming gender identity and embedding DEI principles institutionally. Another may believe equal dignity requires opposing unjust discrimination while resisting compelled affirmation, group preference, weak evidence or contested propositions about human nature.

A professional body still has to regulate conduct. But disagreement with a policy cannot by itself establish indifference to the public interest when the policy’s assumptions, methods or consequences remain reasonably contestable.

Professional Behaviour and the Reputation of the Profession

The second complaint raises a related but different issue. APES 110 requires members to comply with relevant laws and regulations, behave consistently with the profession’s responsibility to act in the public interest in Professional Activities and business relationships, and avoid conduct they know or should know might discredit the profession.

Professional reputation is a legitimate concern. A professional body need not tolerate fraud, harassment, bullying, corruption or conduct that would plainly make the public distrust the designation it protects. But a reputation standard becomes more difficult when the alleged reputational harm arises from strong dissent on a contested social-policy question inside a representative governance meeting. The fact that speech is uncomfortable, unfashionable or sharply expressed does not by itself explain why it discredits an accounting profession.

There is also a risk of circularity. If an institution has already defined support for a particular framework as good organisational practice, opposition to that framework can begin to appear, by definition, inconsistent with institutional values. The institution can then move from saying “this is our preferred policy” to saying “a professional person who disputes this policy displays bias” without clearly identifying the neutral standard separating misconduct from disagreement.

The relevant question is therefore not whether CPA Australia was entitled to disagree with Hardidge’s conclusions. It is why a reasonable and informed third party would regard the conduct as capable of damaging the profession’s good reputation.

I asked CPA Australia to identify the relevant public interest, the conduct said to cross the line, and whether an equally forceful contrary viewpoint would be assessed under the same standard. It declined substantive comment while the proceeding remains live.

This Is Not Only an Accounting Question

Hardidge also raised the implications for other professions. His case does not establish that the same thing is happening everywhere, and the regulatory structures of medicine, nursing, law, psychology, social work, academia and accounting differ substantially. The transferable question is the mechanism: how do broad concepts such as professionalism, public confidence, public interest, objectivity or reputation interact with controversial moral, political or scientific beliefs?

Australia’s health-regulation framework makes the issue concrete. Ahpra’s current social-media guidance says practitioners will not necessarily face action merely for expressing views, but it also says regulatory action may be considered where expression creates risks to public safety, professional standards or public confidence, and that even private-life social-media activity without an identifiable professional connection may be relevant to fitness to hold registration.

The current dispute involving Queensland psychiatrist Dr Andrew Amos is therefore relevant, although not identical. In February 2026 the Medical Board imposed immediate-action conditions preventing him from posting on social media about gender medicine, gender identity or transgender persons and preventing clinical patient contact. Ahpra has publicly disputed the suggestion that it is simply policing dissent and has said the public reporting does not disclose the full basis of the action. As at 22 September 2026, I have not located a final determination or published decision resolving the underlying regulatory matter, and the February conditions appear to remain in place.

The Jillian Spencer settlement eventually produced a different outcome: Children’s Health Queensland acknowledged that her concerns were matters of legitimate professional and public debate.

Internationally, the Rachel Meade employment tribunal judgment found that Social Work England and her employer had crossed the line in their treatment of her gender-critical expression, with the tribunal observing that her beliefs had been treated as unacceptable rather than assessing particular manifestations of them against a clear standard.

Perhaps most instructively, Britain’s Nursing and Midwifery Council now publishes guidance expressly distinguishing protected gender-critical belief from professional misconduct. Its examples say that a midwife expressing the view that sex is binary and cannot be changed would not, on those facts alone, trigger regulatory action, while persistent harassment or discriminatory treatment of a patient or colleague can properly do so.

That is close to the distinction at the centre of this article: belief is not impairment; disagreement is not misconduct; but the way a belief manifests in actual professional conduct can become misconduct.

The same concern appears in the university environment, where institutional socialisation can shape what students understand as normal or professionally safe.

Australia has had a formal national process around freedom of speech and academic freedom in universities, and the 2024 national Student Experience Survey reported that 73.5 per cent of undergraduates positively agreed that they were free to express their views at their institution.

That result should not be misread as meaning the remainder felt censored, but it shows that confidence in free expression is not universal. U.S. campus survey data also reports higher self-censorship among very conservative students than very liberal students, although those American findings cannot simply be imported into Australia.

