Submissions

The Human Rights Law Centre have made a range of recommendations about legislative reform, drawing from our extensive experience of working with health experts and law-makers across Australia, including in Western Australia, on abortion law reform.

A submission to the Independent Review into Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces (Review).

The exposure draft of the Religious Discrimination Bill 2019 (Cth) (the Bill), and associated amendments, seeks to protect Australians from discrimination on the ground of their religious belief or activity, as well as on the ground of not holding a religious belief or engaging in a religious activity.

This is welcome. Australian discrimination laws do not adequately protect people of faith from discrimination. People of faith should have legal protection from discrimination on the basis of their religion and other people should be free from having the religious beliefs of others imposed on them.

However, in seeking to achieve this, the Bill goes too far and fails to strike a fair balance between freedom of religion and the rights of other people. In a range of the circumstances the Bill licenses discrimination against other groups and includes provisions which are unorthodox and unprecedented in federal and Australian anti-discrimination law. The Bill should not be introduced to Parliament in its current form.

Read the Human Rights Law Centre’s submission on the Religious Discrimination Bill.