Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Is Josh a 'Bad Gay'?" with Alastair Lawrie

Transcript

"Is Josh a 'Bad Gay'?" with Alastair Lawrie · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, here's a dangerous idea for you.
• 0:07
  Individuals who are members of minority identity groups that have traditionally been oppressed
• 0:13
  or sidelined don't always agree with each other about how much progress they've made
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  and how hard they should keep fighting for further progress and how grateful they should
• 0:23
  be to the rest of the community for coming along with them on the progress ride.
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  This is a situation I often find myself in as a bloke who's married to another bloke
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  who has kids, the white picket fence, the middle class life, I'm privileged enough to
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  be a gay guy in an environment where that really has no downsides if anything it probably
• 0:43
  has upsides in the current climate.
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  And I've been, I guess, in cautious and heedless enough to say so in public, which puts a target
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  on my back and often makes me a persona non grata amongst the circles that I am supposed
• 0:58
  to be swimming in.
• 0:59
  This happened earlier this year when I was invited to write a piece about Mardi Gras, which
• 1:05
  is the biggest game let's be in festival in the world.
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  We call it Mardi Gras, it's not the same as the New Orleans Mardi Gras, it's basically
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  gay pride in Australia and it's in February because that's when our summer is and we don't
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  want to be marching during actual gay pride in June when it's cold.
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  There was a controversy this year about whether uniform police officers should be able to
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  march in the Mardi Gras because it was happening in the wake of the murder of a young gay couple.
• 1:34
  I'll read you the piece.
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  I think this is the best way of getting into this because today's interview is a conversation
• 1:40
  between me and someone who took exception to the piece.
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  He's a very articulate, very thoughtful, very good person, a gay activist who has spent
• 1:49
  his life fighting for gay rights and he perhaps somewhat understandably found my piece
• 1:56
  a little bit triumphalist or maybe even smug my words, not his.
• 2:03
  The piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia's biggest broadsheet newspaper,
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  was entitled No Cops at Mardi Gras, isn't a moral triumph, it's fuzzy-headed victimhood
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  by Josh Seps, broadcaster February 27th, 2024.
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  So I write, Cops won't march at Mardi Gras.
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  The festival's board instructed New South Wales police not to participate in the parade
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  after a gay officer was charged with the murder of his ex-boyfriend and the ex's partner.
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  Now there's talk of them marching but not in uniform, is this a brave moral triumph or
• 2:43
  a fuzzy-headed capitulation to a narrative of division and victimhood.
• 2:48
  The apparent killing of these two beloved young men is sickening.
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  The history of police aggression towards LGBTQ plus Australians is a moral catastrophe,
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  it's understandable that emotions are raw.
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  But uniformed police have marched in the Mardi Gras parade for more than a quarter of
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  a century.
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  New South Wales police formally apologized to the LGBTQ plus community in 2016.
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  The murder suspect was not acting in his capacity as a cop, New South Wales police charged him
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  as they should any suspect in any situation of domestic violence, gay or straight.
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  It was the commander of the homicide squad, Detective Superintendent Daniel Doherty, who
• 3:31
  laid out the allegations in an explosive press conference.
• 3:36
  If gay pride is to mean anything in 2024, it must mean pride in diversity and openness
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  in inclusiveness, pride in dismantling stereotypes, not in indulging them, pride in resilience,
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  not fragility, in magnanimity, not petiness.
• 4:00
  When uniformed police began marching in the Mardi Gras parade in 1998, it was a watershed
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  moment.
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  It represented the maturation of gay rights from a rebellious fringe movement to a mainstream
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  celebration.
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  It was a triumph of the old-fashioned universalism of the civil rights pioneers, the aspiration
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  that all people should be treated equally, regardless of colour, sex, creed or in this
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  case, uniform.
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  Today, by contrast, we're encouraged to amplify tribal differences and maintain a
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  scrupulous scorecard of oppression.
• 4:40
  I am a man married to a man with kids and a mortgage.
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  Barely a week goes by that I don't hear from a gay fan, often of an older generation,
• 4:50
  thanking me for, quote, the work I do in representing gay people.