The concern is not that conservative students, employees or professionals encounter arguments that challenge their convictions. Serious institutions should challenge everybody. The concern begins when one side of a contested argument remains an idea to be debated while the other is increasingly treated as evidence of prejudice, harm or professional deficiency.

The Cost of the Process

CPA Australia’s published disciplinary guide contains real procedural safeguards. A member referred to a tribunal is served with a Casebook at least 20 business days before the hearing, may attend with legal representation, and faces a three-person tribunal comprising members and non-members that CPA Australia describes as independent. CPA Australia, through its Investigating Case Manager, bears the burden of proving the case on the balance of probabilities. Proceedings are recorded, an appeal process exists, and a member can be ordered to pay costs up to $50,000.

Those safeguards should not be written out of the story merely because the outcome is contested. Neither, however, should the burden of the process be treated as trivial. According to Hardidge, more than 330 pages of case material were prepared, both complaints were sustained, a Severe Reprimand was imposed and he was ordered to pay more than $22,000 toward CPA Australia’s costs.

Hardidge says his legal representation at the Tribunal also cost more than $10,000. In his case that expense was covered by the Free Speech Union of Australia, something for which he says he is grateful. Another member without that support could have faced the defence expense personally in addition to any costs ultimately imposed by the tribunal.

That means the proceeding generated, on Hardidge’s account, more than $32,000 in combined CPA and defence costs. That is not a $32,000 fine, and the distinction matters. CPA describes a costs order as a contribution to the costs and expenses reasonably incurred in investigating the complaint and making the determination.

I therefore looked at recent published CPA disciplinary outcomes for context. Robert Faraci admitted complaints including integrity and objectivity breaches involving misleading ASIC documents and was ordered to contribute $11,045 in costs. Alan Case admitted conduct that caused a client to lose $17,459.36 in Family Tax Benefit and was ordered to pay $5,920. Damien Ward contested a matter involving serious Tax Practitioners Board findings and was ordered to pay $12,978.50.

Other contested or substantial matters have produced figures in Hardidge’s reported range or higher. Richard Sykes was ordered to contribute $23,724.40 after four sustained complaints and a 12-month membership suspension; Haydn Growden was ordered to pay $22,492.40 in a matter involving multiple professional-standard and Practice Review failures; and James Mulcahy was ordered to pay combined costs of $39,971.40 across two serious matters.

Those comparisons do not show that CPA Australia regarded Hardidge’s comments as more serious than fraud, client loss or other professional misconduct. Costs are not a direct measure of moral seriousness, and contested hearings generally require more resources than admitted matters.

But they do put the scale of his reported order in context. A proceeding arising from comments made during an internal representative debate generated a costs order in the same broad financial territory as some substantial professional-misconduct cases. That sharpens a proportionality question rather than answering it.

Why did investigating and prosecuting these particular comments reasonably require a process involving more than 330 pages of case material and a costs order exceeding $22,000?

I cannot answer that from the available record. But for another member deciding whether to speak candidly on a contested institutional question, the distinction between punishment and process cost may provide little comfort. The financial risk exists either way.

Why This Level of Disciplinary Response?

In the course of our correspondence, Hardidge raised a further question: why did this particular disagreement escalate into such a substantial disciplinary process? He says he had previously raised concerns with senior CPA Australia figures about organisational accountability and, after the complaint arose, about what he saw as the tension between CPA’s promise of an authentic voice and the proceedings against him.

It is understandable that Hardidge wonders whether that broader history mattered. I have found no evidence establishing that it did, and I do not suggest that CPA Australia pursued him because he had previously challenged the organisation.

The stronger question is proportionality rather than speculative motive. Professional bodies plainly need mechanisms to investigate genuine misconduct, including misconduct by elected office-holders. But formal disciplinary prosecution is not the only conceivable response to disagreement or poor judgment inside a governance body. Depending on the circumstances, institutions can use clarification, guidance, mediation, warnings, governance intervention or formal discipline.

According to the material available to me, the originating conduct here was an exchange during an internal policy discussion. That eventually produced a lengthy Casebook, a formal Tribunal, substantial defence costs, a Severe Reprimand and more than $22,000 in costs. It is therefore reasonable to ask not merely whether CPA had authority to act, but how it determined that this degree of disciplinary escalation was necessary and proportionate to the professional harm alleged.

