Australia: contentious Bill in the balance

As Evangelicals Now went to press, political manoeuvring in Australia’s lower house has meant that the passage of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s contentious legislation to outlaw religious discrimination was looking increasingly uncertain, with elections looming this May.

Morrison’s government claims that ‘The Religious Discrimination Bill, and associated legislation, will ensure Australians are protected from discrimination on the basis of religious belief or activity – just as they are protected from discrimination on the basis of age, sex, race and disability’. Mounting opposition from some of his own Liberal MPs, and uncertainty as to whether the Labor opposition and some senior senators will back the Bill – with or without a number of amendments – have led to intense debate on the issue, both inside and outside Australia’s Parliament.

In response, Morrison – a devout Pentecostal Christian – has now proposed that the right of church schools to expel gay and transgender students, a permitted exemption to the Bill, should be scrapped with immediate effect. This represents a significant climbdown by the government, which originally wanted to address the potential repeal of those exemptions through a 12-month review process by the Australian Law Reform Commission – after the Bill becomes law.

Christian groups are outraged at the latest move, with one, FamilyVoice Australia, publicly doubting the Bill will ever now see the light of day. Calling on Morrison to ‘walk back his attack on Christian schools’, it says: ‘Religious freedom is a fundamental human right. This includes the ability of Christian schools to operate in accordance with Christian values, including who they enrol as students and who they employ as teachers. But Morrison has caved in to Rainbow activists and said that he will legislate to limit the ability of Christian schools to determine enrolments around matters of gender and sexuality.’

The Australian Christian Lobby’s national director of politics, Wendy Francis, had previously insisted that the sex discrimination exemption ‘protects the teaching and daily operation of faith-based schools’, and said the ACL and other Christian groups would not support the Bill if it included the removal of the sex discrimination exemptions. It is widely believed that a key reason Morrison won the last Australian General Election in 2019 was because the previous Labor administration had failed to connect with religious groups.