Australian Politics
‘What are they trying to achieve?’ Liberal MPs urge caution on religious discrimination
Should religious schools be allowed to reject homosexuals as students and as staff? The basic clash here is between the Biblical view of homosexuality and the current secular view. The two are probably irreconcilable. They certainly have been so far. Putting it crudely, are homosexuals admirable or an abomination? The Bible view is very clear, in both the Old and New Testaments.
Real Christians endeavour to live as the Bible commands. Is it the word of God or is it not? If you think it is, your course is clear. Christians have died for their faith so a "worldly" law is not likely to move them. They would be quite likely to defy it
The issue is likely to be decided by the need to placate Muslims. Prosecuting Muslim school leaders for practicing Islam will just stick in all throats. In the Hadiths, Mohammed tells his followers that homosexuals should be thrown from the top of tall buildings. That is pretty clear disapproval
Two federal Liberal Party MPs are warning that a debate over religious discrimination laws must not again descend into a culture war that captures LGBTQ Australians in its crosshairs, as faith leaders and equality advocates urged the Albanese government not to delay legislating.
Tasmanian MP Bridget Archer and NSW senator Andrew Bragg were among a small bloc of moderate Liberal MPs who broke ranks with their party room in favour of stronger protections for LGBTQ students during the former Morrison government’s failed attempt to pass religious discrimination laws on the cusp of the 2022 federal election.
A renewed debate on the issue is expected to kick off when federal parliament returns in February and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus releases the findings of a review by the Australian Law Reform Commission. The review is designed to inform the government’s plans to legislate a religious discrimination framework while also bolstering protections for LGBTQ students and staff at religious schools.
Archer and Bragg said their positions remained unchanged on the issue and that any reform must simultaneously protect people of faith while also repealing laws that provided a legal basis for discrimination against LGBTQ teachers and students.
Archer, who went a step further than the other moderate Liberals and crossed the floor to vote against the Morrison government’s proposed religious discrimination act, said while she supported protections for people of faith from discrimination, she remained concerned the issue would again be caught in a fight over “identity politics, culture wars and moral panics that never really ends well”.
“The Albanese government needs to be very clear from the outset if they are introducing this legislation, what are they trying to achieve? What’s the problem we’re seeking to solve? This would be worthwhile to justify what I would guarantee will be the damage to people on the way through,” she said.
Archer said a clear lesson from the last parliament was that vulnerable Australians, in particular LGBTQ students, were exposed to a protracted, divisive debate.
The debate devolved into a political fight over whether faith schools should retain legal exemptions in the Sex Discrimination Act to discriminate against gay and transgender students and staff, including in employment and enrolment practices. The Morrison government’s proposal to couple its religious protections with a ban on schools expelling gay students, but not trans students, inflamed the debate.
Of the six Liberals who split from the party room in 2022, only Archer, Bragg and MP-turned-NSW senator Dave Sharma remain in parliament after the others lost their seats at the election. Sharma declined to comment.
Bragg said he had written to Dreyfus in 2022 urging Labor to deal with the issue early in their term. “I agree with the religious leaders that the government shouldn’t leave this to the last minute – that’s a recipe for disaster. I do believe there is a strong case for federal protections for people of faith,” Bragg said.
“I don’t want to see any minority group, whether it’s LGBTQ groups or it’s a religious group, damaged as part of this debate. I think that’s very achievable, but Labor has to deliver a constructive, collaborative process.”
After the Coalition’s aborted attempt in 2022, Labor went to the election promising its own religious discrimination and anti-vilification laws to close a gap in the federal law – which already has anti-discrimination acts covering age, race, sex and disability – while also outlawing discrimination at faith-based schools against staff and students based on their gender status and sexual orientation.
Dreyfus received the report from the law reform commission in December and is expected to release it in February, with religious leaders and equality groups hopeful laws will be introduced into parliament before July.
What’s the proposed religious discrimination law about?
Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Peter Comensoli said he was eager for an exposure draft of Labor’s legislation to be made available in the first half of the year.
“The further delay in the release of the [Australian Law Reform Commission] report until February pushes out the timeline for the government in dealing with the Religious Discrimination Bill. This raises the risk of pushing the bill into the election cycle, which would be most unfortunate, and should be actively avoided,” Comensoli said.
Anglican bishop of South Sydney Michael Stead insisted that no Anglican schools wanted the right to discriminate against LGBTQ students – a view echoed by other faith groups – and said he expected the sticking point this time around for religious institutions would be securing their rights to preference staff who reflected the school’s religious ethos in hiring practices.
“The last thing that any of the communities want is for this to still be an election issue next time around. I’m really hopeful that it can be done in this calendar year,” Stead said.
