Church schools will lose right to expel gay students as PM deals with moderate Liberals

The right of church schools to expel LGBTIQ students will be scrapped as part of the government’s push to legislate religious freedom laws, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison tries to lock in the support of moderate Liberal MPs ahead of a potential vote on the bill in the next sitting fortnight.

The federal government will seek to amend a contentious section of the Sex Discrimination Act alongside its Religious Discrimination Bill, in a move that follows lengthy discussions between the Prime Minister’s office and key backbenchers over the past week.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has flagged an amendment to the government’s religious discrimination bill to protect students from discrimination.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The amendment, confirmed by Mr Morrison on Thursday, represents a significant departure from the government’s public position until now. Originally, the Coalition insisted the best avenue for addressing the potential repeal of the Sex Discrimination Act exemptions was through a 12-month review process by the Australian Law Reform Commission after the passage of the Religious Discrimination Bill.

Instead, moderate Liberal MPs Dave Sharma, Katie Allen, Fiona Martin and Angie Bell are pushing for the provision to be immediately scrapped. Mr Morrison has agreed to amend the law but the details of how that is done are still being worked out.

Mr Morrison revealed the amendment in a radio interview on Thursday, in which he opposed the decision by Brisbane school Citipointe Christian College to issue contracts requiring students to agree to specific gender roles and denounce homosexuality or face expulsion. The school has since withdrawn the contracts.

“My kids go to a Christian school here in Sydney, and I wouldn’t want my school doing that either,” Mr Morrison told Brisbane’s B105.3 radio.

“And the bill that we’re going to be taking through the Parliament, we will have an amendment which will deal with that to ensure that the kids cannot be discriminated against on that basis.”

The flagged amendment comes ahead of the release on Friday of reports by two parliamentary inquiries into the Religious Discrimination Bill. Government sources, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the amendment related to section 38(3) of the Sex Discrimination Act but could not confirm whether it involved the full repeal of the section. The section gives church schools a legal exemption to discriminate against students on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, including by expelling them, if it is done “in good faith in order to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents” of the religion.

The move represents an attempt by the Prime Minister to broker a pathway for the Religious Discrimination Bill’s passage in the next sitting fortnight after the moderate group renewed a push for the exemption to be scrapped following the actions of Citipointe Christian College. The delicate nature of the balance of power in Federal Parliament means Liberal and National MPs prepared to abstain or cross the floor can significantly influence whether the government brings legislation on for a vote.

However, a repeal of the Sex Discrimination Act exemption would not satisfy equality advocacy groups and could, at the same time, enrage conservative Christian lobby groups. Just Equal spokesman Rodney Croome said the repeal would be “hollow” if the Religious Discrimination Bill passed in its current form.

“A deal would be unacceptable if students are only protected from expulsion if there are no changes to those parts of the Religious Discrimination Bill allowing harmful ‘statements of belief’ against LGBTIQ+ young people and if the changes do not protect LGBTIQ+ teachers in faith-based schools,” Mr Croome said.

Equality Australia “cautiously welcomed” the amendment but maintained its view that the bill should be scrapped.

“The Prime Minister may be putting out one small fire, but his Religious Discrimination Bill will unleash a firestorm of discrimination in religious organisations against anyone that holds a different belief from their faith-based employer – even when they can faithfully do the job that is required of them,” legal director Ghassan Kassisieh said.

Several peak Christian lobby groups – including Christian Schools Australia, Australian Christian Lobby and Family Voice – are staunchly opposed to abolishing the exemption and have declared they will withdraw support for the Religious Discrimination Bill if it is scrapped.

Family Voice spokesman Greg Bondar said Mr Morrison had “become a victim of the tyranny of the LGBTIQA+ minority” and “will now suffer the same fate as Bill Shorten did in 2019 by ignoring the mums and dads who hold a Christian worldview”.

Government sources claimed Mr Morrison told Liberal moderates and wrote to Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, on December 1 informing them of the government’s intention to repeal the exemption. But two weeks later, Attorney-General Michaelia Cash walked back a deal struck with the four moderate MPs to fast-track the repeal, telling an online Christian forum people were “deliberately misconstruing” the bill by linking it to the Sex Discrimination Act and recommitting to the 12-month review process.

As recently as Wednesday, Assistant Minister to the Attorney-General Amanda Stoker reiterated the government’s intention to address the issue after the passage of the bill, telling ABC radio the government “has committed to taking away those exceptions, and we will do it as soon as we have the Religious Discrimination Act in force”.

Senator Stoker said some schools had told her the “only circumstance” in which they would seek to use the exemptions was against “activist” students and families.

“There is a concern that’s occasionally expressed to me by schools about, I guess, the activist family that joins a school, not to become a part of its community, but for the purposes of inflicting change upon an otherwise traditional way of doing things,” she said.

The Citipointe Christian College contract, issued to families last Friday and withdrawn on Thursday, stated that in line with the school’s ethos it would “only enrol the student on the basis of the gender that corresponds to their biological sex” and reserved the school’s “right to exclude a student from the college who no longer adheres to the college’s doctrinal precepts”.

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