Tasmanian Catholics rebel against religious freedom changes

Tasmanian Catholic schools are in open rebellion against proposed changes to religious freedom laws they warn will undermine their spiritual ethos and limit choice for parents.

Catholic Education Tasmania executive director Gerard Gaskin.

Catholic Education Tasmania has written to Anthony Albanese urging him not to “enact laws that will divide us over religion” in the latest sign faith-based educators are uniting against new protections for religious institutions on grounds they will do more harm than good.

In a letter sent on Monday to the Prime Minister, the executive director of Catholic Education Tasmania, Gerard Gaskin, and the leaders of 24 Tasmanian Catholic schools, expressed concern that contentious changes being proposed by Labor would undermine the religious ethos of faith-based schools.

“Your proposed legislation will severely impact the Catholic school’s ability to remain Catholic,” the letter said. “Schools would not be able to hire for mission, nor require staff to uphold Catholic belief and practice.”

“Please do not enact laws that will divide us over religion. Even today, religion matters to many Australians. Every fair-minded Australian values free speech. We are not asking for favour or preference.

“We ask only for the rights and freedoms that every Australian values: freedoms that have been honoured by governments since the founding of our nation.”

The letter said that Catholic schools in Tasmania had been “contributing to the common good of society since the 1820s” by educating hundreds of thousands of students across a diversity of backgrounds including migrants, refugees, Indigenous Australians and those with disabilities or special needs.

“A very large number of Australian parents choose religious schools which conform with their faith, or whose broad ethos they support. One in five Australian students attends a Catholic school,” the letter said.

The Australian has previously revealed that Mr Albanese’s draft legislation has proposed removing section 38 from the Sex Discrimination Act in a move that has ignited a fierce fight from religious schools and the Coalition.

The exemptions at section 38 of the SDA allow faith-based educators to insist on staff and students adhering to the doctrines, tenets, beliefs and teachings of the religious school. They also allow schools to preference teachers when hiring on the basis of faith.

While Labor’s changes would remove these exemptions, the government has produced a separate draft Religious Discrimination Act which would seek to replicate these protections and preserve the ability of schools to hire on the basis of faith.

However, the changes have been kept top secret. Labor has not publicly released its draft legislation and has only shared its changes with Peter Dutton and opposition legal affairs spokeswoman Michaelia Cash. Faith-based groups consulted on the shake-up were encouraged to keep the details confidential.

In their letter to the Prime Minister, the Tasmanian Catholic schools said that freedom of religion was the “fundamental bedrock of any democratic, pluralist society” and was enshrined in section 116 of the Australian constitution.
The letter also said Australia was a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which states that parents have the right to “to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in accordance with their own convictions”.

Signatories to the letter urged the government to “enact a Religious Freedom Law as soon as possible to codify and preserve these rights and freedoms.”

Mr Albanese has previously said that he only wanted to pass the changes to religious freedoms if they won support from the Coalition. But he later said the government was open to dealing with the Greens if the minor party was willing to support the rights people to practice their faith.