Real Australia lives outside the media bubble

Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: AFP

The Morrison government’s fumbling of its own religious discrimination Bill last week shows how lacking in political advocacy skill the Coalition is, remembering the changes were originally promised after the Gay Marriage plebiscite in August 2017.

Yet much of the media’s performance on the issue is even more inept. Reporting of attempts to reach a compromise on the Bill last week was so politicised Guardian Australia readers and ABC viewers could have been forgiven for not realising many of Labor’s most senior frontbenchers, especially in western Sydney, have never, and will never, publicly criticise the proposed reforms.

While media activists framed the debate as a question of gay and trans rights, Labor knows many of its own supporters in multicultural Australia care far more about their own freedom to send their children to schools that will impart the religious views their fees are paying for.

As Paul Kelly wrote here on November 26: “The smart course for Albanese will be to support the Bill, though Labor can be expected to move amendments. It needs to curb the 2019 concern, as expressed by Chris Bowen, that people of faith no longer feel progressive politics cares about them.” Kelly got that bang on.

Given the federal government has now shelved the legislation after five Coalition members crossed the floor last week to support the removal of a section of the Sex Discrimination Act, allegedly to protect “trans children”, it seems highly unlikely the related religious discrimination legislation Scott Morrison promised at the 2019 election will be back in the parliament before the next election, likely to be held in May.

This has always been a delicate issue of balancing competing rights: the rights of gay and trans children and the right to free religious expressions of faith.

Yet much of the left media has been unable to prioritise religious freedom and seems able only to defend gay and trans students’ rights.

As several conservative commentators have pointed out, there are no obvious examples of religious schools expelling gay and trans students. The backlash against a Brisbane school that last month wanted parents to sign on to a gender contract before admission to school proved enough for the school to abandon the idea.

Good on The Sydney Morning Herald last Wednesday for publishing a piece by lawyer John Steenhof of the Christian charitable lobby the Human Rights Law Alliance. He wrote: “Sadly, in modern Australia, almost 30 per cent of Australians have experienced discrimination because of their religion or religious views.”

In an updated online version of the story published Thursday morning he argued the Bill as presented would “have provided at least some very minimal protections against discrimination for people of faith”.

“But it only passed … when five Liberals crossed the floor in support of independent MP Rebekah Sharkie’s amendment … that waters down expectations for religious schools to employ people of faith, contrary to human rights conventions that say parents and guardians should have the right to have their children educated in institutions that share their religious beliefs,” he wrote.

Not all rights are created equally at our ABC. RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas and Guardian Australia political editor Katharine Murphy, speaking on Thursday morning, agreed the five Liberals had “done the moral thing”.

Karvelas had earlier interviewed opposition legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus and tried to pin him down on what is essentially a Labor strategy to walk both sides of the fence: to support the bulk of the Religious Discrimination Bill to keep faith with its own religious voters while supporting amendments to the sex discrimination laws to keep faith with activists such as LGBTIQ rights lobbyist and Equality Australia CEO Anna Brown.

That same morning on ABC TV’s breakfast show, host Michael Rowland hectored Financial Services Minister Jane Hume demanding on three separate occasions, “Do you support private schools … having the ability to expel trans students?”

By Thursday night, Anthony Albanese was publicly promising to pass a religious freedom law should Labor win government, effectively exposing many of the ABC’s most senior journalist as dupes.

“Sadly, discrimination on the basis of faith is all too real. It might be a Muslim woman or a Sikh man being vilified on the streets … Labor is committed to ending this vilification and discrimination,” Albanese said.

Doubtless the Coalition will attempt to use Labor’s tactics as a wedge in western Sydney. It’s a pity it came to this because Labor and the Coalition had done a lot of work on religious freedom since the Ruddock Review, set up by former PM Malcolm Turnbull in November 2017.

The failure of the parliament and much of the media to come to terms with the need for a reform that was essentially a quid pro quo to religious Australians worried about gay marriage illustrates the damage that gesture politics and social media posturing are doing to our politics and media. Mainstream Australians do not want to injure gay or trans children, but they do support the rights of religious schools to insist teachers not campaign at work for things at odds with the faith of the school.

Yet this issue and the other puerile scandals exercising journalists the past fortnight will have little effect on voters. Australia has been threatened and punished by China, has managed to negotiate a historic pact with the US and UK and secured access to nuclear submarines, has notched up a trillion dollars in debt trying to support workers and business in the face of the Covid pandemic while recording among the world’s lowest death rates, and despite all that is heading for unemployment below 4 per cent.

Facing our biggest economic and foreign policy challenges since World War II, the political class has focused on two childish text scandals that portray Scott Morrison as a liar, and speeches by two young women about abuse they suffered — one more than a decade ago — who both now want to blame Morrison for their issues.

The issue of the week at the ABC was the rights of an imaginary transsexual child to attend a boys school in a dress without facing discrimination. In a cranky interview on Wednesday night, ABC 7.30 host Leigh Sales asked Finance Minister Simon Birmingham: “If this Bill gets through as it is, would an all-boys school be allowed to expel a student who wanted to wear a skirt and ask to be treated as a girl?”

People who think sending trans children in dresses to boys’ schools might not be such a great idea are apparently extremists. Try saying that to any of the parents at western Sydney’s Islamic schools.

Morrison seems likely to lose the election, but if he pulls off another miracle win it will be largely because many in the parliament and the media have no idea that for most working Australians, the key issues are jobs, prosperity, buying a home, staying healthy and standing up to China.