Tag Archives: Sex Discrimination Amendment Bill 2013

No 2 Australia Finally Adopts Federal Anti-Discrimination Protections for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex People

Posted on by

I have already written about the significance of this achievement (link: https://alastairlawrie.net/2013/06/30/federal-lgbti-anti-discrimination-protections-at-last/), so I won’t go into a lot of new detail here.

Still, as far as highlights of 2013 go, it would be pretty difficult to overlook the passage of the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Act in June. From 1 August, LGBTI people in Australia finally had anti-discrimination protections under federal law. And we only had to wait 38 years after the Racial Discrimination Act, and 29 years since the original Sex Discrimination Act (and yes, that was sarcastic – the passage of this Bill was long, long overdue).

There were two particular aspects of the Sex Discrimination Amendment Act that warrant particular celebration. First, it is the first anti-discrimination law passed anywhere in the world to explicitly include intersex people. That is a pretty amazing achievement, and another testament to the great work and advocacy by OII Australia and other groups.

Second, the legislation includes an amendment that means aged care service providers operated by religious organisations are not legally allowed to discriminate against LGBTI people accessing their services. Again, this is a significant victory, and will help to ensure the generation of LGBTI people who fought so hard – and successfully – for our civil rights, have the opportunity to grow old with dignity.

Nevertheless, the fact that a special ‘carve-out’ is necessary for aged care service delivery by religious organisations emphasises the major weakness of the anti-discrimination protections that were passed: schools, hospitals and other community service organisations that are run by religious groups are legally allowed to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, both employees and service recipients (NB religious organisations do not have exceptions allowing them to discriminate against intersex people).

These religious exemptions or exceptions are contrary to the fundamental concept of anti-discrimination law – that people should not be discriminated against for things that are irrelevant to their capacity to perform a job, or their right to access a service.

Fighting to remove these religious exceptions will be the biggest test for LGBTI advocates and activists over the next 5, 10 or even15 years (achieving marriage equality will likely turn out to be both easier, and quicker, than removing religious exceptions, and religious organisations will probably fight much harder to retain them than to retain a discriminatory Marriage Act).

Still, fight them we must, because for however long a religious school can sack a teacher for being gay or bisexual, or a service organisation can refuse to provide that service because the intended recipient is transgender, then we are not truly equal.

As an indication of how difficult this fight will be, I am re-posting the exchange between myself, now Attorney-General George Brandis and Tony Jones on #QandA back in June, the night before the legislation, including the aged care carve-out, was passed (and, no this is not just – well, not entirely – because I had so much fun doing this):

ALASTAIR LAWRIE: My question is to Senator Brandis. Last Tuesday you announced that the Coalition would block any LGBTI anti-discrimination bill that did not allow religious aged-care service providers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. This is despite the fact that these agencies themselves do not believe they need this exception. You seem to be putting a theoretical religious freedom above practical protections. Why don’t you believe that older lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender Australians, people who have grown up when their love was criminalised, who lost friends and lovers to HIV and AIDS, have the right to grow old in dignity and respect that they deserve?

GEORGE BRANDIS: It is a very important question that you ask and let me explain what the Opposition’s position is. But there was one statement in your question which wasn’t quite right. You said that the religious institutions, the churches, didn’t themselves want the exemption so far as concerned aged care facilities. That’s not right. Some said they didn’t want it. Most said they did. So don’t be misled by a misleading statement by the Attorney-General. On the broader issue, when the bill, the sex discrimination bill, was introduced into the Parliament, I took a submission to the Shadow Cabinet and to our party room which was, I think without a dissenting voice, endorsed that we should support it. And the reason we support it is because it is actually the policy we took to the 2010 election, that the provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act should extend to sexuality as a protected attribute. The Government knew that they had the Opposition on board with this. In fact, the Government’s measure was itself taken from the Opposition’s report on the broader human rights and anti-discrimination bill, the bill that was abandoned by the Government earlier this year because it was acknowledged to have gone way too far. So we had, on this very tricky and important issue of discrimination against gay people, we had bipartisanship and unanimity. And then into the middle of this harmonious bipartisan moment, the Labor Party, out of the blue, threw in an amendment never anticipated, never expected, that would have caused the religious exemption issue to come into play. Now, if you want to build a consensus around this issue, that gay people should be protected from discrimination by the Sex Discrimination Act, then you would not have done that and the Labor Party, on all other grounds, in all other arenas, has said that it will respect the religious exemption. I am cynical about why the Labor Party did that…

TONY JONES: Okay, George.

