Saturday’s federal election result has been described across all media outlets as “surprising.” I would also call it “decisive” because, at the time of writing, the seat count for Labor is in the high 80s, a dozen seats or more above what the party needed for a majority. However you voted, there is no denying that the Labor government has been given a strong mandate for the next parliamentary term.
It is good that Labor will not have to rely on the Greens to form government and even better that the Greens’ anti-life and anti-faith influence in the House of Representatives will be much more muted if not removed altogether.
Without the Greens’ strong anti-religious push, it might seem that there are not any big battles for religious freedom on the immediate horizon.
What’s more, two days prior to the election, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese indicated that a religious discrimination bill would not be one of his priorities. At a press conference held in Perth, the PM said that broad support was needed for religious discrimination legislation, and that this is not the time for a “divisive debate about religion.”
In speaking of his reluctance to move on a religious discrimination bill, the PM did not specifically rule out changes to existing religious protections under the Sex Discrimination Act, and so-called “equality” groups are already renewing their calls for these changes, but given these two items of legislation have always been viewed as a package deal, I think it unlikely that Labor will touch one without the other.
However, this does not mean that there will be no threats to religious freedom during this term of parliament. It seems to me that the biggest potential threat to religious freedom in this parliamentary term will be disguised as a sweet-sounding charter of rights (otherwise known as a human rights act.)
The push for a charter of rights began with key players in the same-sex marriage debate, who started the groundwork on a charter of rights campaign within months of the marriage law changing. In a 2018 document outlining the proposal, the Human Rights Law Centre wrote that “the best chance of introducing a Charter of Rights is in the first year of an incoming ALP Government.” At the time, the Director of Legal Advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre was Anna Brown, who is now the CEO of Equality Australia.
While a charter of rights was not introduced in the first year of an incoming ALP government, the campaign nonetheless gathered steam in that time. In March 2023, just over nine months into Labor’s first term, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus tasked the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights to review Australia’s human rights framework and predictably, in May 2024, the majority of the committee recommended the introduction of a national human rights act. The committee even went further as to annex an example human rights act to its report.
As you might expect, the sample human rights act does not exactly reflect international law and prioritises some rights over others. For example, the very first right listed is the “right to recognition and equality before the law and freedom from discrimination,” with the “right to life” coming in second.
In granting the right to freedom of thought, conscience and belief, the sample human rights act mirrors three out of the four provisions that are listed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. However, the sample human rights act replaces the ICCPR’s guarantee that the “freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others” with a significantly watered-down protection that allows “limits that are reasonable and can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom.”
This proposed departure from Australia’s international obligations is critical, because it replaces a very strong, objective protection with a weak and subjective one that can be used to justify all manner of restrictions on religious freedoms.
While the joint parliamentary committee that recommended the introduction of a human rights act included five Labor MPs, the Albanese government is yet to formally respond to its findings, so whether it will be a priority for its second term remains to be seen. As we wait to find out, I implore you to not be fooled by benign-sounding proposals for a human rights act, because the devil, as they say, will be in the detail.