Labor two-faced on religious freedoms

Anthony Albanese on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

It is obvious why Anthony Albanese and Mark Dreyfus were distancing the government from the Australian Law Reform Commission’s recommendations on changes to religious freedom even before the report was publicly released.

Put simply, the key recommendations immediately kill any chance of faith-based schools or the Coalition accepting Labor proposals, which do not radically change the ALRC’s direction.

It is already clear from the government’s positioning that it has moved substantially away from the ALRC recommendations but falls well short of guaranteeing passage of new laws.

Of course, the publication of the report only strengthens the demands from the LGBTIQ+ community for the full implementation of more rights for staff and students, which strips religious schools of the existing right to discriminate by not hiring staff who act against the ethos of the schools.

The ALRC’s central recommendation, that the protections for faith-based schools to hire teachers contained in Section 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act be removed entirely, is unacceptable to faith leaders and to the opposition.

This the pivotal point in the whole debate about religious freedom and the rights of religious schools to select teachers on the basis they share the same ethos as the school.

This is also still the pivotal point in the Prime Minister’s attempts to get a negotiated settlement through parliament with bipartisan support, and still the biggest obstacle to getting promised new religious freedoms.

Albanese and the Attorney-General both declared before the report was released that they wanted a unifying result from the changes and that “bipartisan support is essential”.

As he tabled the report in parliament late on Thursday, Dreyfus could not have been clearer when he said this is not a report from the government but a report to the government, “which we will consider”.

Albanese had already told Labor colleagues on Tuesday he would not put forward proposed changes to religious freedoms unless he had “bipartisan support”, and on Wednesday passed draft legislation to Peter Dutton to consider.

The government has long had the two proposed bills for freedom of religion drawn up after considering the ALRC recommendations and thus rendered the report practically redundant even as it was made public.

The policy has been subsumed by politics as Albanese seeks to demonstrate he has given ground in pursuit of bipartisanship and wants the Opposition Leader to be blamed for any failure from progressives demanding the powers be stripped from schools.

As for the ALRC, the report repeatedly makes the point that the recommendations, including the removal of Section 38 of the SDA, are necessary if the terms of reference for the inquiry are to be met. In other words, the commission is saying it had delivered what the government asked of it.