GEORGE BRANDIS: …knowing that by introducing the religious exemption, it would make it impossible for that bipartisanship to continue.

TONY JONES: George Brandis, the questioner has his hand up so we’ll go back to you.

ALASTAIR LAWRIE: I would just like to pick up a point you seem to be making. In Senator Humphrey’s dissenting report to the sex discrimination senate inquiry, the two organisations that he quoted justifying the call for religious exception in that circumstance were the Australian Christian Lobby and the Catholic Women’s League. Neither of them provide religious aged care services. So in that circumstance, why are we trying to impose a religious exception to the detriment of older LGBT people for those groups that don’t actually run those services?

GEORGE BRANDIS: Well, I’m very familiar with that minority report because I was one of the signatories to it and I had a lot to do with drafting it. There were many more submissions to the inquiry from other churches and religious institutions than those two. So don’t infer that because those two were mentioned as a ‘For example’, those were the only ones, because they weren’t.

TONY JONES: Okay. George, I would like the hear other people on this subject. Anne Summers?

ANN SUMMERS: Well, I’m afraid I don’t know much about the legislation. I mean I just obviously would support the principle that LGBT people should be able to go to retirement homes and nursing homes free from any form of discrimination, which I take to be the central point and I know that, you know, one of the problems with homes that are run by some religions is they have been discriminatory in the past and I imagine what we are trying to avoid is the continuation of that discrimination and I would support that.

TONY JONES: Yeah, very briefly, George, before I go back to the other panelists, shouldn’t anti-discrimination be universal?

GEORGE BRANDIS: No.

TONY JONES: Why shouldn’t it?

GEORGE BRANDIS: Anti-discrimination laws should not be universal because the right to fair treatment is one of several very important but sometimes inconsistent values. The right of people who practice or profess a particular religious faith to live their lives and to conduct their institutions in accordance with the precepts of their religious faith is integral to religious freedom and religious freedom is also a fundamentally important value.

TONY JONES: So religious…

GEORGE BRANDIS: And if I may say…

TONY JONES: But just on principle, you are saying that religious freedom supersedes the freedom of your sexuality?

 

 

GEORGE BRANDIS: Yes, I am, as a matter of fact. Yes, I am. But I am also making a political point. There are – we in the Liberal Party have joined with people in the Labor Party to progress this agenda for years and those who wanted to see the Sex Discrimination Act extend to protect people on the grounds of their sexuality were furious that the Labor Party decided to throw in a curve ball into the debate that deprived the country of the opportunity for unanimity on this. [emphasis added].

 

That exchange, and especially Senator Brandis’ statement that religious freedoms clearly trump our right to not be discriminated against, show just how hard this battle will be.

Underscoring this point is Attorney-General Brandis’ recent appointment of Tim Wilson as a new Human Rights Commissioner, responsible for promoting ‘traditional freedoms’. Recruited from the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs, on 23 January this year Mr Wilson appeared at a Senate hearing into the then draft Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill (transcript here: http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/committees/commsen/8eb3bdec-c603-4d2d-9564-674c7bd7b5c2/toc_pdf/Legal%20and%20Constitutional%20Affairs%20Legislation%20Committee_2013_01_23_1612_Official.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf#search=%22committees/commsen/8eb3bdec-c603-4d2d-9564-674c7bd7b5c2/0000%22).

During his testimony, he argued that anti-discrimination protections should only apply to government employees and services – basically, that anti-discrimination law should not protect people from being fired for being gay, or being expelled for being a lesbian, or being denied a service for being bisexual, transgender or intersex. Given the extremity of these views, if this is any indication of how Attorney-General Brandis will approach anti-discrimination reforms then we will need to be prepared to fight any moves to wind back our hard-won protections in 2014.

In the meantime, the passage of the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Act 2013 will stand as the most significant LGBTI victory of the past 12 months. Thank you to the former Labor Government, then Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Senators Penny Wong and Louise Pratt and everyone else who helped to make this happen.

Federal LGBTI Anti-Discrimination Protections, At Last

Posted on by

This week, there was a major legal development which will have a direct and lasting impact on the lives of all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) Australians. No, I am not talking about the US Supreme Court decisions overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, and Prop 8 in California.

Welcome as those decisions are, they will not directly impact Australians, outside of those people who are in bi-national relationships with US citizens (of course, the SCOTUS decision could have significant indirect impact in terms of confirming the global momentum towards marriage equality and heightening the embarrassment we feel that Australia has not adopted this reform).