Equality Australia chief executive Anna Brown said after years of failed attempts to change the law it was vital the Albanese government did not delay these reforms any longer.
“Students should be able to go to school and be supported to learn and grow as who they are, and teachers should not fear losing their jobs because their sexuality or gender, or because they support a student who is gay or trans,” Brown said.
“We urge all MPs to deal with this issue in a measured and respectful way to spare LGBTIQ+ communities, particularly young people, the distressful and hurtful debate that took place when this issue was last before federal parliament.”
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Tanya Plibersek blocks Victorian government’s plan to build wind turbine plant at Port of Hastings
Tanya Plibersek has blocked plans by the Victorian government to build a plant to assemble wind turbines for offshore windfarms because of “clearly unacceptable” impacts on internationally important wetlands.
Plans to build the terminal at the Port of Hastings – seen as critical for the state’s strategy to develop an offshore wind industry – included dredging up to 92 hectares (227 acres) of the Western Port Ramsar wetland and reclaiming 29 hectares of seabed.
The environment minister wrote in her rejection of the proposals that “large areas of the [wetland] will be destroyed or substantially modified as a result of direct impacts of the proposed action”.
The Victorian government set aside $27m in its last budget to progress the development, which it said would support “wind construction and delivery of up to 1GW per year” and serve multiple windfarm developments.
But Plibersek said the plan was likely to cause “irreversible damage to the habitat of waterbirds and migratory birds and marine invertebrates and fish” that were critical to the wetland.
The wetlands were one of Victoria’s three most important sites for wading birds, and regularly supported 20,000 or more waterbirds, the minister wrote, and the impacts of dredging and reclaiming large areas could not be mitigated or offset.
Plibersek’s department had advised the wetlands supported at least 1% of the global population of the eastern curlew and the curlew sandpiper – both critically endangered.
Eastern curlews migrate about 11,000km from Siberia and north-eastern China for the Australian summer.
Western Port was listed under the Ramsar convention for internationally important wetlands in 1982.
Sean Dooley, of BirdLife Australia, said: “Ramsar sites are not declared on a whim. This is a hugely important area for Victoria, for Australia and internationally. On principle, to destroy that amount of Ramsar wetland is not on.”
The federal opposition environment spokesperson, Senator Jonathon Duniam, said: “Victorian and federal Labor’s net-zero targets are a mess.
“They are clearly rushing this transition which will set Australia back and push power prices further up. Labor needs to be careful that they don’t wreck the environment in their renewables-only pursuit of net zero targets.”
Victoria has ambitions to deliver Australia’s first offshore windfarm developments and had described the project as “critical, nation-leading, enabling infrastructure” that would receive, assemble and install offshore windfarm foundations, towers and turbines.
The Australian government has proposed six "high priority" offshore wind areas. Two - in Gippsland, in Victoria, and the Hunter, in NSW - have been declared. Another four are proposed for the Illawarra coast off Wollongong, north of Tasmania in Bass Strait, in southwest Victoria and in southern Western Australia following consultation periods.
Most zones are at least 10km from the coast. The government says creating an offshore wind industry will help the country replace ageing coal-fired power plants and reach net zero emissions by 2050.
There has been local opposition in NSW, and the South Australian government asked for the southwest Victorian zone not to cross its border.
The creation of an offshore wind zone does not guarantee development would go ahead. It is the first of five regulatory stages. Others include project-specific feasibility and commercial licences and an environmental assessment under national conservation laws. If successful, the first offshore wind farms could be built this decade.
There are different views on the role offshore wind could play. It can be a powerful source of renewable energy due to the placement and size of the turbines - at times, more than 300 metres in height - but the technology is significantly more expensive to build than onshore renewable energy.
The offshore wind industry has struggled overseas this year, with several projects cancelled and delayed, mainly due to rising construction costs.
The Victorian environment minister, Steve Dimopoulos, said the government was “undeterred” and would “digest the decision” before deciding what to do next.
“These processes exist for a reason because we have to balance biodiversity impacts.”
He said offshore wind was “critically important” for energy security in Victoria and Australia.
A Victorian government spokesperson said: “Victoria is proud to be developing Australia’s first offshore wind industry, which will be crucial for delivering national energy security and create thousands of jobs right here in Victoria. The Victorian Renewable Energy Terminal is key to achieving this.
“We are assessing the Commonwealth’s feedback to determine the next steps.”
Plibersek will have to make a decision later this year on a $1.3bn proposal for homes, restaurants and a marina at Toondah Harbour in Brisbane’s Moreton Bay that critics say will cause unacceptable damage to the Ramsar-listed wetlands there.
