House debates

Wednesday, 9 February 2022

Bills

Religious Discrimination Bill 2021, Religious Discrimination (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2021, Human Rights Legislation Amendment Bill 2021; Second Reading

11:05 pm

Photo of Tim WattsTim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications and Cyber Security) Share this | Hansard source

As a member of parliament I've always been open about the fact I am an atheist. Indeed, I've written before about the fact that my personal view is that I don't believe it's appropriate for each day's parliamentary sitting to begin with a prayer, and I don't participate in them myself. I say this as context for the fact that among the things that I am most proud of as a member of parliament are the faith communities in my electorate. I know that's a common experience for those in this House. I'm blessed with one of the most diverse electorates in the country, and those of us who live there in Melbourne's west—we love it. We don't worry about war on Christmas-style culture in my electorate; no-one goes around saying 'Happy holidays' to each other every December, instead of 'Merry Christmas,' because in our community we're used to celebrating everyone's special days with our mates. We're just as comfortable saying 'Happy Holi' or 'Ramadan Kareem' as we are saying 'Merry Christmas', as circumstances demand.

Respect for diversity of religious faith is a normal part of our experience in my community in Melbourne's west. And we are so much richer for it, because, while their source of faith might be diverse, their motive towards community service is universal. We tell our kids to, in a crisis, look for the helpers. Well, in my community all too often in a crisis the helpers are driven to go to the scene and help by their faith. Sikh Volunteers Australia have become famous Australia wide for their constant presence anywhere where there is a crisis in our community. Where there are members of our community in distress, you can bank on the Sikh volunteers being there in their famous high-viz vests, colourful turbans and smiling bearded faces. Across the Black Summer bushfires and the two years of the pandemic that followed, they have served well over 100,000 free meals from their trusty Free Food Van, taking the langar of the Gurudwara on the road to where it's needed most. Look for a crisis and you'll see them there. We're so proud of them.

Then you have the Australian Islamic Centre volunteers from the Newport mosque—an architectural icon of Melbourne's west that we are so proud of in its own right, a powerhouse community group. They don't just look out for people in our own backyard but go looking for fellow Australians in need everywhere. During the Black Summer bushfires, volunteers from the Newport mosque collected five semitrailer loads full of donations, drove them to Bairnsdale at three o'clock in the morning and, with the assistance of the MFB and the CFA, put on a breakfast sausage sizzle for exhausted firefighters. It was quite the logistical enterprise and it earned them international television coverage. I'm so proud to be their representative in this chamber.

We're also home to one of Australia's largest Buddhist temples in Melbourne's west, Quang Minh Temple. Their volunteers delivered $33,000 worth of donations to the CFA in Bairnsdale and the CFA District 11 Headquarters Brigade during the Back Summer bushfires. Senior Venerable Thich Phuoc Tan, the abbot of Quang Minh, is a model of ethical leadership in the country and someone I know all local political representatives in Melbourne's west draw guidance and inspiration from. He's a great bloke to spend time with.

Christian groups, too, are a wonderful source of charitable works in our communities, staffing food vans for the disadvantaged and providing essential support for the vulnerable, especially the significant asylum seeker community in Melbourne's west. The Westgate Baptist community shares its ministry and facilities with a growing congregation of Karen refugees from Myanmar and has for many years provided direct material support for refugees in the camps on the Thai-Myanmar border, as well as providing direct support for our refugees in our own community through the ministry of Westgate Refugee Support.

These people of faith in our community in Melbourne's west make our community a better place. They're the kinds of people of faith who make me embarrassed of the militant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins, who are so arrogant in their intellectual certainty that they can't recognise fundamental human decency when it's right there in front of their eyes. I would be furious if anyone discriminated against any of these people of faith in my community on the basis of their religion or religious practices.

I joined the Australian Labor Party because I believe in equality of opportunity, social and economic. Everyone should be entitled to live a life of equal human dignity, free from discrimination. Protecting people from this kind of discrimination is core to why I am in politics and the Labor cause. It's why Labor has been the architect of Australia's antidiscrimination law framework. It was Labor that enacted the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975, Labor that enacted the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984, Labor that enacted the Disability Discrimination Act in 1992 and Labor that provided bipartisan support for the enactment of the Age Discrimination Act in 2004. It's an antidiscrimination record that those of us on this side of the House are rightly proud of. The legal protection of freedom from discrimination on the basis of religious belief or activity deserves equal recognition in Australia's Commonwealth antidiscrimination framework.

