Face of Nation : While religious figures say the laws don’t go far enough, secular groups say they override the rights of other marginalised parts of society. The Morrison government’s proposed religious freedom laws have managed to please few, with religious groups and human rights organisations alike calling for changes.
Submissions on the draft religious freedom bills closed last Wednesday, but the sheer volume received means the Attorney General’s Department is yet to publish them.
The government hopes to get the legislation to a parliamentary vote by the end of the year. But with a final form of legislation yet to be settled, only four sitting weeks remaining, and the expectation of Senate committee scrutiny, that looks unlikely.
The Catholic and Anglican churches hold similar concerns about the bill, including that its protections don’t extend across the full gamut of religious organisations. Melbourne Archbishop Peter Comensoli, writing on behalf of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, said the laws required “significant amendment”.
This included ensuring that courts did not determine what constituted religious belief, and a recognition that religious activity extended beyond acts of prayer and worship. The bishops are also concerned that exemptions don’t apply to bodies engaging “solely or primarily in commercial activities”.
“Even the Society of St Vincent de Paul could be excluded given its vast number of retail stores, despite them being operated on a not-for-profit basis,” Archbishop Comensoli wrote.
He wants the laws to include protections for a wider range of religious organisations, including hospitals, aged care homes, publishing houses, and retreat centres. The Anglican Church expressed similar concerns, saying the bills could not be supported in their current form.
Sydney Bishop Michael Stead has even warned it could force Anglican youth camps to hire out their facilities to Satanists. The National Catholic Education Commission, headed by former Labor senator Jacinta Collins, said the definitions used opened up the possibility that religious activity in future could be deemed unlawful.
It has concerns the administrative duties of running a school, or related activities like hiring out facilities, could be deemed by secular bureaucrats as not “intrinsically religious” and thus not attracting the legal protections.
A joint submission from 150 Muslim community organisations called for the new regime to include a civil remedy. “Australian Muslims – and indeed people of minority faiths more generally – need a form of recourse to challenge those who openly vilify them and incite hatred and/or violence against them on the basis of their religious belief or activity,” it says.
But human rights organisations say the proposals trample over the rights of others. “This is unacceptable because it allows religious belief to be used as a cloak for sexism, racism, homophobia and other prejudices,” Australian Lawyers Alliance national president Andrew Christopoulos said.
Amnesty International’s submission says the employment protections cover people of faith for statements they make relating to their beliefs on any topic, but only cover non-religious people for statements they make about religion.
It wants the bills changed to include express prohibitions of racial and religious vilification in Australia, remove sections regarding healthcare and employment, and ensure that religious schools getting public funding cannot discriminate against students.
The Human Rights Law Centre says the federal laws would override existing state protections and give unjustified protections for people who express harmful discriminatory views.