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‘Who’ matters in immigration
Perhaps the only positive to come from the Israel-Hamas war and its upheavals is that it has opened up space for an honest conversation about immigration. As these events have made clear, there are sizable numbers of people in Western societies who thoroughly despise us.
In Australia, this is the result of an immigration regime that’s been run on a near carte blanche basis. To take the figures first, we’ve had ‘historic highs’ in immigration with net overseas migration of half a million in the year to September and an international student intake that’s now over 600,000.
Regarding the sources of our migrants, our permanent migrants stem overwhelmingly from East Asia and the Subcontinent and not from our Anglo-European origins: three of our top five source countries, for instance, are India, China, and Nepal.
This is not an error, but deliberate policy. As Immigration Minister Andrew Giles boasted on social media, the Albanese government swiftly processed a million or so visas as they came into office. Giles and Co were, to quote: ‘Cleaning up the visa system and clearing the backlog after almost a decade of Liberal neglect.’
Yet the simple but taboo fact is that not all immigration is equal.
The most obvious example of this is in the recent rise of anti-Semitism. In contrast to historical Western anti-Semitism, the current wave overwhelmingly emanates from Australia’s Islamic communities where we have seen a disturbing rise in hate preachers and violence visited upon the Jewish community.
This trend is seen across Europe as well. Take the Kosher supermarket killings in Paris in 2015, or the record number of Jews leaving Europe, or that there are security guards outside Jewish schools. Indeed, there’s a very real prospect that there’ll be no Jewish communities left in Europe at all by the end of the century.
The failures of the West’s immigration programs are not restricted to the Jewish community. Here, for instance, is ex-Downing Street advisor Nick Timothy on some of the effects of immigration in the UK.
‘Seventy-two per cent of Somalis here live in social housing. Fifty-seven per cent of Bangladeshi and Pakistani women are economically inactive. Forty-six per cent of Pakistani-heritage babies born in Bradford have parents who are cousins. Proportionately, Albanians are 10 times more likely than the public as a whole to be in prison. The number of people unable to speak English well or at all has increased in the past 10 years by more than 20 per cent to more than a million.’
In Europe, things are much the same. In the Netherlands, a recent report revealed that migration from rich countries was a net benefit while that from poor countries was not. In Denmark, a 2018 study showed strikingly similar results: it noted that in contrast to Western migrants, non-Western migrants from areas such as North Africa and the Middle East were a net fiscal negative.
And as it is in the UK and Europe, so it is here as well, especially now that around one in three Australians are foreign born as are 45 per cent of residents in Sydney and Melbourne.
Here are some assorted statistics, you can make of them what you will. Sudanese-born Australians have the highest imprisonment figures of any immigrant group, with rates around three times the national average. The number of foreign-born Australians with no or poor English proficiency is over 800,000. Around three-quarters of recent migrants are low-skilled.
People born in North Africa and the Middle East have unemployment rates some three times higher than those born in North-West Europe and the Americas. Migrants from non-English speaking countries have higher crime rates than those from the UK or North America. Migrant and refugee women have poorer health outcomes than the native-born and are much less likely to be employed.
In Victoria, the Sudanese-born make up ‘7 per cent of individuals charged in home invasions, 6 per cent of those in car theft offenses and 14 per cent of individuals charged with aggravated robbery’ despite being just 0.16 per cent of the population. In New South Wales, Muslims make up about 3 per cent of the population but around 9 per cent of the prisoners.
These are not good outcomes for a society in which the official dogma is that ‘we’re the most successful multicultural nation in the world’ while generating these statistics. Indeed, even to mention this is to cast yourself as a heretic and to exclude yourself from polite society.
What is needed, however, is for Australia to embrace reality again and to acknowledge that there are meaningful differences between groups and their capacity to successfully integrate and contribute to our society.
This is a view that still prevails in places like East Asia and Hungary and that’s been prevalent through almost all of human history. Indeed, it’s a notion that European nations have returned to as they’ve seen indiscriminate immigration dissolve their societies before their very eyes. That poster child of post-war liberalism, Sweden, for instance, is now on track to be 20-30 per cent Muslim by 2050.
It’s no surprise, then, that the Europeans are winding back their experiments in mass immigration. As Christopher Caldwell has noted, [highly-restrictive] ‘Denmark is the country on which virtually all European governments have announced they wish to pattern their policies.’
Australia, too, should heed this advice. As is becoming clearer by the day, our experiments with mass immigration have not improved our country.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/who-matters/
*********************************************Time for a new generation of Indigenous leaders to step up
The last thing we should do in the new year is continue with Indigenous policies that the past year proved to be hopeless and divisive failures.
