Religious discrimination bill debacle a failure of major parties, parliament

PM Scott Morrison, centre, and the MPs who crossed the floor, Dave Sharma and Bridget Archer, top left, Trent Zimmerman, bottom left, Katie Allen, top right and Fiona Martin, bottom right. Pictures: Gary Ramage/NCA Newswire

The promised religious discrimination act is all but dead in this term. Anthony Albanese will now make it an election issue after the government’s legislation was shelved in the Senate.

In the end, it simply proved too hard for the parliament.

There are only two more sitting days left in the upper house before the election: the government’s time has run out.

This is a victory for the progressive movement whose real goal was to kill the bill, with Labor acting as spoilers. Labor wanted a bill on its terms. And the Opposition Leader will now pursue this at the next poll.

Scott Morrison had no choice but to stall the passage of the legislation, or risk a bastardised version of his religious freedoms package being passed into law. This represents a failure of the parliament and the major political parties.

Morrison cannot escape serious blame. He did not leave himself enough time to guide such a tricky change through the parliament and he was undermined by his own MPs who crossed the floor.

But why wait until the 11th hour to push through the legislation?

This is the question many ­Coalition MPs are privately asking of the Prime Minister.

The episode exposes Morrison’s weak position in the parliament and his lack of command over his own MPs.

Labor also bears a heavy responsibility. It supported amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act in the lower house, which weakened protections for faith-based educators. It was also proposing watering down key elements of the religious discrimination bill itself in the Senate.

This reflects the ongoing internal conflict in the ALP between its progressive base and its electorates with multicultural and faith-based communities that uphold more traditional values.

In this case, Labor’s proposed amendments leaned heavily towards meeting the needs of the former camp.

This posed a political nightmare for the Coalition – there was a risk the government could fail to pass the religious discrimination bill and suffer the humiliation of the Senate passing into law weakened protections for religious schools in the SDA.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese. Picture: Gary Ramage

This would have been the ultimate own goal for Morrison.

Albanese trumpeted this reality on Thursday morning.

“The Prime Minister tried to wedge Labor and ended up wedging himself,” the Opposition Leader said.

More broadly, the chaos over the bill and inability to secure an outcome represents a failure of the parliament. Despite the nat­ion’s legislators having three years since the last election, the task of securing new religious protections while shielding the LGBTQI community from discrimination has again confounded them.

This reflects the competing interests in Australia’s social fabric. These tensions are only likely to become more entrenched over time, making it even more difficult for a future parliament to weigh up how to balance the question of competing rights.

Morrison may be tempted to blame Labor for the failure to secure an outcome but this claim will be undermined by the fact that five of his own MPs crossed the floor to vote with Labor in the House of Representatives.