Scott Morrison yesterday asked Bill Shorten a simple question: do you believe in equality for religion in Australia?
It is a highly relevant question for an alternative prime minister. This question goes to the essence of the government’s belated proposal for a religious discrimination act. As Attorney-General Christian Porter said, discrimination on the grounds of sex, race and disability is illegal in Australia but not discrimination based on religious grounds.
“How can we allow that to stand in Australia?” the Prime Minister asked.
And what was Shorten’s response? He dodged, played both sides of the fence and then dismissed the whole thing as unimportant. The reason is obvious: much of the progressive constituency and ALP rank and file that Shorten needs doesn’t believe in equality for religion in this country. It wants religion in an inferior place with an inferior legal status. This reality underpins much of the current debate about religion. And it is a potential problem for Labor, despite its official support for such an act and Shorten’s insistence that Labor supports religious freedom.
Morrison, a conviction politician on this front, has drawn two new lines of argument. First, that religious protection is pivotal in a multicultural society where many religions thrive, where new arrivals tend to be more religious and where ethnic communities value their religious identity. The second is the equality argument advanced yesterday by both Morrison and Porter. The Attorney-General put it bluntly: you cannot stop a person entering a room on the basis of sex, race or disability but you can stop a person because of their religion.
The proposal for a religious discrimination act is long overdue. As Morrison said, religion is intrinsic to an individual’s identity. Polls show a majority of the population agrees with the principle of religious protection.
The inferior legal protections for religion have long been documented despite the blind eye of much of the media to this fact. It has been repeatedly pointed out by parliamentary committees, academic experts, the Australian Law Reform Commission and the Australian Human Rights Commission.
Morrison’s religious discrimination act was a recommendation from the Ruddock review to the Turnbull government. Shorten was correct to say the review should have been addressed much earlier this year. The blame for this lies with the former government.
Father Frank Brennan, a member of the review, told The Australian: “As we have a Sex Discrimination Act which deals with discrimination on the basis of various criteria including sexual orientation, the Ruddock panel thought it desirable that we at least have a religious discrimination act.”
As Porter argues, this is not a radical idea. It is conventional and follows the pattern on which Australia has legislated against various forms of discrimination. Morrison will seek to introduce the bill before the election. In an ideal world, it should be passed on a bipartisan basis. That is unlikely — given tension over competing rights — and the issue would then run over to the election period.
The government has been astute in referring to the Australian Law Reform Commission the issue of reconciling the protection of gay children at school with the school’s right to pursue its religious ethos and teachings. The government and Labor cannot agree on this task. The reference has the potential to isolate this issue from an election campaign.
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