Australia’s gold standard attack on religious freedom: Churches must remain free

As the flame goes out on the Paris Olympic Games, one image left smouldering in the minds of those of faith was the overt mockery of Christ at the opening ceremony on 26 July.

The grotesque parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper, saw Jesus Christ, portrayed by a lesbian DJ, surrounded by drag performers and a near-naked man painted blue. While the painting depicts one of the most profound moments of the Gospel stories, the Olympic organisers saw fit to parade writhing cross-dressers over what Christians hold sacred.

Despite the overtly profane performance, its artistic director, Thomas Jolly, hurriedly denied it was so, and Paris2024 spokesperson, Anne Descamps, apologised for any offence caused by the ceremony, stating, ‘I think (with) Thomas Jolly, we really did try to celebrate community tolerance…. If people have taken any offense, we are, of course, really, really sorry.’

In Australia, attacking Christianity has become a sport for the elites and the political class.

Just as in Paris, the evocation of ‘tolerance’ and ‘love’ is eerily resemblant of attacks on Christianity in our own country. Indeed, in Australia, the most savage attacks on our religious institutions are carried out in the name of ‘inclusivity’ and ‘equality’.

In March, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) released its report into religious educational institutions and anti-discrimination laws as proposed by the Albanese government. While entitled Maximising the Realisation of Human Rights, the ALRC in reality acknowledged that within ‘progressive’ politics, some rights are more equal than others. It concluded that while its changes would enhance many other rights, religious freedom should be limited in order to better protect the rights of others, noting ‘the recommended reforms may limit, for some people, the freedom to manifest religion or belief in community with others and the associated parental liberty to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions’. It proceeded to propose sweeping changes that would render religious schools seriously vulnerable to activist attacks.

The report recommended that faith-based schools be stripped of their current exemption under Section 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, which allows them autonomy in hiring and enrolments so long as their decisions are made ‘in good faith in order to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of an adherent of that religion or creed’.

The proposed changes would hand a sword to activists seeking to undermine faith-based education by making faith-based schools vulnerable to litigation. Under the ALRC’s proposed changes, if a teacher conducted lessons contrary to the school’s religious ethos, it would have had no protection to ensure staff members honour the fundamental principles of the institution’s values.

Under the current laws, schools are protected from litigation under Section 38. However, if a future federal government successfully enacts the ALRC’s recommendations, the school would be left with little choice but to acquiesce to the teacher’s demands, or face litigation.

Having failed to convince the federal opposition to buy into its attack on Australia’s religious institutions, the Prime Minister appears to have contracted a serious case of cold feet on changing Australia’s religious discrimination laws, of which changes to Section 38 were believed to be a part. The PM said rather sheepishly, ‘The last thing that Australia needs is any divisive debate relating to religion and people’s faith…. I don’t intend to engage in a partisan debate when it comes to religious discrimination.’

While it seems this front of the elite’s war on religion has gone quiet, the battle still rages. In July, the Productivity Commission, now led by former Grattan Institute CEO Danielle Wood, released recommendations in its Future Foundations for Giving Inquiry report that seeks to diminish the ability of religious groups to attract philanthropic support.

Despite all evidence suggesting that religious entities enrich lives and provide a vital source of support in the community, the Productivity Commission does not consider them to be in line with the federal government’s philanthropic goals. It declared that there was ‘no strong case for government support’ of activities which seek to advance religion through the deductible giving recipient system.

The Commission instead recommended the federal government expressly exclude ‘all activities in the subtype of advancing religion’ from deductible giving recipient status, ‘primary, secondary, religious and informal education activities’ and school building funds.

Worse still, the Report recommends the abolition of the ‘basic religious charity’ category and related exemptions. This would empower the regulator, the Australian Charity and Non-for-profits Commission, to suspend, appoint, and remove leaders of religious institutions if it declared they violated certain governance standards. Currently, basic religious charities have autonomy over their own leadership.