Who Supplies the Standards of Good Practice?

The Hardidge case does not sit in an institutional vacuum, which is why the title of this article asks who defines belonging rather than merely whether one accountant spoke too strongly. CPA Australia makes its own policy choices, but it also participates in a wider ecosystem of external standards, memberships and benchmarking programs.

As at 21 September 2026, CPA Australia is a current member of Diversity Council Australia. That is a mainstream institutional relationship and is not evidence of wrongdoing.

The more specific relationship is CPA Australia’s participation in Pride in Diversity’s 2026 Australian Workplace Equality Index Employee Survey. Pride in Diversity reports that 149 organisations and 35,670 individuals participated in 2026, with CPA Australia expressly named among the organisations taking part.

Pride in Diversity describes the AWEI as a roadmap for LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion. It says the criteria are evidence-informed, reviewed on a three-year cycle against national and international best practice, and can be used to guide organisational planning, policy development and resource allocation. Its own published history records that the index was developed in 2010 with assistance from Stonewall UK and support from the Australian Federal Police.

What the public record does not establish clearly is when CPA Australia’s relationship with Pride in Diversity began, what membership or participation arrangement applied in earlier years, or what specific services it purchased or used before 2026. I asked CPA Australia directly about its relationship with Pride in Diversity and Diversity Council Australia and whether either played any role in the Belonging framework, proposed Divisional Council champions, the complaint or the disciplinary case. CPA declined to answer while the matter remains live.

I have found no evidence that Pride in Diversity, Diversity Council Australia or another external organisation caused the complaint against Hardidge, instructed the Investigating Case Manager or dictated the tribunal’s reasoning. The relationships are real. The causal bridge is not established.

But external benchmarks do not need to issue commands to influence what organisations understand as good practice. Memberships, criteria, training, surveys, professional networks and comparative recognition can create shared vocabulary, incentives and expectations. That is where the deeper institutional question begins.

When a Contested Framework Becomes the Baseline

Hardidge uses the word “indoctrination” to describe what he believes has happened. I understand the concern behind that language, but I think gradualism, institutional permeation and normalisation describe the mechanism more precisely.

Indoctrination normally implies deliberate inculcation while discouraging critical examination. Institutional permeation need not require a single directing hand. The process can be slower: a contested idea is advocated; it enters professional networks and policy; it is repeated through education, benchmarking and organisational language; it becomes associated with responsible practice; and eventually it may cease to feel like one contested proposition among others. It becomes the baseline.

Organisational scholars have long described forms of institutional convergence.

DiMaggio and Powell’s classic work on institutional isomorphism examined how professionalisation, networks, imitation and external pressures can cause organisations within a field to become increasingly alike without a central command directing each decision.

There can also be a more personal mechanism at work. In their Harvard Business Review analysis of diversity programs, sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev discuss engagement through the lens of cognitive dissonance. Their argument is favourable to diversity initiatives: rather than forcing compliance, they contend that organisations often achieve better results by actively involving managers in diversity efforts. But their explanation is revealing for a wider institutional question. When people are encouraged to act in support of a particular objective, their attitudes can shift toward the behaviour they have adopted. Dobbin and Kalev describe managers who become actively involved in advancing diversity as increasingly coming to see themselves as advocates for it. 

That does not establish that CPA Australia’s proposed Member Belonging Champion role was intended to change councillors’ beliefs, and there is no evidence that it was. Nor should Dobbin and Kalev’s general use of the idea of a “diversity champion” be confused with CPA Australia’s particular role. The relevance is the mechanism.

Institutional participation does not necessarily just express an existing culture; it can help reproduce and reinforce that culture. A person moves from being someone to whom a framework applies to someone participating in its implementation, carrying its language and objectives further into organisational life.

Seen in that light, the proposed Champion role becomes relevant for another reason. A councillor appointed to “foster diversity, equity, and inclusion” would not simply be observing CPA Australia’s Belonging framework from the outside but taking an active role in advancing it. That makes the ability of another councillor to question the framework’s assumptions particularly important. If participation helps strengthen institutional identification with a set of ideas, there must remain room for someone within the same governance structure to ask whether those ideas should be advanced in the first place.