The major achievement which I am referring to is the passage of the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Bill 2013. 38 years after the passage of the Racial Discrimination Act, three decades after the Sex Discrimination Act, two decades since Disability was protected, and nine years since Age was covered, we finally have federal anti-discrimination legislation of our own.

Five days later and I am still smiling about this. And I am still pleased that the removal of exceptions for religious organisations in the provision of aged care services was included, despite the formal Opposition of the Liberal and National Parties. This is incredibly important, not just in terms of protecting vulnerable older LGBTI Australians as they enter aged care facilities, but also in terms of its precedent value – contrary to the public statements of Shadow Attorney-General Senator George Brandis, freedom of religion should not trump the right of LGBTI Australians not to be discriminated against.

Hopefully, the removal of religious exceptions – outside of who can be a member of a congregation, how religious ceremonies are conducted and who is appointed as ministers of religion – will ultimately be delivered.

In the meantime, it is very important that we remember and pay tribute to those LGBTI activists who have helped to make this happen, as well as the politicians who have assisted to achieve this historic reform.

In terms of activists, I would particularly like to mention Anna Brown of the Victorian Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby, long-term activist Corey Irlam and NSW Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby policy officer Jed Horner, who were all on the ground in Canberra in the critical final weeks, as people who the community should thank. I think we should also congratulate people like Sally Goldner of Transgender Victoria (and likely several others who I am not aware of) for their success in ensuring an inclusive definition of trans issues in the Bill.

Above all, it was an amazing effort by Gina Wilson and Morgan Carpenter of OII Australia for them not only to raise public consciousness of the needs of intersex Australians, but also for achieving their inclusion as a specific protected attribute in the SDA Bill, the first time intersex people have been explicitly protected at federal level anywhere in the world.

Unfortunately, given the long and winding road which eventually delivered federal LGBTI anti-discrimination protections in Australia it is next to impossible to note all of those who put in the ground work which led up to this year’s Bill, but thank you nonetheless.

In terms of political support, I think it is fair to say that the legislation could not have been delivered without the hard work of Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, who had oversight of the Bill, as well as the more ‘behind-the-scenes’ support of the ALP’s two queer Senators, Penny Wong and Louise Pratt. And I genuinely believe the removal of the religious aged care service provision exception would not have happened without the efforts of Minister for Mental Health & Ageing Mark Butler. Underneath all of this work, Rainbow Labor played a key role in ensuring the issue of LGBTI anti-discrimination reform remained on the ALP’s agenda.

In the current Parliament, the Bill obviously would not have progressed without the critical support of the Australian Greens and people like Senator Sarah Hanson-Young (who has portfolio responsibility for LGBTI issues). And the Independent cross-benchers should be thanked for shepherding the Bill through, as well as Liberal Senators Sue Boyce (for supporting) and Dean Smith (for abstaining), for providing moral support for the, as yet unnamed, House of Representatives Liberal MPs who were prepared to abstain to ensure its ultimate passage.

As with LGBTI activists, the long history of this issue means it is difficult to point out all of the MPs who have championed this issue over the years. But I would like to pay special tribute to the gay former Democrats Senator Brian Greig who helped to put this issue on the national legislative agenda through his private member’s bill.

Anyway, that is a not-at-all comprehensive list of people who have helped to make the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Bill 2013 a reality. Apologies to those people omitted – please accept that it was not deliberate. This might seem to some like an indulgent blog post, but thanking those people who make our successes happen is not something which our community has traditionally been very good at, and this is my small attempt to redress a little bit of that. Hopefully those people, named and unnamed, know the incredible difference they have made to current and future generations of LGBTI Australians.

Sex Discrimination Amendment Bill 2013 – The Final Countdown

Posted on by

There are now only two sitting weeks left before the upcoming federal election. Which means there are only 8 days during which Parliament can pass the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Bill 2013, historic legislation which would finally provide federal anti-discrimination protections to Australia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community.

It goes without saying that this could go down to the wire. Which is why I sent the email posted below to all cross-bench MPs, as well as key figures in the Opposition and Greens (and a slightly re-worded version to the Government). I don’t think that we, as members of the LGBTI community, should ‘die wondering’ about this Bill. So, I would encourage you to consider sending you own emails to these parliamentarians, to help get the Sex Discrimination Amendment Bill 2013 over the line.