The report justifies this as an effort to bring basic religious charities into line with the regulatory framework, citing that ‘inconsistent treatment of basic religious charities lacks policy rationale’. However, the Productivity Commission’s proposal is not merely a regulatory technicality, but rather the deliberate blurring of the line between church and state.

The autonomy to select, appoint, discipline, and remove religious leaders is fundamental to religious liberty. The logical extension of the state being empowered to appoint and dismiss religious leaders is that it would be positioned to select ministers sympathetic to its political goals, and to remove others that challenge its authority.

As Australia drifts ever further down the path of moral relativism, it is crucial that the church remain free to proselytise its faith and ethos. The idea that some government bureaucrat would be empowered to appoint or dismiss a religious leader is anathema to liberal democracy, and is an eerie echo of the Council for Religious Affairs appointing priests across the Soviet empire.

The race to nobble religious liberty in our own backyard is being vigorously contested. While Australia’s aggressive breed of institutional secularism may not be covered in sequins and blue body paint, it has the same finishing line.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/australias-gold-standard-attack-on-religious-freedom/

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Sydney University accused of ‘gold plating’ campus with foreign enrolments around 50 per cent

Sydney University has revealed its proportion of international students is about 50 per cent this semester as it fronted allegations it was swimming in “rivers of gold” from foreign enrolment fees.

Vice chancellor Mark Scott’s comments came at a Senate hearing into the proposed international student caps, which university chiefs say amount to giving the government “sweeping emergency powers”.

Scott said the university’s senate had in 2021 determined that about 50 per cent should be the ceiling for the proportion of international students at the institution, which is heavily reliant on Chinese enrolments.

“Our era of solid growth in international students was drawing to a close,” Scott said

“At Sydney, for some years now, we have not planned to move further beyond where we are now.”

In a fiery exchange, Liberal senator Sarah Henderson said the institution was getting “rivers of gold” and told Scott he was “gold plating” the university from foreign students’ fees – pointing to a $650 million medical research project – while smaller universities were “on their knees”.

Scott said revenue from foreign fees – $1.4 billion last year – propped up teaching, research and infrastructure projects.

“I don’t think there is a magic number here,” he said. “I don’t think social licence disappears suddenly when you pass a certain threshold.”

International students have become central to Labor’s plan to slash net migration from 520,000 in 2023 to 260,000 by June next year.

The bill to cap international students, introduced to parliament in May, was a significant escalation of the government’s bid to reduce foreign enrolments, which rebounded strongly after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The proposed legislation would give Education Minister Jason Clare sweeping powers to cap international student numbers at both an institution and course level.

Universities and other higher education providers are expecting to be told this week what next year’s proposed caps are.

Treasury officials told the hearings they had not undertaken detailed modelling on the impact of the caps on Australia’s economy, but would do so after they are announced.

After the hearings, Group of Eight universities chief executive Vicki Thomson labelled this a “scandalous admission” that showed international education was the subject of a “reckless gamble” by government.

University of NSW chief Attila Brungs said the institution had been forced to halt enrolment for three popular degrees due to uncertainty about the caps.

“That will have long-term ramifications for those courses. They won’t come back for three to four years,” he said.

“The international education market is such a complex, such a large and long-term thing, making changes at this late stage is very problematic to Australia’s reputation.”

Western Sydney University vice chancellor George Williams, a constitutional lawyer, said the international student caps bill was poorly drafted and not fit to be passed.

“When I look at this bill it’s remarkable in many respects … the concentration of power is surprising,” he said.

“It’s unfettered, coercive and being concentrated in a minister in a way that you would normally associate, in my experience, with a biosecurity act or a piece of national security legislation.

“You would not expect it in a piece of industry policy, particularly something directed at higher education.”