A related literature now examines cultural capture - social and psychological processes through which shared networks, frames and identities can influence regulators and marginalise alternative viewpoints. I am not claiming that CPA Australia has been culturally captured. The relevance of the concept is narrower: influence does not always require bribery, instruction or conscious coordination. An institutional framework can become so normal that those operating inside it experience it as the neutral starting point from which other views are judged.

What is commonly described as indoctrination may sometimes be better understood as the end point of gradual institutional permeation: contested ideas repeated and reinforced across enough layers of institutional life that they eventually cease to feel contested at all.

Universities offer a familiar illustration of the concern. The issue is not that a conservative student is challenged by a progressive academic - serious education should challenge everyone. The problem begins when one side of a contested argument remains an idea to be debated while the other is increasingly treated as evidence of prejudice, harm or intellectual deficiency merely for being expressed. Some students change their minds, some continue to speak, and some learn to remain silent. The fewer dissenters who speak, the more complete the apparent consensus becomes.

That mechanism helps explain why the absence of a direct causal link between an external organisation and Hardidge’s tribunal does not settle the broader influence question. The relevant question is not simply whether someone told CPA Australia how to decide the case. There is no evidence of that. It is whether some of the propositions Hardidge was challenging had become sufficiently embedded in the institutional understanding of good practice that disagreement with them could itself begin to look like evidence of bias.

Successful institutional influence may become hardest to recognise precisely when the ideas being advanced no longer feel like somebody’s advocacy at all, but simply like the neutral standards by which other people’s views are judged.

Who Guards the Guardians?

Hardidge’s concerns also lead to a governance question: who guards the guardians?

The first thing to say is that CPA Australia has genuine safeguards. Its published disciplinary guide says a Disciplinary Tribunal is independent of CPA Australia in its decision-making; tribunals contain CPA members and non-member community representatives; CPA bears the burden of proof; respondents may be legally represented; and an appeal process exists. Its published Disciplinary Panel selection material also excludes current CPA employees and people serving on CPA committees or governance bodies from the Disciplinary Panel.

Those safeguards matter. So does external context: the International Federation of Accountants currently assesses CPA Australia’s investigation and discipline framework as meeting its Statement of Membership Obligations 6 at a “Sustain” level.

But there is another meaning of independence: structural independence from the institution bringing the case. CPA Australia’s own organisational structure says the Disciplinary Panel and Professional Conduct Oversight Panel are created by the Board to review and evaluate member conduct. The current By-Laws regulate that internal disciplinary architecture. An Investigating Case Manager presents the case on behalf of CPA Australia, while the tribunal is drawn from the Board-appointed panel system.

That does not mean individual tribunal members are not conscientious or independent in the decisions they make. Functional independence and structural independence are different questions. A tribunal can exercise independent judgment within a system that remains institutionally housed inside the professional body whose disciplinary case it is deciding.

That distinction is not peculiar to Hardidge’s dispute. In 2024, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services identified a potential conflict of interest between professional accounting bodies managing member conduct and representing member interests. It recommended that the Australian Government review their investigatory and disciplinary processes and, if appropriate, establish a single independent body to perform those functions. The Australian Government’s February 2026 response noted that recommendation as part of wider work on regulation, transparency and accountability in accounting, auditing and consulting.

None of that establishes bias in Hardidge’s Tribunal. It establishes that structural self-regulation and the adequacy of disciplinary independence are already legitimate public-policy questions inside the accounting profession.

Who Tests the Tribunal’s Objectivity?

There is a further difficulty when the alleged misconduct is itself a question of bias.

Hardidge was found, according to the tribunal material supplied to me, to have allowed his personal views concerning DEI, biological sex and the gender pay gap to compromise his professional judgment. But adjudicators, like every other participant in institutional life, also bring assumptions, experiences and prior beliefs to contested questions.

That does not mean the tribunal members were biased, and I have found no evidence that Pride in Diversity, Diversity Council Australia or CPA Australia’s Belonging staff instructed or influenced their decision. Nor are all tribunal members necessarily CPA members: CPA’s disciplinary architecture includes non-member community representatives.

But a symmetry question follows. If Hardidge’s prior convictions could constitute a threat to objectivity, what protected the assessment of those convictions from the adjudicators’ own unexamined assumptions about DEI, sex, gender and inclusion?

Consider two possible starting points. One person may understand DEI and gender-identity frameworks as established components of modern professional inclusion, so strong opposition to them may appear prejudicial or professionally suspect.