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  I don't feel as if I'm doing any work, I'm the beneficiary of others' work, I'm just
• 5:02
  living my life in public.
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  Their gratitude is not because I fly a flag of victimhood, of fear and resentment.
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  Their gratitude is for the normality of my life.
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  They're grateful for how boring I am.
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  That is the triumph of the gay rights movement.
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  It made rational demands, it appealed to everyone's sense of a fair go, it was inclusive,
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  it didn't hunker into a permanent antagonistic crouch, it was big-hearted enough to forgive.
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  The last thing we need is to start branding certain groups as goodies or baddies based
• 5:44
  on whether some alleged malifactor belonged to one or another team.
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  If you live in a big city in a rich western country, every company has a diversity and
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  inclusion policy that proactively celebrates my community.
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  Nearly every corporation puts rainbow flags on their ads, press releases and social media
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  accounts, gay TV shows are everywhere, RuPaul, the L word, oranges the new black, euphoria,
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  race and Frankie, sex education, queer eye, crashing, looking, glee, modern family,
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  riverdale, everyone went gargaw for heart stopper.
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  Shit's Creek was one of the most celebrated shows of the decade created by and starring
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  a gay man who plays a gay man, even Star Trek Discovery has a gay space couple.
• 6:34
  Does that mean there's no homophobia?
• 6:37
  No.
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  But it does mean that homophobia fits within the spectrum of awful, boring, everyday,
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  humdrum bigotry faced by Hindus and feminists and people with autism and anybody else who
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  lives life as a messy human being.
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  What's gained by fetishizing victimhood?
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  I want a Madigra that celebrates our power, not our powerlessness.
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  It's understandable for LGBTQ plus Australians to feel tender right now.
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  That's precisely why this is an opportunity for courage, not spite.
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  My heart goes out to every LGBTQ plus person whose weekend will be tarnished by the recent
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  tragedy, including those who can't fully participate through no fault of their own.
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  Those were my thoughts at the time.
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  And on Twitter, as you can imagine, I got some backlash.
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  Today's guest, Alistair Laurie, was one of the people who responded.
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  He said quote, that is the triumph of the gay rights movement.
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  You do realise we haven't won yet, don't you?
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  We still live in the worst place in Australia for LGBTQ rights.
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  The New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Act, ADA, doesn't even cover bisexuals, non-binary
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  and intersex people.
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  The ADA still allows religious schools to discriminate against LGBTQ students and teachers.
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  And other publicly funded faith orgs, including adoption and foster care agencies, to discriminate
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  against LGBTQ workers as well as people accessing their services.
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  We are the only place this was a Twitter thread, as you can imagine.
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  And the only place he wrote in Australia, which still requires trans people to undergo
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  genital surgery in order to access a new birth certificate, surgery many don't want, and
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  even more can't afford.
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  We haven't outlawed sexual orientation and gender identity conversion practices either.
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  Oh, and unlike the ACT, that's the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales has yet
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  to legislate to protect children born with variations of sex characteristics from involuntary
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  surgeries and other harmful medical interventions, barbaric violations of bodily autonomy.
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  But do tell us how good heart stopper is, he wrote.
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  As has become my policy, I didn't engage on Twitter.
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  I think it's fruitless.
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  There's no point in arguing on social media.
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  I just said, okay, thanks.
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  We disagree.
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  Why don't you come on the podcast and we will hash it out.
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  So today I bring you Alistair Laurie.
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  It was a real joy to go through some of those points and to try to see where we agree
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  and where we disagree.
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  Alistair is the director of policy and advocacy at the Justice and Equity Center.
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  He is a great advocate for LGBTQ rights.
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  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did this chat with the one and only Alistair Laurie.
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  Thank you so much for coming.
• 9:39
  It's lovely to talk to you and to meet you in the flesh.
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  Do you want to just start by maybe articulating what you thought was a little bit misguided
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  about my herald piece and we can do a 30,000 foot snapshot and then get down into specifics?
