Page 5296 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 29 November 2017
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community spaces and from any aspect of public life because of who they love is flat out wrong, and the Labor government will not accept it.
We believe that all people are entitled to respect, dignity and the full protection of the law and we will work to eliminate discrimination in all its forms. That is not to minimise the importance of religious freedoms, but it is important to recognise that our religious practices operate in a social context. Let us look at some alternative examples of the principles that have been proposed recently. There are some expressions of faith which maintain that it is inappropriate for females to have positions of authority over males in their institutions. Obviously, we have not legislated that this cannot occur within those congregations or denominations; nor do we have any intention of allowing caterers to refuse to supply goods to a company on the basis that their CEO is a woman.
There are some expressions of faith which maintain that it is inappropriate for previously divorced people to marry. Again, obviously we have not legislated that this cannot occur within those denominations. I am also fully aware that religious celebrants regularly exercise their rights under the Marriage Act to refuse to conduct these ceremonies. But we do not have any intention of allowing people to refuse to supply goods to couples who are celebrating a second marriage, following a divorce. Canberrans reject a vision of religious freedom that endorses discrimination and exclusion.
What this motion also calls to our attention is the importance of self-government. Self-government allows the voters of Canberra to decide that this will continue to be the most inclusive, fair city in Australia. It is never acceptable for the commonwealth politicians to try to undermine our core values in Canberra in order to appease people who believe that discrimination is okay in their electorates. An important feature of the ACT’s anti-discrimination framework and debates about competing views of rights is that we have a Human Rights Act. The commonwealth shadow Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus QC, recently outlined the problem very neatly for jurisdictions that do not have a human rights act. He stated:
Saying that you want to provide an exemption from that existing anti-discrimination law for bakers is making a naked attempt to roll back protections that have been there for years for the LGBTI community.
On the question of whether it is actually an issue of religious freedom, he continued:
… we’re are in an arm wrestle without reference to any external framework because there is no human rights act but there are already exemptions for religious bodies in a range of ways.
The ACT has a legal framework now that embodies its values and that makes clear that these national calls for anti-discrimination reform are, in fact, cause to diminish our policies of inclusion and equality. The postal survey result and the introduction of legislation to achieve marriage equality, when the ACT has been denied that opportunity so many times in the past, should be times for celebration, with our nation, and Canberra most of all, voting overwhelmingly to end discrimination.
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