Furore over non-issue of religious schools’ discrimination against gays

Reporting by some media of the review headed by Philip Ruddock into religious discrimination was mischievous.

Former Federal Liberal MP Phillip Ruddock. Picture: AAP

Reporting by some media organisations of recommendations from a panel headed by former Howard government attorney-general Philip Ruddock looking into a proposed religious discrimination act has been so mischievous it surely qualifies as “fake news”.

It started last Wednesday week when The Sydney Morning Herald splashed on a story suggesting the Ruddock report would recommend religious schools be given the power to expel or refuse ­admission to gay students. The Australian’s Joe Kelly later the same day corrected the record.

Many of the powers over staff and pupils flagged in the Fairfax report had existed in federal law since 2013, when Bill Shorten, then in the Gillard government, voted for exactly the power he had spent that afternoon decrying.

It was hypocrisy from Labor, and the leak was designed by someone — probably linked to ousted prime minister Malcolm Turnbull — to damage the ­Coalition ahead of Saturday’s by-election for Turnbull’s formerly safe Liberal seat of Wentworth.

The SMH’s reporter made clear many of the powers warned about under the paper’s page one headline, “Secret plan for laws to reject gay students”, already existed. The body copy even made clear the proposals would disappoint conservatives who saw the Ruddock committee as a way to guarantee religious freedoms they believe are under attack by campaigners trying to force wider acceptance of the LGBTIQ agenda.

Predictably the ABC went to town, especially on The Drum on Wednesday, October 10, and then again on the Friday.

That same October 10, Andrew Bolt said on Sky News that he could not imagine a situation where any church school would seek the power to hurt gay or trans students. Several church spokes­people said schools already had such powers and Ruddock’s committee, set up in the wake of last year’s gay marriage vote, had ­apparently received no evidence of any such discrimination.

Ruddock told The Australian that Wednesday that the ­review’s recommendations were “aimed at restricting the ability of schools in the ACT, NSW and WA to reject gay students”.

The committee was proposing schools seeking such rights be forced to publish their policies on gay students and teachers, and their policy be made clear before student enrolments.

Not to be deflected from a course that would hurt both the Coalition in Wentworth and the debate over religious freedom, Fairfax commissioned an IPSOS poll that led the SMH on Monday under the page one headline, ­“Nation loathes gay schools ban”. Never mind the basis for com­missioning such a poll was ­largely false.

As with the original SMH story of the Ruddock report leak the previous week, there was not too much wrong with the body of the splash. But the paper’s treatment of the story and the fact the original mischievous piece was even polled would have made the ordinary reader believe the Coalition and the churches were seeking some new power to expel gay students.

The question asked in the poll gave the game away: “Do you support or oppose laws to allow religious schools to select students and teachers based on their sexual orientation, gender identity or relationship status?” The wording was guaranteed to mislead and the poll should have been spiked.

The performance of The Drum on ABC TV was even worse. On October 10, only Kathryn Greiner, who had been a member of the initial Gonski education review panel, seemed to have a clue about how religious schools operate in Australia.

Sydney University physics professor Michael Biercuk, lawyer and chef Adam Liaw and Tasmanian Uniting Church bisexual minister and climate change campaigner Avril Hannah-Jones went the full monty on bagging religious schools and signalling their concerns over the welfare of young gay students.

Biercuk said religious schools should be forced to abide by standards set for the wider community if they took federal funding. He seemed not to realise that parents who send their children to independent schools, sometimes under great financial strain, pay twice — once in fees and again through their taxes — or that the entire school education system could not function without the financial contribution of independent schools.

And why no questions from the ABC or Fairfax about the views of Labor MPs in seats with large Muslim populations, such as frontbenchers Tony Burke and Chris Bowen in the western Sydney seats of Watson and McMahon? Does anyone imagine Islamic schools in those electorates are going to start hiring gay teachers?

The subtleties of a story essentially about the interaction between exemptions from state and federal anti-discrimination laws to allow for religious belief were too much for Drum presenter Sarah Dingle, and remained so two days later when the program discussed the same issue with panellists Philip Ruddock, Saman Shad, Jacqui Lambie and Craig Reucassel. The special guest was LGBTIQ gay marriage campaigner Sally Rugg.

Despite Ruddock’s valiant efforts, the consensus seemed to be that the whole debate was a threat to the emotional safety of gay students. It was as if the concerns of people of all religions about their lifelong faiths were of no consequence.

By last Monday, new Prime Minister Scott Morrison was actively campaigning on new laws to protect gay and trans students from arbitrary discrimination. Labor was continuing to get away with criticising its own 2013 federal law and bagging a proposal Ruddock’s committee had never made.

It is not as if the religious freedom issue was not front and centre of the No campaign, supported by almost five million Australians last November in the same-sex marriage plebiscite.

Liberal Party conservative Catholic Kevin Andrews, as chair of the Human Rights Subcommittee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, led an inquiry into the status of religion or belief, that, reporting last November, shortly before the plebiscite, unanimously found that legal protection of religious freedom is limited in Australia compared with other countries and that the main threat to religious freedom arises from “an imbalance between competing rights”.

As Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven wrote in The Weekend Australian on October 14: “Because the hard Left loathes religion as most people loathe dentistry, any proposal around religious freedom must be sunk before it even sets sail, lest someone actually may analyse it.” He went on: “If we accept the notion of Christian and Islamic schools as matter of freedom of religion … those schools must be free to hire people who will support their mission, not undermine it.”

He cited a political comparison: “Should the Greens be compelled to employ as an adviser a person whose interest in whales lies in eating them?”

Or, might I add, should gay lobby organisations be forced to hire people who voted No in the SSM plebiscite? And, God forbid, should media organisations be forced to respect the beliefs of the 60 per cent of Australians in the 2016 census who nominated a religious affiliation, 52 per cent of them Christian?