About Mark
A life lived between worlds
Mark Leach's story begins with two people who should never have met. His mother, a German Jew, fled the Holocaust and arrived in southern Africa as a refugee. His father, a white Catholic South African, fought as a mercenary and spent a lifetime in ventures best described as colourful, including smuggling emeralds and diamonds across Africa.
Raised in a secular home, Mark completed his education in Rhodesia and South Africa, studying medicine, philosophy and classical Greek on scholarship at the University of Cape Town. Then came a turn no one predicted: four years of theology in Sydney, and ordination as an Anglican clergyman.
For the past thirty years Mark has read, studied, taught and cared for people in churches and organisations across Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto. Along the way he completed a Master's degree in organisation dynamics, studying the system psychodynamics of organisations, how communities and movements behave under pressure. It is exactly the lens this moment requires.
October 9, 2023
Two days after the October 7 attacks, Mark stood on the steps of St Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney waving an Israeli flag, before most commentators had understood what was happening. From that moment he founded Never Again Is Now, and began building The Allies for a Strong Australia: a citizen movement to make antisemitism unthinkable in this country.
Today the movement publishes a weekly eNewsletter, runs chapters in 21 federal electorates, conducts seminars around the country, and is engaged with the national Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. After the Bondi attack of December 14, 2025, the worst antisemitic attack in Australian history, the need for a credible public voice has never been greater. The podcast is the movement's answer.
"We cannot allow Australia to descend into the tribal, antisemitic hatred that takes us back to Germany in the 1930s. Defeat is not an option."
Why Mark, why now
No other Australian commentator brings this combination. Genuine subject-matter depth in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the last intensely personal, because his own brother converted to Islam. Thirty years of pastoral listening: the world's best training for drawing out what people actually think and feel. A family story that runs through the Holocaust and colonial Africa. And a movement already on the ground across the country.
Mark's voice is not academic. It is theological, personal, and morally direct: an analogy, a story, a first-person account that makes the abstract argument land. He has keynoted conferences around the world and consulted to organisations from auto parts manufacturers in Toronto to elite private schools in Sydney. He can hold a room of sceptics.
That is what The Allies Podcast is: those skills, that story, and that mission, turned toward the defining questions of our time.