• 9:55
  To be fair, I'd quite recall the details of our exchange, but I think in general you're
• 10:01
  articulating how much progress we had made in New South Wales and Australia and the situation
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  for LGBTQ people generally being quite good here and I was being more realistic about
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  the state of our law reform, particularly in New South Wales, where we at the time in March
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  I think when we were exchanging on Twitter had the worst laws in Australia and now we have
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  the second worst but we'll probably go back to being having the worst later this year.
• 10:29
  Right.
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  So obviously there are two kind of frames that you could, like there are two lenses that
• 10:35
  you could look at through it, right?
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  One is are we doing better than our peer states in a country that on the whole was pretty
• 10:41
  good for gay rights, I mean I'm struggling in the other lens here which was where I was
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  coming from which was I think a bigger picture question of how our gay rights thought about
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  in elite institutions and the mainstream media and the public in comparison to the way
• 10:58
  they might have been say a generation or two ago and trying to be grateful for those
• 11:03
  wins.
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  So we can have a gratitude for the wins but even in the framing that you've just used
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  you've talked about gay rights and the acceptance of gay rights, whereas I've been talking about
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  LGBTQ rights and particularly where you move past gay men and lesbians that's where our
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  laws and even cultural attitudes still fall short of where they should be, right?
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  Not just in New South Wales but around the country.
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  But the Māori grass started as a gay and lesbian celebration, right?
• 11:31
  It doesn't mean that that's the only fight left but if that's a legitimate lens isn't it?
• 11:36
  It started as the gay Māori grass but that doesn't mean it was only gay people there.
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  So over time the institutional organisation has expanded to be gay and lesbian in the name
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  and to be incorporated, incorporate the broader community in its representation but they
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  were trans people, they were gender diverse people there from the very beginning and they
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  weren't in the name.
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  Yeah, right.
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  I was wondering whether or not part of the sort of disagreement or what you thought that
• 12:03
  I was off mark was maybe in the way that we use a word like triumph because I think I
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  had said that the triumph of the gay rights movement was the normality of my life, was the fact
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  that I don't come from a place of great privilege, I'm middle class, I'm white, I'm male, that
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  I don't experience discrimination on a day-to-day basis that I'm aware of, I have a family,
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  I have the white bigot fans and so I was talking about the triumph of the gay rights movement
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  and I feel like that perhaps set you off on the wrong foot by thinking, well hang on,
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  it's a bit what, gloating to talk about a triumph when there's still a lot left to be
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  done but I would talk about the triumph of guns rights activists in the United States
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  or I would talk about the triumph of liberal democracy in establishing a stable world
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  order at the same time as I would recognise that Russia has invaded Ukraine and Xi Jinping
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  isn't on board and you know there's still a gun rights person in America would say,
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  well hang on, we still can't buy the automatic weapons that I think we should be able to buy.
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  So it's a triumph, there's never a total but I feel like maybe you thought that that was
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  a totalising way of framing it.
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  Again, I think triumph and I'm glad that you've acknowledged it reflects the fact that
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  you and I sitting as his gay men, you know middle or upper class who have other people
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  might describe us, life can be pretty good, that doesn't necessarily reflect the facts
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  on the ground for other members of the, even the gay community, let alone other parts
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  of the alphabet, when we have in New South Wales and federally religious exceptions which
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  allow schools and hospitals and welfare institutions to sack staff, to not employ staff, to turn
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  people away, to mistreat students, to expel students, even for gay men, the situation
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  is not what I would describe as a triumph and then you look at all the other things.
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  So bisexual people in New South Wales aren't even included in our Anti-Discrimination
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  Act.
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  Transgender people in New South Wales have to have surgery in order to change their birth
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  certificates, the only place in their country, intersects people are only protected against
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  involuntary surgeries after birth as young children when they're too young to consent in one
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  jurisdiction in Australia.
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  So you talked about America, so maybe your use of triumph there I would say is a bit mission
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  accomplished and we need to think about all the other things that are still left to do,
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  what, expressing gratitude for the fact that we have come a long way.