Education Department deputy secretary Ben Rimmer said he was confident providers would “find it possible to live with” the caps when they received them

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-university-accused-of-gold-plating-campus-with-foreign-enrolments-around-50-per-cent-20240826-p5k5eo.html

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Business goes to war on Labor’s IR laws

Business has launched a fresh attack on the Albanese government, labelling a suite of “radical” workplace laws taking effect on Monday as a “hellishly complex minefield” that will undermine productivity.

The Business Council of Australia, Minerals Council of Australia, Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Australian Industry Group condemned the impact of multi-employer bargaining, after the Fair Work Commission on Friday compelled three NSW coalmining companies to collectively negotiate workplace agreements with a union.

“What’s alarming about this decision is that it essentially says all of the businesses in any sector can be roped together and subject to the same determination because of these new laws,” BCA chief executive Bran Black said of the Friday decision, impacting Whitehaven Coal, Peabody Energy, and Ulan Coal Mines.

“Businesses should be on edge about this precedent, because it will slash productivity and undermine enterprise-level engagement between employees and employers.”

From Monday, employers will be bound by new laws that limit them from contacting workers outside normal work hours, clamp down on the use of independent contractors, provide an easier pathway for casual workers to become permanent, and empower the FWC to set minimum standards for gig economy employees.

Unions are calling on BHP to negotiate with them by using a loophole in the Albanese government’s workplace laws.
Workplace Relations Minister Murray Watt said the reforms were part of Labor’s pre-election platform of “getting wages moving again”. He claimed wage growth was “running above inflation on an annual basis”, despite wages in the year to June being lower than prices growth.

“When we think about cost?of?living, we need to be thinking about how much people are paying for things, the tax cuts they’re receiving from our government, the energy bill relief they’re being provided with as well,” Senator Watt said on Sunday. “But what’s just as important is what they’re earning at work. Some of the changes we’ve already made have been assisting to lift people’s wages, make their jobs more secure, to enable them to deal with those cost-of-living pressures.”

Ai Group chief executive Innes Willox said running a business would become “even harder with a new wave of confidence-sapping industrial laws rolling out across our workplaces, making employing people more difficult and achieving productivity growth even more elusive”. Writing in The Australian, Mr Willox warned the real consequences of the reforms would “only reveal themselves in the months and years ahead as unions weaponise them”.

“Nowhere in this mass of legislative change is a word on how our pathetic productivity performance will be improved. In fact, all of this is anti-productivity,” he writes.

“Without turning our productivity outcomes around, we condemn ourselves to falling living standards and risk perpetuating high inflation and an elevated cost of living.”

ACCI chief executive Andrew McKellar said the new laws would “crush productivity”.

“I think there’s also a significant risk that this could mean increases in input costs for some businesses, and of course in some cases that’s going to mean those costs will be passed on to consumers,” he said.

Opposition employment spokeswoman Michaelia Cash said the new laws were “designed to create confusion in workplaces across Australia”.

“The Coalition has promised to repeal the right-to-disconnect laws when in government,” Senator Cash said.

“Mr Albanese’s changes to casual employment are designed to destroy casual jobs … For small-business employers in particular, those employing casual workers can no longer rely on their employment contract to determine their employment status.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/business-goes-to-war-on-labors-ir-laws/news-story/5e0e1c76d6690e669c0701ed66d511b2

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Albanese’s inevitable slide into a Whitlamesque economy

A common mindset held by too many on the left is that production is inevitable, and will be maintained irrespective of the taxes levied and regulations imposed upon productive processes.

For many, the issue for activist politicians is simply how do we divide people’s incomes between the part they are permitted to retain, the part for promoting the political class’s preferred ideologies, and the part for the all-important task of maintaining themselves in power.

This may explain why the first and immediate act of the Albanese government was to grant favours to Labor’s key paymasters, the union movement, including putting in place arrangements which make the non-unionisation of the workforce more difficult to avoid. This has been followed by pay increases for certain workers, initially those in childcare, but only if their employer is union-friendly.

