Page 5288 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 29 November 2017
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immediately in the lower house without amendments, without delays and complications. Yet what we have seen in the Senate over the past week is that amendments have been moved, supported by those who are seeking to delay, derail, and pervert the will of the people, amendments that seek to implement the discriminatory provisions of the Paterson bill, which was withdrawn, creating a class of civil celebrants who are excused from applying the law and who can refuse to marry people on the basis of a mere conscientious objection.
As our government said in our submission to the Senate select committee on the exposure draft of the bill, there is no rational basis for creating a right for marriage celebrants, who are not ministers of religion, to discriminate. It is one thing to have a right to hold a belief but quite another thing to be held exempt from laws that apply universally to all people. These amendments that have been proposed also seek to carve out lawful discrimination and radically widen the definitions of bodies established for religious purposes that can take advantage of the discrimination. Make no mistake: these so-called religious protections are code for discriminating against LGBTIQ people in the ACT.
I am pleased that these amendments were voted down in the Senate this week by the Labor Party, and other moderates in the Senate, and I am very pleased that the bill passed without amendment. But we really do not know what amendments will be moved by MPs when the bill goes down to the lower house, and we should be rightly concerned that these amendments could significantly undermine the ACT’s current discrimination laws—or, indeed, following the review of religious protections which has been foreshadowed by the commonwealth government. The half-baked amendments that we have seen on the proposed bill substantially roll back long-established federal protections from discrimination contained in the commonwealth’s Sex Discrimination Act. In doing so, the laws proposed in these amendments would cover the field, thereby excluding the operation of all state and territory anti-discrimination laws in the area.
Many of the amendments being proposed are being propped up by the external affairs power of the Australian Constitution, through very broad links to international treaties, so that they can be used to effectively overrule state and territory laws. So if there are amendments to impose discrimination and our Discrimination Act is incapable of concurrent operation with the bill, the federal bill would effectively trump our Discrimination Act.
We know that if these amendments are passed to the marriage bill, as Dr Anja Hilkemeijer from the University of Tasmania points out, Australia will be the only country in the world to effectively wind back laws prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination after legislating to protect them. That is why this Assembly has to send a strong message, as this debate continues on the same-sex marriage bill in the House of Representatives, to respect our ACT discrimination laws. These amendments that have been proposed have not been subject to scrutiny, they are without justification and their interaction with state and territory anti-discrimination law has not been thoroughly examined. Moreover, these attempts to introduce new forms of discrimination undermine self-government here in the ACT.
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