Another may understand the same frameworks as containing contested propositions about equality, sex and human identity, so strong disagreement with them would not, without further evidence, demonstrate professional impairment. Two conscientious adjudicators beginning from those different premises could interpret identical words differently without either consciously believing themselves biased.

This is why the institutional environment matters. CPA Australia’s Belonging Policy already contains substantive commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion, LGBTQIA+ visibility and active allyship. That does not prove an adjudicator shared those commitments or allowed them to influence the case. It does mean the dispute was adjudicated inside an institution that had already adopted positions touching some of the ideas under dispute.

If objectivity required Hardidge to interrogate whether his convictions distorted his judgment, the same principle should require the institution judging him to interrogate whether its prevailing assumptions distorted its understanding of his dissent.

That principle is symmetrical. A Christian institution disciplining a progressive member should face the same test. A regulator committed to one economic orthodoxy should remain capable of hearing a dissenter who challenges it. The point is not that institutions can have no principles. It is that institutional confidence in a principle does not magically remove the possibility of institutional bias.

The Legal Question Underneath

There is also a legal question beneath the ethical one, although this article does not attempt to resolve it. Queensland’s Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 lists political belief or activity and religious belief or activity among protected attributes. Section 20 deals with unfavourable treatment by an industrial, professional, trade or business organisation in connection with membership, while section 10 addresses situations involving multiple reasons for treatment.

Whether Hardidge’s comments constitute political or religious belief or activity for the purposes of the Act, whether CPA Australia’s disciplinary treatment falls within the relevant statutory category in these circumstances, whether any protected attribute was a substantial reason for the treatment, and what exemptions or jurisdictional questions might arise are legal issues beyond this article.

Nothing presently available to me establishes that a protected political or religious belief was a substantial reason for CPA Australia’s action. A protected belief does not immunise every manner of expressing it, and a professional body can still regulate independently objectionable conduct.

That is precisely why the conduct-versus-viewpoint distinction matters. If the disciplinary action rests on demonstrable impairment in how Hardidge performed the relevant professional or governance function, the legal and ethical analysis may look very different.

If the contested beliefs themselves are treated as sufficient evidence of compromised objectivity, the issue becomes harder. I am not offering a legal verdict; the statutory context is one reason the matter cannot simply be dismissed as an internal disagreement about corporate culture.

What This Is Not Proof Of

The existence of external memberships and benchmarking relationships is not proof that CPA Australia disciplined Hardidge because an advocacy organisation wanted it to. The fact that words such as belonging, bias, allyship and inclusion appear across institutional materials is not proof that one organisation copied another. Shared vocabulary can arise because organisations operate in the same professional and cultural environment.

Nor does the fact that Hardidge was speaking in a representative setting mean every statement he made must have been beyond criticism. An elected councillor can speak irresponsibly. A sincerely held belief can be expressed badly. A professional body can impose legitimate limits on bullying, personal attacks, harassment, conflicts of interest, misrepresentation or conduct that prevents a governance body from functioning.

Nor am I claiming that every diversity initiative is harmful, that CPA Australia’s Tribunal lacked conscientious members, or that some hidden organisation secretly directed the outcome. Those claims have not been earned.

What the record does justify is asking whether sufficiently clear distinctions were maintained between a strongly held belief and impaired judgment; disagreement with institutional policy and professional bias; protecting people and compelling assent; adjudicative independence and structural independence; the cost of legitimate discipline and a process capable of chilling lawful dissent; and an institution’s own worldview and the worldview it identifies as biased.

Every Person in This Story

David Hardidge bears the image of God whether an appeal ultimately succeeds or fails. So does the councillor who made the complaint. So do the people who investigated it, the tribunal members and the staff who developed CPA Australia’s Belonging framework. So does every person who identifies as LGBTIQ+ and wants to work without being humiliated, mistreated or unjustly excluded. And so does every member who holds a traditional Christian or otherwise dissenting view on sex, gender, DEI or another contested social question and wonders whether expressing that conviction inside their own professional institution now carries a professional cost.

But the Christian claim goes further than saying competing groups possess equal dignity. My traditional Christian worldview does not locate human worth in identity categories, personal desire, institutional recognition or social affirmation. As I explored more fully in Christ at the Centre: Christian Political Philosophy and Australia’s Forgotten Foundations, human dignity is received because the human person is created in the image and likeness of God. We do not create our own nature, and neither the State, the corporation nor the professional body has authority to grant or remove the worth God gives.

