QLD
The "Respect at Work" Bill
has been passed
On Monday September 10, the Queensland Parliament passed the “Respect at Work” bill, without fixing any of the problems that we have been highlighting.
We support the overall purpose of the bill of preventing sexual harassment and vilification. However, the specific drafting introduced new concepts that risked significant unintended consequences. We have argued for many months that these problems could be fixed easily with some simple tweaks.
In her speech, the Attorney General recognised that faith communities had deep concerns, and she tabled a letter that she had sent that day to heads of faith (read the letter here). However the speech and letter only addressed some of the concerns raised, and seemed to misunderstand some of the important details.
We are very disappointed that the Government did not take the time to engage with us to understand the details of our concerns and how they could be easily fixed.
There is still good news.
One positive change is that the Attorney General amended the bill to require the Human Rights Commission to “issue guidelines about how persons may comply with the positive duty”. These guidelines will give some certainty as to how that element of the law will be applied to faith communities.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the same certainty around the new vilification and “hateful” speech provisions.
Equally encouraging is that the Liberal National Party, Katter’s Australian Party and Sandy Bolton (the Independent Member for Noosa) all spoke about the effect that the Bill would have on religious freedom.
Shadow Attorney-General Tim Nicholls laid out our full concerns in detail, and directly quoted material that we had provided to them (developed for heads of faith by Professor Nicholas Aroney and Freedom for Faith). Many other Members spoke to the same issues.
Other Members made mention of the number of letters and emails that they had received from faith communities. Andrew Powell, the Member for Glass House, even read out a number of letters into the record.
Your emails made a big difference.
Our MPs only understood the issues because you told them, and they opposed the legislation because you asked them to.
We need them to commit to fixing the bill if they win the next election.
If your MP wanted to fix the bill, write to them again to thank them for supporting faith communities, and ask them to commit to fixing the bill in the next Government.
If your MP supported the bill without fixing it (Labor or Greens), we suggest you instead write to the Leader of the Opposition and the Shadow Attorney-General and thank them for their support and ask for their commitment.
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