Why religious freedom bill is a culture war sugar hit — and not much more

And the cheap sugar hits just keep on coming, culture-war wise that is, with the religious freedom bill coming around again. This is classic junk-on-junk stuff, prompted by a very particular stoush — the Israel Folau case — and responding to no great demand, to carve out a new political flank for the right.

Designed to operate at the federal level, and to override state-based employment protection and service guarantee, the bill’s confusions and contradictions are not a design flaw; they’re very much part of what’s wanted, in which the Coalition can portray itself as defending allegedly embattled religious types, despite the messiness and chaos it creates.

The political customer base is Christians in outer suburban marginal seats, who can be encouraged to feel put upon by a secular culture, and, more sneakily, Muslims in Sydney’s west. The latter was the only place in Australia, apart from central Queensland, which voted “no” in the marriage plebiscite. Religious stuff would be the best way to do an end-run around Labor in the region, and hold a key seat such as Reid, in the inner-middle west.

There is no guarantee that the Coalition want it to get through at all; there’s some usefulness in being defeated on it, valiant defeat against the secular hordes etc etc. The points gained from that, without the problems that the actual passage of the bill would create, would be a win-win for the Coalition. Problems there would be.

There’s a lot of employers and peak bodies who don’t want it to go through, because it threatens chaos in the workplace, and lawsuits. This is rooted in the law’s genesis, when sports star Folau went against the provisions of his very lucrative contract to run newspaper ads warning homosexuals that they would burn in hell if they did not cease their wicked activities. (Folau hasn’t caught up to “queer” yet; if he had to go through the sinfulness of every gender and sexuality permutation, he would have had to pay for a lift-out supplement.)

Sport is entertainment, and trading away speech rights to preserve image is nothing new. You don’t want the lead actor in a TV series to suddenly start mouthing off about the great replacement theory or some such, and sport isn’t much more than a TV series these days.

Those using it as a free speech struggle at the time were happy to disregard the employers’ rights they had spent years defending — against unfair dismissal laws for example — to get this momentary opportunity for a fight. 

Now, the bill is being buried under a thousand caveats. To appease employers, it has had to give them a clause under which religious fanatics can be sacked if they are causing financial harm, which presumably covers the pharmacy assistant who won’t sell HIV meds, the workplace Christian proselytiser, or the lunchroom jihadist, insofar as there are lunchrooms or workplaces anymore.

There’s plenty of room for dragged out hearings and lawsuits there, including nuisance ones, since the law gives an employee protection to practice discriminatory behaviour — haranguing LGBTQ colleagues for example — while also protecting those targeted from discrimination.

Paradoxically, its objective effect is to further weaken employer control via property and the market. The other nightmare it wants to throw up is in service provision, via religious administration of schools, hospitals, etc.

The answer to this has been around for a while, too. If a religious order wants to operate a closed religious practice — church, commune, seminary, higher teaching facility — they can do what they like within the basic law. But their schools and hospitals have long since ceased to be anything autonomous.

It’s not only that they accept huge amounts of state funding; it’s that practices we see as universally applicable are attached to the funding, tax deductions etc that allow them to keep going.

Schools, to be part of the system at all, accept certain curriculum and outcome conditions which are inherently secular, modern and scientific, and presume a certain set of assumptions — that students should be taught to think reflexively, evaluate beliefs, that science delivers truthful results and is a standalone practice, etc.

This is doubtless being ducked at many happy-clappy Christian schools, Orthodox Jewish and Muslim outfits, where creationism, female subservience and other stuff is spruiked as the revealed truth. But the fact that this is grounds for deregistering a school — even one that accepts no government funding — shows how necessarily secular we are. Same with hospitals.

Having a big wooden cross and a picture of a nun in the foyer of a multistory, multibuilding hi-tech outfit doesn’t make you a Catholic hospital; it simply means the institution was descended from one, and is now something else entirely. A religious hospice, a rehab centre, an adoption agency — sure, smaller and more value-driven outfits can have specific religious or philosophical principles, and the right to hire or act in light of those.

Those of us who want to run free political associations need to defend that form of organisational autonomy, which extends to things like LGBTQ venues, womens’ only organisations (and their right to define what constitutes women) and indigenous organisations.

But the idea that a thousand-staff hospital should be able to hire and fire on the basis of gender, sexuality or views of it is ridiculous.

That’s pretty much the same for assisted dying, medically necessary abortion and the like. If Catholic hospitals — most of what we’re talking about here — don’t want to administer a general health regime, they should hand over hospital control to the state, and reduce back to services that have some real relation to a religious practice. What we need are laws and debates that help us clarify such complex issues.

They can’t be definitively settled, so we need to make the process by which they are argued afresh as reflexive as possible. What we have with this junk religious discrimination law is the opposite — designed to obscure, muddy, and render dialogue more difficult, entrench camps of mutual misunderstanding, and feed off a sense of resentment and victimhood.

Should the Coalition get another term, they will have to own it, which would seem to guarantee that they will run it to the election, and then drop it soon after. And the sugar hits keep on coming…