Popular support for faith-based hiring in nation’s schools

Two in three Australians are happy for schools to hire teachers based on their religion, a parliamentary inquiry will hear on Tuesday.

National Catholic Education Commission executive director Jacinta Collins.

Almost two in three Australians believe religious schools are entitled to require employees to uphold the ethos and values of their faith and should be free to favour hiring staff who share those values, new data to be presented to a key parliamentary inquiry finds.

And about 80 per cent of ­Catholics and parents of children at Catholic schools have the same view, according to a survey of 1600 people across NSW, Victoria and Queensland commissioned by the National Catholic Education Commission.

NCEC executive director Jacinta Collins will present the findings to the parliamentary joint committee on human rights on Tuesday as it examines the commonwealth’s contentious Religious Discrimination Bill.

Ms Collins said her organisation would tell the committee Catholic schools should be free to be Catholic, and religious freedom deserves the same protection as other rights, including race, gender and freedom of association.

She argued the Victorian government had “overreached” in its recent legislation that prohibits religious organisations and schools from sacking or refusing to hire people based on protected attributes such as sexuality, gender identity or marital status, saying there was a concern it would set a precedent for other jurisdictions.

“Catholic schools don’t, and are not seeking to, discriminate against people on the basis of their personal attributes,” Ms Collins, a former Labor senator, told The Australian.

“We have gay teachers in the Catholic system, but it is our right to expect staff to act within the Catholic social teaching ethos. We would have concerns about a staff member who wanted to promote capital punishment or euthanasia – that’s not in accordance with our teaching,” she said.

Ms Collins said parents were choosing to send their children to a faith-based school because they wanted them to learn that faith, its values and teachings.

“It’s a very popular choice. Parents always have a secular education as an option to them, and if teachers want to work in a non-faith-based or a different-faith-based environment that’s a choice available to them as well,” she said.

Ms Collins stressed that it was important for the identity and purpose of Catholic schools to be able to retain a “critical mass” of Catholic students and staff, even as they accepted students and teachers from all religious and non-­religious backgrounds.

“This bill is about protecting ­religious rights, not discriminating against people who don’t support the same religious views,” she said.

The Religious Discrimination Bill, designed to prohibit discrimination based on religion in settings and areas such as employment and education, maintains a number of exemptions. These are the subject of fierce debate, including the exemption that would allow religious schools to favour teachers of that faith in their hiring.

Others giving evidence to the parliamentary committee on Tuesday include the Australian National Imams Council, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, and LGBTIQ+ rights group Equality Australia.

Equality Australia argues that under the proposed law, faith-based organisations including religious schools will maintain the ability to discriminate against ­people with different or no religious beliefs in employment and education.

Ms Collins said while she had sympathy with the LGBTIQ+ community over delays to the Sex Discrimination Act, it was a separate issue.

“This long-awaited legislation is about protecting religious rights and is not about sex discrimination,” she said.