Key Points
- The WA government is working on drafting a new Equal Opportunity Act.
- It would strengthen protections for LGBTIQ+ people in relation to religious schools.
Coming out as gay can be a mentally and emotionally challenging time, but for Perth man Craig Campbell, it was made more difficult when he lost his job because of his sexuality.
As the school he worked at was a religious school in Western Australia, the school was acting within its legal rights to discriminate on the basis of sexuality; the state’s laws give it an exemption based on religious grounds.
The WA government is working on drafting a new Equal Opportunity Act which would strengthen protections for LGBTIQ+ people in relation to religious schools.
The new Act will be informed by a Law Reform Commission of WA review of the state’s Equal Opportunity Act 1984.
The review made 163 recommendations, which the government has broadly accepted.
WA’s Attorney-General John Quigley has listed strengthening equal opportunity protections for LGBTIQ+ staff and students in religious schools as one of .
Cases of discrimination
Mr Campbell had been working at South Coast Baptist College for two years and had also attended the school as a student but his services as a relief teacher were discontinued in 2017 after the school became aware of his sexuality.
A short time after coming out as gay, Craig was removed from the school’s teaching roster.
At the time the school told the ABC there was an “inconsistency” between Mr Campbell’s beliefs on sexuality and those of the college.
Craig Campbell lost his job as a relief teacher after he came out as gay in 2017.
Brian Greig, spokesperson for LGBTIQ+ advocacy group Just.Equal, said while homosexuality was decriminalised and discrimination laws introduced in WA two decades ago, gaps, such as the one that allows religious schools to discriminate based on sexuality still need to be addressed.
“Currently, the schools can get away with this because of the sweeping religious exemptions, the religious exemptions in WA are the broadest, harshest and worst in the country," Mr Greig said.
Tasmania leading the way
A teacher or student could not be treated differently because of their sexuality at a religious school in Tasmania due to the laws in place.
“Tasmania has the best anti-vilification anti-bullying laws in Australia, the grounds for anti-vilification hate speech there are much wider and much broader,” Mr Greig said.
“That's the benchmark. There are no religious exemptions - period,” he said.
He described similar laws in different states as “patchy”, with different levels of protections in place for individuals and exemptions on the basis of religious grounds, listing NSW and the ACT alongside WA as those with the weaker protections.
Mr Greig said while there are laws that deal with discrimination on a federal level, state laws generally change ahead of those on a national level.
“The history of anti-discrimination law within Australia has been one where the states have always gone first,” he said.
Sending a 'terrible message'
Religious schools in WA are also able to discriminate against students on the basis of sexuality under the current Act.
“When a school discriminates like this, it sends a terrible message, particularly to LGBTI kids, especially those in the closet,” Mr Greig said.
“And it's worse for those who come from religious backgrounds because that can lead to depression, anxiety, PTSD, and in the worst cases, such kids end up going to conversion practices.”
In 2015, a religious school in WA told the parents of a seven-year-old student, who was asked not to talk about her two dads, that she would not have been accepted at the school if the principal had known her father was gay.
Wider reform urged
Mr Greig is urging the WA government to make even wider reform than suggested in the Law Reform Commission’s review.
He said the recommendations propose allowing religious schools to be still able to discriminate in what he described as “very tight, certain circumstances, principally in cases where they're not in receipt of any government funding."
Mr Greig said this would mean that discrimination may still be allowed in certain circumstances depending on funding arrangements, “such as hiring somebody in the school, with a purpose with the job of that they were being hired for was specifically religious education.”
He said further protections to address “inadequate and clumsy laws that don't fully protect people who are transgender from basic discrimination in employment, housing and the provision of goods and services” also needed to be looked at being strengthened as part of the reform.
A different view
The Australian Association of Christian Schools (AASC), an advocacy group that represents more than 100 Christian schools across the country, does not share the WA Attorney General’s broad support of the recommendations being considered for implementation as part of the new Act.
AACS Executive Officer Vanessa Cheng said unless the government pushed back against some of the recommendations, it would be difficult to operate a Christian school according to Christian principles and beliefs once they become law.
“Sadly, the Attorney-General has announced support for 163 recommendations without consulting with Christian schools affected by these proposed changes,” she said.
Ms Cheng said the recommendations supported by the government did not protect religious freedoms and failed to protect traditional views on sexual and gender expression.