In requiring greater unionisation, there has been little concern about the effects of this on costs to the governed as both consumers and taxpayers. Nor is productivity a high priority… In the case of construction unionisation, we have seen reductions of 30 per cent as a result of the conditions required by the government including granting designated unions monopoly rights over who may work and the conditions of the working arrangements both for direct employees and subcontractors’ workers. National productivity, according to the latest figures, is falling.

In concert with this, we see with the CFMEU that alleged corruption is apparently tolerated until it is exposed for all to see and politicians’ averted gaze can no longer be sublimated to the notion that the prerequisite of an omelette is breaking eggs. Even then, politicians who have worked side-by-side with the miscreants now profusely claim ignorance of union misdeeds with political leaders straight-facedly insisting that they are unaware.

A rapid increase in spending is the hallmark of Labor governments other than (for the most part) the Hawke-Keating era. Albanese has been no exception, with the size of the Commonwealth rising to comprise over 26 per cent of GDP – and with even less of this than previously devoted to the most important feature of government – national defence. And arrangements are in train for further damage in providing greater scope for the government to control and therefore expand the money supply by suppressing interest rates with its attendant implications for inflation and wealth destruction. Depreciating the currency for short-term gain is the eternal temptation of governments and the Treasurer is only just getting started.

Politicians’ lack of awareness of (or indifference to) the drivers of increased income levels brings the sort of decisions that Tanya Plibersek has recently made regarding a $1 billion gold mine program near Orange. Thinking that she can remove some of the bricks supporting the project without the venture totally collapsing, in defiance of the very development approval processes which she has in place, she capriciously required additional regulatory conditions to appease particular anti-development mini interests, promoting clearly confected issues.

The mindset behind such arbitrariness owes much to the fact that very few politicians, particularly on the green-left, have ever had to make the trade-offs, cost savings, or search for solutions that confront those in the private sector.

We see the very same contempt for those involved in production with squeezes on water supply from the Murray Darling (again part of the Plibersek portfolio). Similar measures crippling productivity are seen in Queensland, where avocado farmers are suddenly losing their water rights within a pristine river system in spite of having used them for generations. And gill net fisherman are being denied access to the fisheries, which have been sustainably harvested for many years, because of confected fears about loss of the Great Barrier Reef, which is in excellent health and in any event is hundreds of miles away

Using access to the machinery of government to perpetuate themselves in office is a primary goal of all politicians but those without the awareness of the damage that overrides commercial market forces are less prone to abusing their power.

Thus, forms of arbitrary regulatory damage compound that being fomented in subsidies and grants to non-commercial wind, solar, and hydrogen energy and to facilitating the collection and distribution of that energy via transmission networks. Previous governments had built those subsidies to a level costing over $9 billion a year, but the Albanese government immediately stepped this up to $16 billion a year with its Safeguard Mechanism, the direct renewable energy purchases through the $68 billion Capacity Investment Scheme, its Hydrogen Headstart scheme, and a massive new build of transmission to deliver the diffuse power these schemes entail.

The mania of decarbonisation is also being used to justify proposals to force off-road vehicles to pay the fuel excise that funds roads. While also providing short-term revenue gains to government, this means long-term damaging costs to competitiveness.

Ideological preferences were also behind the Voice to Parliament. Under this, a parallel government would be in place across large swathes of economic activity with all the additional work-gumming and patronage this would bring in its wake. And there has been the reckless attitude to Gaza visas where Australia, a nation that is geographically just about as far away from the conflict as any in the world, is granting 95 per cent of the visas to this troubled community.

All governments naturally seek self-preservation and this will always and appropriately mean setting policies that align with some form of majority opinion. And it is expected of those in power to exercise leadership on emerging issues. But the ALP has finely honed the notion of assembling the right array of interest groups to ensure a survival oblivious to the consequences of its policies on general welfare.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/albaneses-inevitable-slide-into-a-whitlamesque-economy/

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