The Religious Discrimination Bill Won’t Protect LGBTIQ Students From Punishment
Additional protections won't come into place for another year.
LGBTIQ students could be waiting 12 months for any real protection under proposed the new religious discrimination bill, with Attorney General Michaelia Cash appearing to backflip on her original deal.
Under the current proposed legislation, LGBTIQ students could be protected from expulsion immediately, but further protections to ensure they aren’t discriminated against or punished in other ways. However, it’s worth noting that the actual protections to ensure students can’t be expelled is yet to be added to the legislation.
Further protections will not be implemented until the Australian Law Reform Commission review next year, Michaelia Cash told Christian lobby group FamilyVoice in a webinar on Wednesday.
This new policy seemingly contradicts the deal that four key Liberal MPs — Katie Allen, Fiona Martin, Angie Bell, and Dave Sharma — agreed on in order to vote for the new legislation. These protections for students were a key part of the agreement.
“I’ve made clear that my support of the bill is contingent upon dealing with students,” Sharma told The Guardian.
This clause in the deal removed section 38(3) of the agreement, which allowed religious schools to discriminate against another person on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or relationship status or pregnancy. The Religious Discrimination Bill — which is one of the many things the Morrison Government promised at the last election but has not yet delivered on — has proven quite difficult. Michaelia Cash has been tasked with finding the difficult middle ground needed to actually pass the bill.
The bill has struggled to gain the support of the Liberal’s own MPs in the lower house, but by offering the additional protections Cash now appears to have reneged, the party risks the support of the Australian Christian Lobby and Christian Schools Australia.
In the webinar on Wednesday, Cash was asked how schools would be protected if they attempted to discipline — for example — a transgender student who wants “to wear a dress, or use a female bathroom although he’s biologically a male, or be called Steve instead of Eve”.
“The bill does not change the existing status quo for this issue…Because those exemptions already exist in the Sex Discrimination Act, they’re longstanding,” she replied.
Cash stressed that the Religious Discrimination Act is in addition to Australia’s preexisting sex discrimination laws. “I really wanted to make that distinction clear: this is a bill to protect against religious discrimination,” she said. “In relation to the Sex Discrimination Act, that is an ALRC referral…They will report back to the government 12 months after the passage of the bill.”
Australia’s proposed new religious discrimination laws have been widely criticised for essentially paving the way for further discrimination for the LGBTIQ community.
While many clauses — like the controversial ‘Folau’ clause — have been removed from the bill, there is still the issue of religious speech, with a clause essentially allowing you to say anything under the guise of genuine religion — provided it is in good faith.
“[If] the statement is made, in good faith, by written or spoken words or other communication (other than physical contact), the person [and] is of a belief that the person genuinely considers to be in accordance with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of that religion,” the bill reads.
While there are rules in place designed to protect this from turning into a caveat for hate speech, activists are convinced the protections do not go far enough.
“This bill will license people to say statements in the name of religion that would be discrimination today but tomorrow under this bill they would be lawful,” Equality Australia CEO Anna Brown told SBS News.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who is Pentecostal himself, introduced the bill to Parliament on November 25.
The bill, which won’t pass until next year at the earliest, is extremely controversial and has a number of key issues — particularly around health and education services — that are still the subject of much debate.