That conviction also includes moral agency. Christianity does not describe human beings as machines to be programmed into virtue. God gives humanity freedom and responsibility. In the Orthodox tradition, theosis describes participation in the life of God by grace; the human response involves freely cooperating with that grace rather than being coerced into communion. As another Orthodox reflection puts it, we can cooperate with God or refuse to cooperate. Some people consciously seek that life of repentance and transformation; others do not.

That matters here because conviction produced by compulsion is not the same thing as conviction freely embraced. If my Creator allows human beings genuine moral agency - including the possibility of rejecting Him - Christians should be especially wary of constructing professional or civic systems that try to manufacture inward assent by attaching unacceptable costs to disagreement. That does not remove consequences for conduct. It does distinguish governing conduct from attempting to govern conscience.

This conviction now sits within an Australian society that has become markedly more secular. Christianity remains deeply woven into the country’s history and institutions, but its cultural authority has receded while alternative understandings of identity, autonomy, sex and human flourishing have become increasingly influential. Institutions do not operate outside that cultural change. They both respond to it and, at times, actively help shape it.

I do not assume that every one of those changes was engineered from above. Much cultural change is plainly organic. People change their beliefs, generations inherit different assumptions, and institutions respond to the society around them. But after repeatedly investigating these questions through my writing, I am increasingly doubtful that what we are witnessing can always be explained simply as spontaneous social evolution.

Across different subjects I have encountered organised philanthropy, advocacy organisations, professional networks, benchmarking schemes and relationships between governments, corporations and specialist bodies whose stated purpose is to influence institutional policy, workplace practice and cultural norms. I examined one particularly clear example of that architecture in Who Funds the Redefinition of Sex?, tracing a documented pathway through philanthropic funding, advocacy, institutional relationships and Australian law.

Much of this activity is not secret. Organisations openly publish strategies, benchmarks, membership programs, advocacy objectives and measures of institutional progress designed to move workplaces, governments and professional bodies toward particular understandings of diversity, equity, sex, gender and identity.

That does not establish a centrally coordinated project, nor does it mean every organisation involved shares the same motives or objectives. It does not negate genuine grassroots support for those ideas. But it does challenge the assumption that the cultural direction eventually presented as normal, inevitable or settled necessarily arose only from what ordinary people spontaneously came to believe. There is a difference between a culture changing and institutions actively helping to change a culture.

It is a distinction I have encountered elsewhere in examining Who Owns the Conversation?: who gains organised access to institutions, who helps establish the language through which an issue is understood, and how ideas can acquire institutional authority long before the public has consciously considered the assumptions underneath them. That matters particularly when the subject is the human person.

Compassion toward another person does not require me to affirm every claim that person, an advocacy organisation or an institution makes about sex, gender or human nature. Christianity has never taught that love and truth are opposites. To love my neighbour is to recognise his or her irreducible dignity while acknowledging that every one of us is fallen and fallible, and that our desires, perceptions and institutions are not infallible.

The Christian answer is not to reverse the hierarchy and seek institutional preference for Christians, conservatives or traditionalists over those who identify as LGBTIQ+. That would contradict the very principle being defended. The point is not to force one side to submit to the other. It is to preserve the freedom to seek truth, to act according to conscience within legitimate professional boundaries, and to accept that people may freely make choices about the beliefs by which they live.

The proper distinction is between protecting the person and compelling assent to an ideology.

A workplace should protect an employee from humiliation, harassment, unjust discrimination or exclusion. It is a different thing for an institution to require members to adopt contested propositions about sex, gender, identity or equality as a condition of belonging, professional respectability or ethical standing.

Terms such as diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging can sound morally self-evident, but they are not always philosophically neutral. Once joined to propositions about “all genders”, gender identity, allyship or other contested understandings of the person, they carry assumptions that many Christians - and many people who are not Christian - do not share.

That does not make every such program malicious, nor every person advancing it an ideologue. It means those frameworks should remain open to scrutiny rather than being treated as morally settled territory.

The same caution applies to every organisation in this story. CPA Australia, Pride in Diversity, Diversity Council Australia and the Free Speech Union of Australia are institutions built and staffed by fallible people. None deserves automatic suspicion merely because it exercises influence, and none deserves immunity from scrutiny because its stated purpose is benevolent.

