There has been some very confused debate about the Government's proposed consolidation of anti-discrimination laws. Nicola Roxon left the job unfinished and confused. Simon Crean tried to still concerns in January, saying 'the intent was never to change the laws, simply to consolidate them'.
Since then the Government has agreed to drop some of the more controversial, novel suggestions in the Exposure Draft. There is still debate about the extent to which churches discriminate, and are entitled to discriminate, in employment and service provision. There is also debate within the Catholic Church leadership about the extent to which it is desirable that religion be listed as a ground for legal objection to discrimination.
David Marr on ABC Insiders on 3 February 2013 spoke of the challenges confronting the new Attorney General Mark Dreyfus with this legislation. He said:
There are lots of things to be tidied up. The big one now is to get out of that bill the charter that some of the most conservative leaders in some of the most conservative faiths in this country are being given ... to kick poofters, lesbians, single mothers, people living in de facto relationships ... kick 'em around in employment and do it with public money. This is not medieval Spain; this is Australia in 2013.
Marr was conflating two issues: employment and service delivery in education, and employment and service delivery in health and aged care.
Church schools are entitled to adopt employment practices requiring teachers not to flaunt or ridicule Church teachings to their students.
The Church continues to teach that sexual relations should be confined to marriage and open to procreation. This is not a teaching that commands broad compliance even within the Catholic community. It would be wrong for a Catholic school to dismiss a homosexual teacher for public non-compliance with Church teaching unless a heterosexual teacher was also liable to dismissal for the same public flaunting of that teaching.
Everyone knows there are teachers in Catholic schools who are homosexual, not married, practise contraception, have had abortions or used IVF. State intervention to prohibit discriminating employment practices informed by adherence, silence or respectful questioning of Church teaching would be an unwarranted interference with freedom of religion. Why not leave the law as it is, as Crean said the Government was committed to doing?
The issue in relation to Church health and aged care services is much simpler. It is a bureaucratic beat-up. Catholic Health