“If a council bans a the building of a Mosque, the next building to be banned will be a church: freedom of religion for some must be religious freedom for all,” is how Mike Southon, executive officer of Freedom For Faith (FFF), described the work of the Christian legal think tank at their Freedom 24 conference this week.
Southon described fifteen separate pieces of legislation or inquiries that FFF had been dealing with in the last few months as religious discrimination continues on the political agenda of each state and the Federal Government.
The proposed Religious Discrimination Act has been slow-walked by the Federal government. The Albanese government’s attempt at achieving a bipartisan agreement in talks between Attorney General General Dreyfus and the Coalition Senator Cash in late May failed to make progress. Mark Sneddon of the Institute for Civil Society told the conference that there does not appear to have been much movement since then.
Federal: a success and a concern
The FFF and school groups saw success in their lobbying about Productivity Commission recommendations which were to strip school building funds and voluntary scripture teaching in public schools of DGR or tax-deductible status. The government says they have rejected those proposed changes: “While we consider the Productivity Commission’s recommendations, we will not be considering changing the tax arrangements around schools, including donations for religious education,” Andrew Leigh, the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury announced.
The productivity commission also proposed another change with significant effects on religious freedom: the removal of the “basic religious charity” category. This exempts small churches from some of the charity commission’s supervisory powers, such as the power to remove and replace the executive of a charity.
“The government realized that if the ACNC had this power over churches, it could literally replace the minister with its own choice,” Southon reported.
FFF worked with religious leaders to have the Productivity Commission proposals rejected. Pointing out that productivity commission proposals have had a history of resurfacing, Southon pointed out “We need to keep an eye on this, and we need to keep pressure on that so that no government in the future goes ‘Well, that’s a good idea.'”
But another obscure-sounding bill, the “AHRC (Australian Human Rights Commission) Costs Protection Bill,” is seen as “cost-free weaponisation of the federal courts system.” An organisation that is the subject of an anti-discrimination action could be forced to bear the entire cost of the case.
The bill was originally promoted as making it easier for sexual harassment cases to be brought by complainants, and Southon readily acknowledged the power imbalance between an employee making an harrasment claim against a large company. However the bill as drafted will apply to all discrimination cases. This includes vilification, sex and gender identity discrimination, and religious discrimination cases.
The bill provides that “if the applicant is successful in proceedings on one or more grounds, the court must order each respondent against whom the applicant is successful to pay the applicant’s costs.” This means that where there is a list of complaints – not unusual in an anti-discrimination case – even if the majority of complaints or the most significant ones are rejected by the court, the respondents would have to pay the entire costs, even if only a minor complaint is accepted. The complainant can’t be asked to pay costs.
Proposals for a Human Rights charter for the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) downplay religious freedom, according to FFF. “The AHRC proposal has a higher emphasis on anti-discrimination rights; that is no one should be discriminated against based on their race, religion, disability and sex. And of course that proposal expands that to about sexuality, gender,gender identity, et cetera. The proposal also downplays the importance of religious freedom despite the fact that it’s listed as one of the core human rights under international treatis.”
NSW faces a blockbuster bill
FFF sees the NSW version of a Conversion Practices Bill as much less onerous on religious bodies than the Victorian model. Southon described it as having ” explicit protections for families and faith communities – by no means perfect, there are significant problems with this bill, but it’s better than where we started and better than Victoria.”
He added; “Now it is dramatically better than the Victorian legislation with explicit protections but those protections are poorly worded and it is especially it’s hard to know what’s protected.”
That conversion bill debate occurred against the background of a far-reaching and complex ‘equality’ bill from influential independent MP Alex Greenwich is scheduled for debate on August 16, although Southon suspects it will be delayed again.
“This is a massive bill, 50 pages long, making over 80 changes to 20 pieces of legislation and [it] would have dramatic negative impact on faith communities, women and children. Normally any one of the changes that they’re trying to make would require a whole bill to itself but this bill blends all these issues together and it’s almost impossible to split them apart from each other.”
Describing the impact of FFF mobilising churches and protests, Southon said staff in MP’s offices say they are getting hundreds of protest letters a week, more than the controversial planning legislation in the state.
A win in Queensland
Strong lobbying by religious leaders, with the help of FFF, overturned a rewrite of the Queensland anti-discrimination legislation. The legislation would have restricted preference to hire staff of the same religion as a religious institution to when “participation in the teaching, observance or practice of the religion concerned is a genuine occupational requirement of the work.”
Religious bodies could not discriminate on the basis of any other protected attribute.
Southon gave examples of what this would have meant:
• A Jewish school could refuse to employ someone if they eat pork, but not if they are a prostitute.
• A Christian church could require employees to say they believe that sex should remain within heterosexual marriage but cannot require them to live that way
•A Muslim women’s group could refuse to employ a woman who is not wearing a hijab, but not if they were a biological male who has ‘transitioned’
FFF worked with Queensland Churches Together to oppose the bill, and the Queensland government withdrew it.
A new “Respect at Work” Bill with a narrower focus replaced it. It requires organisations to “take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate the discrimination, sexual harassment, harassment on the basis of sex or other objectionable conduct as far as possible.”
But it sets a low bar. The bill states, “A person must not, because of the age, gender identity, impairment, race, religion, sex, sex characteristics or sexual orientation of another person or a group of persons, engage in a public act that a reasonable person would consider hateful towards, reviling, seriously contemptuous of, or seriously ridiculing the other person or members of the group.”
The word “hateful” has no case law defining it, and Southon pointed to the dictionary definition that includes
- arouses hate
- deserves to be hated
- full of or expressing hate
- unpleasant; dislikable; distasteful
The second problem is that the definition of what is “hateful” is defined by the group of persons the complainant comes from rather than a community-wide standard.
SA, WA Tas
The SA Greens plan to introduce an Equal Opportunity (Religious Bodies) Amendment Bill that would remove anti-discrimination exemptions for religious bodies. Religious schools and organisations would be prevented from discriminating against LGBTQIA persons, except for appointing religious ministers.
WA and Tasmania have conversion therapy bills on the way and FFF are working with local Christians.
Elections
FFF aims to be active in the wave of elections. A kit provided by FFF gives churches the ability to run candidate forums, where questions about the bills discussed above can be raised.
• A Federal election will be held before May. (The deadline set by the rules requires a senate poll.)
• NT general election August 24
• ACT general electio Oct 19
• Queensland state poll is on October 26.
• WA State election March 8 2025
• Tas legislative Council elction for three seats (Montgomery, Pembroke, Nelson)Date to be announced 2025.
Freedom For Prejudice.