Many constituents have written to me in recent days, urging me to oppose this bill on the grounds that Labor must defend its antidiscrimination legacy. It should be understood that Labor's antidiscrimination legacy includes a long record of legislative action to protect people of faith from discrimination. In Queensland in 1991, Wayne Goss made it unlawful for people of faith to be discriminated against on the grounds of religion, as did the ACT Labor government the same year. A Labor government had already passed equivalent laws in Western Australia. The Tasmanian Labor government introduced similar protections in 1999, and the great Steve Bracks passed the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act in Victoria in 2001. In 2009 the Rann South Australian government amended the Equal Opportunity Act to prevent discrimination on the grounds of a person's religious appearance or dress. Labor has always been the party of fairness and equality. We've put in place the vast bulk of this country's antidiscrimination laws, entrenching legal equality for people, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality or disability. It has been core to our values for half a century. These are the values that have guided our consideration of this bill.

The shadow Attorney-General has outlined the three principles that have guided our engagement with this bill: (1) religious organisations and people of faith having the right to act in accordance with the doctrines, beliefs or teachings of their traditions of faith; (2), consistent with decades of legislative action at the state level, support for the extension of the federal antidiscrimination framework to ensure Australians are not discriminated against because of their religious beliefs or practices; and, (3), consistent with an international covenant, ensuring any extension of the federal antidiscrimination framework does not remove protections that already exist in law to protect Australians from other forms of discrimination. It's pretty simple.

There's support throughout the Australian community and across the political spectrum to extend the current federal antidiscrimination framework to people of faith. The Prime Minister's bungling of a handful of contentious provisions that he has introduced in this bill shouldn't be allowed to detract from this. Unfortunately, though, the base, petty partisan instincts of this Prime Minister have caused the position of these people of faith in our community to be demeaned. Instead of seeing antidiscrimination laws as a shield to protect groups from unfair and unequal treatment, he set out to design this bill to give a sword to the tiny minority of people that want to attack other groups. Instead of celebrating the role of people of faith in our community, he sought to set other groups in our community against them; instead of uniting Australians, he set out to divide them—and all for that most base of political reasons: the pursuit of short-term political gain. He doesn't care about the long-term damage that this divisive approach will cause to our social cohesion—to the relationship between people of faith and other groups in our community, principally the LBGTIQ community, and to the individuals targeted in this legislation. He just wants to play politics because that's all he is capable of. He's a little man inflicting a narrow viewpoint on a nation that is far bigger, far greater, than he can even comprehend.

This Prime Minister has diminished the position of people of faith and their communities in our nation through his political games. When they and the nation needed a leader; what they got was a political schemer. After failing to live up to his word to deliver a religious antidiscrimination bill for the past three years, the Prime Minister is trying to ram through an extraordinarily complicated, unprecedented piece of legislation, in the shadow of an election. His motives are plain for all to see—as usual, dividing, not unifying; not leading but scheming.

The core part of this bill is uncontroversial: prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of religious belief or activity in different areas of public life, including in the context of employment, education, access to premises and the provision of goods, services and accommodation facilities. But there are significant problems with this bill, particularly regarding the so-called 'statements of belief' clause and the provisions overriding existing state and territory antidiscrimination laws. The Prime Minister has ignored these problems. Indeed, despite them being identified by his own members, he has only introduced amendments in the last few days. When things got messy in the party room, they cobbled together a work-through solution. When he should have been working with everyone in this chamber, opposition and crossbench united, he worked with a small group in his party room.

