Senator Fatima Payman’s exit from the Labor Party, after being suspended for crossing the floor to vote in support of Palestine, inadvertently exposed an uncomfortable, underlying double standard at the heart of the federal government when it comes to the future of religious schools in Australia.
At present, the federal government is seeking to amend the nation’s anti-discrimination laws to prevent Australia’s religious schools from ensuring its staff believe in and promote the core tenets of the faiths that underpin the schools.
Under proposed changes, if a religious school sought to expel a staff member over their different convictions, just like Labor did with Payman, they could very well be sued by activists.
Reinforcing this double standard, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said before Payman’s resignation that she was welcome to return to the party if she toed the party line on Palestine, saying she was “welcome to return to participating in the team if she accepts she’s a member of it.”
Senator Penny Wong, once forced to vote the party line against same-sex marriage, added “we believe on this side of the chamber that collective decision-making is about the group being more powerful, more wise, than any one individual.”
So, if Labor uses this principle to govern its own house, how can it be seen as anything other than hypocritical to seek to prevent Australia’s religious schools from doing exactly same thing?
The recent Australian Law Reform Commission report commissioned by the federal government, recommends the removal of the exemption for faith-based schools in section 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act, stripping schools of their ability to make decisions “in good faith to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of an adherent of that religion or creed.”
The ALRC’s recommendation that section 38 be removed is a solution in search of a problem. By the ALRC’s own admission, the problem of religious schools discriminating against staff and students is negligible.
In its own report, it admits that discrimination complaints against religious schools recorded by the Queensland Human Rights Commission made up just 0.02 per cent of overall complaints, amounting to just 23 complaints since 2009. Equal Opportunity Tasmania similarly noted that it received very few complaints against religious schools.
Yet, the ALRC’s report on federal anti-discrimination laws would leave faith-based schools with little choice but to submit to ideological positions of its staff which are incompatible with their religious ethos.
It also creates an easy target for activist lawfare, as these changes deliver a sword to a minority of students, parents, and ideologically motivated organisations seeking to advance a political campaign to undermine faith-based education.
Exposed, the prime minister has been at pains to explain that he will not proceed with the changes without bipartisan support. His Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has even taken the extraordinary step of demanding a line-by-line review of any proposed legislation from the federal opposition in an effort to deflect attention away from reforms he and his colleagues commissioned.
In any event, the cost of mitigating these risks through heightened insurance premiums and the engagement of lawyers will be borne by parents. Institute of Public Affairs research found that families could face a 15 per cent increase in their child’s school fees to pay for just one activist’s attempt to sue a religious school under the proposed changes.
Worryingly, recent history shows a school could face multiple discrimination complaints at the same time. In 2022, students and staff at Citipointe Christian College lodged five discrimination complaints with the Queensland Human Rights Commission over the school’s issuing of enrolment contracts, which contained a statement of faith detailing the school’s beliefs about human sexuality.
Far from stopping discrimination, the federal government’s proposed reforms will serve to encourage it, by opening the floodgates for political activists to target people of faith and the schools in which they want their children educated.
The prime minister should appreciate that communicating a statement of belief to the school community was a deliberate effort to ensure that people were ideologically aligned—precisely what he does every day as the leader of the Labor caucus.
Margaret Chambers is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.