We need legal clarity on religious freedom

Former Essendon chief executive Andrew Thorburn.

It is high time the Labor government delivered on its election promise to provide legal protections against religious discrimination.

Though it is a sorry state of affairs that we must go cap in hand to government begging for religious freedom, there is little point crying over spilt milk. That horse bolted when the human rights industry convinced successive governments that feelings should receive legal protection. Elevated into a faux human right, feelings are routinely weaponised to trump and destroy fundamental rights.

Rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, so central to living in a free and liberal society, have been emasculated by social engineers who know exactly what they are doing, and facilitated by knaves who should know better.

Last week, when forcing Andrew Thorburn to resign, the board of Essendon Football Club caused their club a world of pain and damaged the fabric of freedom that binds a tolerant, liberal society. Their hasty and foolish decision raises the question: should they be trusted to make considered, prudent decisions in the future?

In the hierarchy of human rights, religious freedom – a central tenet of liberty and our history – should trump feelings. That means, at a minimum, a person should not be effectively sacked because of their faith.

The ABC’s Patricia Karvelas could be counted on to side with feelings, saying that gay Essendon players wouldn’t feel welcome if the chief executive was the leader of an Anglican church. Let’s add a dash of logic. Thorburn was not trying to turn players into Christians, nor was he removing homosexuals from the team. His private faith is just that. Following Karvelas’s feelings argument, it is preferable that a quiet Christian be made to feel unwelcome, and be unemployable too.

To understand how demented the human rights industry has become, and how those running these bureaucracies cannot be trusted with our most fundamental rights, it bears repeating that Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights commissioner Ro Allen sided with Essendon’s religious persecution of a Christian man, applauding the club for “standing to their values”.

This perverse approach to human rights, especially in Victoria, means Anthony Albanese has a chance to do what the former Morrison government failed to do: deliver on an election promise and protect, at the federal level, citizens from being discriminated against because of their private religious faith.

But will he?

Last week, Labor’s Brendan O’Connor suggested that Essendon’s mistake was not to do enough due diligence before appointing Thorburn. In other words, discriminate against a person’s religious faith behind the scenes and early. Is that the Labor government’s position?

Opposition legal affairs spokesman Julian Leeser is calling on the government to act now to protect Australians from further religious persecution. Speaking with The Australian late last week, he said it was outrageous that a person could be sacked for their religious beliefs.

Leeser, who has a long history of working with faith-based bodies, is concerned “that so few people on the centre-left of Australian politics have been prepared to say: ‘Hang on, this is wrong.’ Daniel Andrews joined the pile-on. No one at the federal level of Labor has stood up for Thorburn’s rights” to hold a job and practise his religion privately.

Leeser has spoken many times about human rights emanating from our Judaeo-Christian tradition where all people, made in the image of God, are equal, attracting equal dignity and worth. “When a society loses a sense of human dignity that society loses its soul,” he said in parliament in February when speaking in favour of the Morrison government’s religious discrimination bill that floundered from lack of support from within its own ranks.

While Leeser is not suggesting that only people of faith believe we are all equal, he has warned about the dangers of “pulling too far away from our moral roots”.

Essendon board members did that last week by effectively sacking its chief executive for his faith. The silence of the Labor Prime Minister and Labor ministers points to how a culture loses its soul.

Leeser is equally concerned about other cases that haven’t attracted national attention. “There will be more cases around the country where people of faith in the workplace are being discriminated against, and we don’t hear anything about these,” he told The Australian on Friday.

In a 2019 speech to the St Thomas More Society, Leeser listed concerns that Christians had raised with him, “things they have never had to worry about previously”. They worried about their right to quote the Bible; the freedom to share the message of Jesus; what their children were being taught about gender and sexuality; what they themselves would be allowed to teach about sexuality and gender to the next generation; the right of employees to object to participating in work-based corporate social responsibility programs that were at odds with the employee’s beliefs without putting their employment at risk; the use of discrimination law as a weapon against Christians; and the media and in particular the ABC’s bias against Christians and Christian leaders.

Today it’s about Christians, says Leeser, “tomorrow it will be about Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Sikhs. But Christians are particularly in the gun. It’s hard to believe that, that this would’ve been the case even 10 years ago. It just shows what’s happening to the culture.”

“Victoria,” he says, “is the canary in the coalmine” because of all the restrictions it has put on religious institutions over the past few years.

There is a baseline case for people not to lose their livelihoods because of their faith. While a religious discrimination bill comes with its own dangers – handing judges and human rights bureaucrats the power to determine what faith means – the collapse of religious freedom demands a targeted legal response.

Don’t mistake this for the woolly-headed calls for a broadbased bill of rights to sort this out. Last week, Reverend Tim Costello suggested that a bill of rights would “settle this down”. How so? Costello didn’t explain how a bill of rights would resolve the conflict between legally weaponised feelings and religious freedom. Victoria’s charter of rights didn’t save Thorburn from religious persecution.

Instead of the clarity from sharply targeted legislative protection from discrimination on religious grounds, a federal bill of rights will add more confusion and ambiguity, empowering judges to socially engineer the society they want. In a democracy, we should hold on to that power for ourselves.