Prime Minister Scott Morrison plans to introduce his Religious Discrimination Bill into Parliament this week despite mixed support from colleagues in a Coalition meeting yesterday. The Morrison Government pledged to develop the bill during the last federal election.
The contentious Religious Discrimination Bill is set to be seen by the lower house this week, now in its third and ostensibly final draft. Mr Morrison committed to introducing the legislation at the last election after the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2017.
The most updated version of the legislation was made publicly available yesterday. The Bill was proposed as a means of strengthening protections for people of faith and religious groups. During a Coalition meeting yesterday, some Liberal MPs raised concerns about the Act’s potential to diminish or disempower established equality laws.
The Act would grant protections to religious institutions—including schools—who want to employ people based on their adherence to a given faith.
“It is not discrimination for a religious primary school to require all of its staff and students to practice that religion, if such a requirement is necessary to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of people of that religion,” the Act says.
The same would apply to religious hospitals, aged care facilities, and disability care services.
Provisions in past drafts also allowed religious institutions to dismiss staff on faith-based grounds, but that has now been removed. Another provision that has since been amended would have allowed health service providers to refuse treatment on the grounds of “conscientious objection”.
Members of the Coalition told Mr Morrison they had concerns over the Bill, one of whom said he “questions the need for it”.
“We need to make sure we are not legislating a right to discriminate…for one party and removing the right to defend from another,” Backbencher Warren Entsch told ABC.
LGBTQ+ groups such as Equality Australia have expressed concerns the Bill would be used to justify discrimination against people in same-sex relationships.
“This will allow someone to be given a defence to a discrimination complaint if they say offensive, insulting, inappropriate, unacceptable things,” Equality Australia chief executive Anna Brown told ABC Radio.
However, Mr Morrison defended the legislation as a “shield”.
“It is a religious discrimination bill, not a religious freedoms bill, and that is important in relation to it being a shield, not a sword, and to allow the freedoms of people to follow their faith,” the prime minister said.
If accepted by the lower house, it is expected the next move will be to take the Bill to a Senate inquiry. The Bill is unlikely to become law by the end of 2021 as this parliamentary session draws to a close.