My task as a Christian writer is therefore not to decide which institution belongs to the morally approved tribe. It is to test what each one says and does against the evidence, while holding to a prior conviction about the human person: dignity comes from God, truth does not become false because it is unpopular, and love does not require silence when institutions begin turning contested ideas about human nature into professional expectations.

Where This Leaves the Reader

The record does not leave us with a simple morality play. CPA Australia’s Belonging Policy genuinely applies to volunteers. Its Volunteer Code genuinely links representative conduct to APES 110. Hardidge genuinely occupied a governance role in which professional standards applied. An extract from the supplied Council minutes records him making strongly critical comments about DEI, sex and the gender pay gap.

According to the case material supplied through FSUA, CPA Australia subsequently pursued disciplinary complaints arising from those comments under long-standing principles of objectivity and professional behaviour, and the supplied tribunal material records both complaints as sustained.

CPA Australia has genuine disciplinary safeguards, and IFAC’s current assessment regards its investigation and discipline framework as meeting the relevant international membership obligation. At the same time, Parliament has already identified structural questions about professional accounting bodies investigating and disciplining their own members, and CPA Australia participates in external diversity and benchmarking relationships that are real and documentable.

Those relationships explain why it is reasonable to ask who supplies the standards by which modern institutions define good practice. But the evidence does not establish that Pride in Diversity or any other external organisation caused Hardidge’s prosecution or dictated the tribunal’s reasoning. That causal claim has not been earned.

The more immediate questions therefore sit inside CPA Australia’s own rules. What Professional Activity was Hardidge undertaking when he gave his view on the proposed Belonging Champion? What professional or business judgment was said to be compromised? What in his reasoning or decision-making demonstrated that impairment rather than simply a strongly held conclusion? What was the specific public interest engaged? If his worldview could constitute bias, how was the institutional framework’s own worldview tested for the same problem? Why did this internal policy disagreement warrant the scale and cost of the disciplinary process that followed? And what neutral standard would have applied if a councillor had expressed an equally strong set of convictions in the opposite direction?

Those questions matter because professional bodies occupy a powerful place in modern civic life. Membership and designation can affect reputation, career, networks, clients and the ability to participate fully in a profession. Ethical codes are necessary, but the broader their reach becomes, the greater the responsibility to distinguish conduct from conviction and professional failure from ideological disagreement.

Belonging is an attractive word. Properly understood, it should make room for people who differ while requiring them to treat one another with dignity. A genuine culture of belonging must be capable of containing disagreement about belonging itself. If everyone is welcome only provided they affirm the institution’s contested conclusions, belonging has ceased to describe a shared professional space. It has become a boundary around permitted belief.

The difficult work of pluralism is not teaching everyone to agree. It is allowing people who profoundly disagree to share institutions, professions and workplaces without either side requiring the other’s silence as the price of participation. That is the line this case asks us to examine: not whether professional standards should exist, but whether a standard intended to protect objectivity can itself be applied in a way that defines certain disputed beliefs as objective and others as bias; not whether workplaces should be free from discrimination, but whether protecting people from discrimination requires professional institutions to discipline disagreement; and not whether David Hardidge expressed every concern in the language others would have chosen, but whether the evidence demonstrates professional misconduct rather than the expression of views that conflicted with the organisation’s stated Belonging framework.

I do not think those questions should be answered by instinct, including mine. They should be answered by the record. As at 22 September 2026, part of that record is still missing from public view. Hardidge has supplied his account and extracts of the materials relied upon against him. CPA Australia has chosen not to provide its substantive account while the matter remains live. That is where the evidence honestly stands.

I would be interested to hear how readers have seen these tensions unfold in their own workplaces, professions and communities.

Have diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives found a reasonable balance between protecting people from genuine discrimination and allowing room for disagreement? Or have some frameworks moved beyond protecting people and begun establishing contested beliefs about sex, gender, identity and equality as institutional expectations?

And perhaps most importantly: If you hold a view that differs from the prevailing position in your workplace or profession, do you still feel genuinely free to express it respectfully, or, having seen what can follow dissent, have you learned that some disagreements are safer left unspoken?

But test them all; hold on to what is good. - 1 Thessalonians 5:21

Thanks for reading.

God bless.

Mark