To help you on your way, I have included the email addresses of a range of relevant MPs at the end of this post. And please feel free to ‘borrow’ any and all of the following:

I am writing to you regarding the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Bill 2013.

In particular, I am requesting that you:

  • Please support the Government’s proposed amendments which exclude the operation of religious exceptions in the area of aged care service provision; and
  • Please support the passage of the amended Sex Discrimination Amendment Bill 2013 in the final two sitting weeks of this Parliamentary term.

This Bill is a significant reform that will benefit the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) citizens of Australia, because, if passed, it will be the first term LGBTI people will enjoy anti-discrimination protections under federal law.

It is historic because it will be the first time any federal anti-discrimination law, anywhere in the world, explicitly covers intersex people. And the Sex Discrimination Amendment Bill 2013 will also help to protect more people than some state and territory schemes – for example, the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 does not currently apply to bisexual or intersex people, both groups that are protected under this proposed law.

Unfortunately, the Bill as drafted will ensure that religious organisations are provided with wide-ranging exceptions from otherwise lawful obligations not to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. This will allow religious organisations to continue to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in employment and service provision, which will operate to undermine the scope and effectiveness of these anti-discrimination provisions. In principle, I do not support the operation of any religious exceptions outside the appointment of religious officials, membership of religious organisations and celebration of religious ceremonies.

However, I understand that LGBTI anti-discrimination legislation which did not contain any religious exceptions would be unlikely to pass the current Parliament. What is possible is for the Sex Discrimination Amendment Bill 2013 to be passed with amendments proposed by the Government that exclude the operation of religious exceptions in the area of aged care provision.

I strongly support the removal of religious exceptions in these circumstances. Older lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people should not be subjected to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity when they are accessing aged care services. This is particularly important when you consider that for many people, aged care facilities will be their home for long periods of their life – nobody deserves to be lawfully discriminated against in their home.

Above all, I see this as the very least which should be done for older lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Australians. These are people who grew up when homosexuality was still a criminal offence, who had to fight simply for the right to be who they are, who lost partners and friends through the devastation caused by HIV/AIDS, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. These are people who deserve our respect, not the operation of provisions which could force them back into ‘the closet’ because of the fear of being discriminated against.

It is my sincere hope that all Parliamentarians will vote in favour of the Government’s amendments to exclude the operation of religious exceptions in the area of aged care services.

It is also my sincere hope that all Parliamentarians will unite and work together to ensure that the Sex Discrimination Amendment Bill 2013 is passed, as amended, in the final two sitting weeks of this Parliamentary term.

With Parliament rising on 27 June, there is only limited time to ensure this legislation is passed. Please help ensure that the Bill receives sufficient priority, through both Chambers, that it will finally be made law before the upcoming federal election.

I believe that the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex citizens of Australia, like myself, have waited long enough to be protected under federal anti-discrimination laws. I hope that you agree.

Attorney-General, The Hon Mark Dreyfus QC MP Mark.Dreyfus.MP@aph.gov.au

Mental Health and Ageing Minister, The Hon Mark Butler MP Mark.Butler.MP@aph.gov.au

Leader of the Opposition, the Hon Tony Abbott MP Tony.Abbott.MP@aph.gov.au

Shadow Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis senator.brandis@aph.gov.au

Greens Spokesperson for Attorney-General, Senator Penny Wright senator.wright@aph.gov.au

Greens Spokesperson for LGBTI issues, Senator Sarah Hanson-Young senator.hanson-young@aph.gov.au

Member for Kennedy, the Hon Bob Katter MP Bob.Katter.MP@aph.gov.au

Member for Fisher, the Hon Peter Slipper MP Peter.Slipper@aph.gov.au

Member for Dobell, Mr Craig Thomson MP Craig.Thomson.MP@aph.gov.au

Member for Lyne, Mr Rob Oakeshott MP Robert.Oakeshott.MP@aph.gov.au

Member for New England, Mr Tony Windsor MP Tony.Windsor.MP@aph.gov.au

Member for Denison, Mr Andrew Wilkie MP Andrew.Wilkie.MP@aph.gov.au

Member for O’Connor, Mr Tony Crook MP Tony.Crook.MP@aph.gov.au

Member for Melbourne, Mr Adam Bandt MP Adam.Bandt.MP@aph.gov.au

Senator for South Australia, Senator Nick Xenophon senator.xenophon@aph.gov.au

Senator for Victoria, Senator John Madigan senator.madigan@aph.gov.au