That's why today Labor is moving substantial amendments to this bill—three sets of amendments. We'll move amendments in the House and the Senate and, if our amendments are successful in either the House or the Senate, we will insist on them. First, we'll be moving an amendment to delete the statements-of-belief clause and the provisions of the bill overriding state and territory antidiscrimination laws and qualifying conduct rules. The provisions have been described by a number of legal experts as procedurally unworkable and potentially unconstitutional—as the member for Maribyrnong said, a lawyer's picnic. More importantly, though, these are the sword provisions of the bill. These are the provisions that don't give people of faith a shield against unequal or unfair treatment but instead purport to set up unfair, unequal legal protections for people to infringe the rights of others. In this way they diminish existing protections against discrimination and vilification rather than expanding on them. Labor's amendments will remove this sword and ensure that people continue to be protected by existing anti-discrimination regimes.

Second, we'll be proposing an amendment to introduce an antivilification provision in this bill. In the second reading speech of this bill, the Prime Minister told this chamber:

People should not be cancelled or persecuted or vilified because their beliefs are different from someone else's in a free liberal democratic society such as Australia.

But there is nothing in Australian law or the bill before the House prohibiting religious vilification. We know this from the 18C debate. I saw the effects of this firsthand during the hearings for the government's social media and online safety select committee inquiry. I'll give one disturbing example of this that we heard during the hearings. The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network and its volunteers have been being trying to tackle Islamophobia targeting Australian Muslims on social media platforms. Its work is motivated in no small part by fear that the radicalisation engine that powered the Christchurch terrorist, an Australian who murdered 51 Kiwis nearly three years ago, has not been fronted by Australian society or government. As part of this work, over 18 months AMAN identified more than 100 hate artefacts, examples of dehumanising Islamophobic vilification posted by the former senator Fraser Anning to his Facebook page. Despite this, Facebook did not see this as breaching their policies to the extent that removal of his account was required. Social media appearing before this inquiry have been united in the need for a legal baseline for hate speech in our society, but it hasn't happened in Australia.

I asked Rita Jabri-Markwell, AMAN's representative, how it felt knowing that coming up on three years since Christchurch attack there was still no Commonwealth law preventing this kind of online religious vilification that radicalised the Christchurch terrorist. She responded:

It's made us feel really lonely. I don't know how else to describe it. It's kind of like you don't matter. But we just have to keep going. If another scenario like that happens, I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I knew that I hadn't tried everything. At the moment, we haven't acted.

We should act in this bill, and Labor's amendments will.

This is yet another example of the Prime Minister's actions not matching words and it is, I would add, a failure of this country to confront the conditions that allowed one of our own to be radicalised to the point of murdering 51 people of faith in another country.

The third set of amendments we will make to this bill ensure that in-home aged-care service providers cannot discriminate on the basis of religion in the provision of aged-care services, an inexplicable oversight in the bill.

Finally, Labor will move amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act to ensure that religious schools will be prohibited from discriminating against students of on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

During the same-sex marriage debate in the wake of the plebiscite result, I told this chamber:

The parliament and the public have so clearly rejected homophobia. The tiny minority of people who think that religion is like a toy plastic sheriff's badge to wave at other people rather than a source of personal moral reflection will be tutting their fingers at someone else soon enough. Indeed, it is clear from the way that the 'no' campaign desperately tried to make the marriage equality survey about anything other than marriage between LGBTIQ Australians that the reactionaries have already chosen their new target—trans kids.

And here we are. Australia this morning woke to news headlines that declared that the Prime Minister's deal with his own party room to ensure their support for this bill would protect the right of gay, lesbian and bi kids but would not protect trans kids from discrimination at the hands of their schools. From looking at these headlines, it looked like the Morrison government had deliberately chosen to use discrimination against trans kids as a political weapon in this debate. People of good faith will find the use of any children in this way to be utterly repulsive, let alone the most vulnerable children in our community. In the marriage equality debate, I implored conservative members of parliament not to make the same mistake, not to have the same failure of human empathy that they did for marriage equality again in the future when it came to trans kids.

Labor hasn't forgotten trans kids, and we'll be moving these amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act to ensure that they cannot be discriminated against at their most vulnerable. I say to those Liberals sitting opposite who are on the fence on this bill, reserving their position: 'Take this opportunity; support these amendments. This is your chance. We can still deliver legal protections for people of faith, defending them from discrimination, while also addressing the existing vulnerability to discrimination faced by Aussie kids just for being who they are. Support Labor's amendments, and we can achieve both of these objectives. Don't look back in future years wishing you took the opportunity while you had it.'

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