(Image: Private Media)

Between now and the election (whenever that is) there will be at most five days on which both houses of federal Parliament are sitting: three this week and two at the end of March. That’s it for the pretence of lawmaking, pretence being the Morrison government’s core skill.

It says much about this government that it has chosen as the two laws it says it really wants to pass bills which have three things in common: they are unnecessary; they will do more harm than good; their real purpose is unrelated to how they are described.

The government might as well have added a third — its bullshit anti-corruption bill, which if passed would make federal corruption more likely rather than less — but couldn’t be arsed even pretending to want to meet that 2018-vintage election commitment any more. Instead it will waste its last few days of parliamentary time altogether.

It’s barely worth the bother of even reading the social media (anti-trolling) bill or the religious discrimination bill, let alone analysing them.

For the sake of posterity, however, here is a short list of the reasons they should be buried in the backyard.

The anti-trolling bill has nothing to do with trolling on social media, and will do nothing whatsoever to combat it. That’s not just my jaundiced take; the public servants responsible for drafting it have confirmed exactly that to a Senate committee. The bill’s name is intentionally misleading.

The bill is in fact an attempt at defamation law reform. It purports to remove liability for defamatory third party comments posted on media company websites from the media publishers and plant it with the social media giants. It also creates a regime intended to make it easier for defamation plaintiffs to discover the identity of people who’ve defamed them on social media anonymously.

Defamation law is state law, not federal. These reforms, were they needed, should be addressed at state level. They’re not needed. If they achieve anything, it will be to increase the already ridiculous volume of defamation litigation clogging Australian courts. Most importantly, though, they will do nothing to improve online safety or combat anonymous trolling, which is what the government keeps saying they’re all about. That’s a flat lie.

The religious discrimination bill, the government says, is needed to combat discrimination against people on religious grounds. What it will do is create additional space for discrimination by religious people and institutions against others whose existence offends them. Mainly LGBTIQ+ people.

Two developments just yesterday will suffice to prove my point. First, it has been revealed that Morrison’s sop to the moderates on his backbench, the on-again-off-again promise he’s been making for over two years now to protect gay school students from being expelled by religious schools for being gay (as the law currently allows them to do), will be restricted to gay students only.

The amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act the government is proposing will remove the exemption religious schools enjoy from the prohibition on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It is, however, going to leave the exemption in place for discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Trans kids will still have no legal protection from being expelled or otherwise discriminated against by their school. So much for the faux empathy line.

Second and most instructively, the specific case study example Morrison chose to justify why the religious discrimination law is needed: “It’s a bill that means that a Sikh family can go and rent an apartment and not be discriminated against.”

There’s the sophistry, laid bare. It is illegal under existing racial discrimination laws in every state and territory in Australia to do what Morrison described. He is eliding racial and religious discrimination. It is beyond obvious that if a Sikh person in Australia suffers discrimination (as they often do) that is racially based, entirely on appearances. For fuck’s sake, Sikh men here and in the US suffered massive vilification in the aftermath of 9/11 because some ignorant idiots thought they look like Muslims due to their turbans. To pretend to claim that the hypothetical Sikh family being denied a rental property are the victims of religious rather than racial discrimination insults everyone’s intelligence. It’s specious and dishonest.

The religious discrimination bill will do nothing to protect anyone from genuine discrimination, because (as the government’s own review found) there’s no evidence that such a social ill exists in Australia. By and large nobody gives a shit about anyone else’s religion in relation to employment or the provision of services.

What the bill will do is encourage the projection of personal beliefs on to others. It will promote and protect the refusal of services, help and equal treatment to LGBTIQ+ people, along with their abuse. It will create, perpetuate and worsen division, discrimination and hate. 

Bravo.

To its shame, Labor is toying with supporting both these bills, for the craven political reason that it doesn’t want to get wedged so close to the election.

That the Morrison government sees these two useless, poorly drafted bills as the most appropriately last of its pathetically short list of legislative achievements says so much about the government it has been. Like these laws: insubstantial, performative, divisive and, ultimately, pointless.