Yet the last day of 2023 was full of the same old complaints by the same old people. Noel Pearson was reported as complaining that Indigenous affairs were in a worse state than before the October 14 referendum vote. Liberals for Yes leader Sean Gordon complained that neither side of politics had offered a viable alternative to a voice to parliament.
Pearson’s admission in the last throes of the failed campaign that there was no plan B should be seen as an opportunity to make a fresh start in 2024. An opportunity to break from the policies and philosophies that brought us the desperate failure of the voice.
And if that means breaking with some of the people wedded to those policies and philosophies, so be it. The voice was the high-water mark of a philosophy of grievance and separatism fostered by leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinkers. Its comprehensive rejection gives us the chance to start again with a positive and empowering approach to Indigenous affairs. But to do so, the leaders who won’t shift from that philosophy will need to stand aside for new blood so their failed ideas can be relegated to history.
Pearson was responsible for groundbreaking, important work in Indigenous communities many years ago.
His most recent work on the voice has not been his finest. With apologies to Gough Whitlam, it’s time for him and others such as Marcia Langton, Megan Davis, Gordon and Thomas Mayo to hand over to a new generation of emerging Indigenous leaders.
They bet the house on red and lost. It’s time for them to promote their successors. Pearson promised as much when he told the ABC’s 7.30 report on February 20, 2023, that if the voice referendum fails he “Will fall silent. That will be the end of it”.
Even more pointedly he told 7.30 that “if the advocacy of that pathway fails well then a whole generation of leadership will have failed … It will be up to a new generation to chart a new course”.
But Pearson and company must not just hand over to successors with the same failed approaches, but a new generation with new ideas.
Foremost among these, of course, is Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Price not only has – to borrow a dreaded term – lived experience of the challenge Indigenous people face but a coherent and considered philosophy for change.
Her emphasis on individual rights, freedoms and responsibilities is not merely liberal to the core but empowering. Seeing Indigenous policy through the prism of victimhood, grievance and separatism disempowers individuals and justifies the collectivist approaches that have failed everywhere they have been tried.
Price is not the only one we should turn to. Nyunggai Warren Mundine, Anthony Dillon and Kerrynne Liddle are Indigenous leaders of a new and promising stamp. They offer a sense of hope – a sense the failed policies of the past don’t need to determine the future.
This is not to underestimate the difficulties of ensuring Indigenous Australians get the equality of opportunities we expect for non-Indigenous Australians. Nor is it to substitute one new magic bullet for a magic bullet that has manifestly failed. Shared work, determination and investment are required.
However, Australians are manifestly happy to support that effort. What they are not prepared to do is to continue the divisive and failed policies embodied by the voice. No more separatism, no more separate categories of Australians with permanently entrenched special rights.
Practical solutions rather than rights-based agendas will be the way forward. So, universities that genuinely care about Indigenous advancement should disband those corners of our law schools that continue to promulgate an Australian equivalent of the radical critical race theories seen in some US universities.
Australia is a single sovereign state and suffers no crisis of legitimacy. The deluded extremists in the halls of academe should find some other windmill to tilt at.
Similarly, we will need symbols and rituals of unity, not division. It is nonsense for Australians to be welcomed to their own country – as if it belongs to someone else – and claims of ownership or custody of land made in order to ground reparations are equally nonsensical.
Indeed, since the key elements of any treaty – acknowledgment of sovereignty, grants of self-government and reparations – are anathema to ordinary Australians, we need to stop talking about treaty and find a path to individual empowerment for individual Indigenous people.
The ABC, Qantas and the like should stop telling us that parts of Australia belong to certain collective subgroups of Australians.
While we can’t stop Lidia Thorpe claiming Australia belongs to her and her kin, not to those of us who do actually appear on the certificate of title, our great institutions should not contribute to this divisiveness.
Last year also taught us that Australians don’t appreciate being told they are racist simply for disagreeing with an agenda, especially by people seeking race-based preferences. In 2024 we should treat use of that word the same way we treat the use of the word Nazi – use of the word is immediate acknowledgment that the user has lost whatever argument they were trying to make.
This year should be the year of celebrating individual merit, not membership of a collective. To borrow from Martin Luther King, success or failure, the grant of privileges or the administration of punishments, should all depend on the content of one’s character, not on skin colour or indeed membership of any other collective.
Aiming for positive, uplifting and unifying symbols, not finding division or victimhood wherever one can, would make 2024 radically different from, and better than, 2023. That is why those who led us to the disasters of 2023 should stand aside and let the next generation try a brand-new way.
That may sound radical in these days of identity politics, critical race theory and gender or race-based policy. However, it isn’t really. It is no more than a return to classic liberal beliefs about the rights and freedoms, obligations and responsibilities, of individuals.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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