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In recent days, if you were to listen to the media reports, you could be forgiven for thinking that religious educators want to retain a right to exclude children or teachers from their schools on the basis of their gender or sexual orientation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Or nothing should be further from the truth.
It’s four years since the Australian Parliament amended the Marriage Act 1961 to provide that marriage means ‘the union of two people to the exclusion of all others’. The legislation followed the plebiscite on same sex marriage. To address the concerns of some religious groups, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull set up an expert panel chaired by long time Liberal Party minister Philip Ruddock to report on whether Australian law adequately protected the human right to freedom of religion.
On Thursday, three Bills were introduced to the House of Representatives: the Religious Discrimination Bill 2021, the Religious Discrimination (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2021, and the Human Rights Legislation Amendment Bill 2021. Collectively, these bills constitute the Morrison Government’s response to the Ruddock Religious Freedom Review provided to government in May 2018.
About 1 in 6 Australians (18 per cent) live with disability, and many of these 4.4 million people face daily barriers to their full inclusion in education, work, services, activities, etc, not because of their disability, but because access has been structured around the needs, capacities and preferences of people who do not live with disability. Exclusion has always been a choice, but the pandemic has laid this reality bare.
One of the most popular, and largely counterproductive, metaphors in public conversation is the military one. It suggests that the project commended is a war in which there is an enemy, a campaign to be begun, forces to be mobilised, a public whose support is to be won, and weapons to be used. They commit us to do whatever it takes to win the war.
The next month will be full of sugar-hits and sweeteners, whether they be personal tax cuts, grants or special deals for organised interests. Every candidate and party is guilty of this in their scramble to win. Citizens are complicit too if their main concern is 'what's in it for me'. Churches play the game as much as any pressure group.
'We can do this better by breaking down the silos and binding together our concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.' Opening Keynote Address by Fr Frank Brennan SJ at the Catholic Social Services Australia National Conference, Port Macquarie 19 February 2019.
It's easy to ridicule Hanson and her party. After all, they are our resident shambolic political show with a line of defecting MPs, racist stunts and statements, and staff arrests. What is not so easy to dismiss is the fact that PHON candidates were steadily clocking 20-30 per cent support in their seats at the Queensland election.
The UK's Yorkshire moors seem like an ideal setting for a crude yet beautiful film about two shepherds falling in love. What's even better is a director bringing to the film his own history of such a place, adding the depth of familiarity with both the land and those who live off it. Such is the case with one-time Yorkshire farm boy Francis Lee's directorial debut, God's Own Country.
This is not the beginning of the normalisation of Hanson and One Nation: it's the end. In a piece for The Monthly, Dominic Kelly highlighted how large swaths of the rightwing commentariat have embraced the 'more mature', 'disciplined' and 'principled' Hanson 2.0. Despite this rhetoric, for the Right, appeasing One Nation has always been a balancing act. They're guided by one question: How much racism is permissible before it has to be condemned?
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