…about proposed legislation affecting ‘religious’ schools.

When your phone rings and it’s the school’s number, you always pay attention. And when it’s the Principal on the other end of the line, you know it must be serious. When that happened to me last week, I braced myself for the worst.

But the serious issue that our Principal was calling me about was not concerning my children specifically. It was about something much broader that could affect every child in every Christian, church or ‘religious’ school across Australia.

The Principal of our children’s school was calling to invite me to join a small group of parents meeting with our federal Member of Parliament in a couple of weeks’ time to voice our views on some proposed changes to legislation concerning ‘religious educational institutions’. Knowing the profound significance of these proposed changes, I immediately agreed. Although I find the thought of speaking face-to-face with an MP extremely daunting, this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

What are the proposed changes?

Under Australian law, ‘religious educational institutions’ are currently exempt from the Sex Discrimination Act (1984) (SDA), which prohibits individuals and organisations from discriminating against a person based on that person’s sex, marital or relationship status, pregnancy or, since 2013, their sexual orientation or gender identity.

These exemptions were put in place ‘in order to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents of that religion or creed’.¹ In 2013, when sexual orientation and gender identity were added to the list of protected attributes, there was bipartisan support for keeping the exemptions in order to ‘protect the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief in respect of the new grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity’.

The current Federal Government has now committed to removing these exemptions to make it unlawful for religious educational institutions to ‘discriminate’ against students or staff based on their sex, marital or relationship status, pregnancy, sexual orientation or gender identity. At the same time, the Government wants to ensure that these institutions ‘can continue to build a community of faith by giving preference, in good faith, to persons of the same religion … in the selection of staff’.²

In some jurisdictions, such as Victoria, these kind of exemptions have already been removed, making it illegal in that state for a Christian school to fire—or refuse to employ—a person based on their sexual practice, gender identity or marital status. Queensland is proposing to prohibit a school from discriminating against an even wider group, including those doing ‘sex work activity’.

In order to bring Australian law into line with this, the Federal Government asked the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) to investigate whether their commitments were consistent with international human rights law. The ALRC delivered its recommendations in December, which, if implemented, would write the Government’s commitments into law.

The ALRC report admits that in seeking to ‘maximise’ the right of some teachers to work in religious schools, its recommended reforms ‘may limit, for some people, the freedom to manifest religion or belief in community with others, and the parental liberty to “ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions”’.³

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