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  Yeah, I mean, for me it's a sort of a tonal thing because I understand where you're
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  coming from in the sense that one of the rhetorical moves that really hurts me about conservatives
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  often and I'm sure it hurts you as well, I can tell from you're response to my piece,
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  was when conservatives will say, you know, take for example diversity in the media or
• 14:40
  something like that, they'll say, why do these people keep banging on about having more
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  diverse media look at all the diversity that we see on our television screens and progressives
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  will say, we've only got that diversity now because we were agitating for it five years
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  ago or ten years ago, like you were the ones who were opposed to it before it was fixed.
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  So there is a certain amount of, you know, one has to be cautious about saying like, why
• 15:03
  are we continuing to agitate for X cause when it's going so well and then the people who've
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  been agitating for X cause for the past 30 years ago, the end of reason is going so well
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  is because we have been agitating for it.
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  I can see that, but then I also feel like there's a time and a place for certain strategies
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  and for a certain amount of divisiveness and hostility and when you're very, very, very
• 15:25
  much on the back foot, when the attitudes towards LGBTQIA plus people are what they were
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  in the 80s, for example, where it's really regarded widely and commonly at cocktail parties
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  and on editorial pages of newspapers and in the mainstream press and even amongst progressives
• 15:48
  as being a bit of a perversion and like these people as being degenerate essentially.
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  And you go from that to not only is it not a perversion, not only is it not degenerate,
• 16:00
  we have all of the big wins that we wanted, marriage, the ability to visit your spouse
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  when they're in a hospital, proper financial arrangements like being able to share mortgages
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  and things like that.
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  All the big stuff, like do you think that it is a triumph?
• 16:19
  Do you think that a person in the 70s would look at the status quo in the 2020s and go,
• 16:25
  that's pretty fast and that's pretty good, what do you reckon they'd be like?
• 16:33
  It's a bit of both.
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  I think we can, as I said before, we can have gratitude for how far we've come, the victories
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  that have been achieved.
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  I guess from my perspective, a policy advocate, it's my job to keep campaigning to make
• 16:46
  things even better.
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  We can highlight the fact that particularly for gay men and lesbians, things have come
• 16:54
  a long way since the 80s and public attitudes towards homosexuality and public attitudes
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  and discrimination towards people on the basis of the sexual orientation.
• 17:03
  We can simultaneously point out that some of the public debate about transgender and
• 17:08
  gender-diverse people now is highly reminiscent of the 1980s.
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  Some of the pushback against trans rights and inclusion is quite similar to what you
• 17:16
  and I grew up with as gay people at that time.
• 17:21
  That leaves aside the fact that for intersex people, they're at the start of the journey
• 17:25
  towards legal protections from what are some of the gravest human rights violations against
• 17:31
  any part of our community.
• 17:33
  It makes me fun at parties, but it is my job to point out where we're falling short.
• 17:39
  Will there ever come a point of progress where you'll put yourself out of a job?
• 17:44
  I would love to think so.
• 17:47
  It doesn't seem like it's going to be in the near future.
• 17:49
  There is a sense sometimes of a shifting of the goalposts like you win all of this stuff,
• 17:55
  but you still need a job and you still want to feel like you're on the right side of the fight.
• 18:00
  We find new things that we have to worry about.
• 18:04
  I'm not saying that all of those concerns are illegitimate,
• 18:06
  but you'll get a stronger and stronger microscope to find the inequalities that we need to man the barricades against.
• 18:16
  Again, yes and no.
• 18:16
  So one of the reasons why I'm such a staunch advocate for LGBTQ inclusion and rights
• 18:22
  is the fact that I was that gay kid at a religious boarding school who was mistreated on the basis of who I was.
• 18:28
  That wasn't the early 1990s in Queensland.
• 18:31
  The fact that in 2024 in New South Wales, that same mistreatment is lawful in New South Wales is appalling.
• 18:38
  Lawful because of religious schools?
• 18:40
  Yes.
• 18:41
  So let's explain that to people because I think the most weird and egregious way that we structure a lot of our education and adoption and foster care in New South Wales
• 18:53
  and in Australia, broadly, when it comes to education is that we pay taxpayer money to religious institutions, basically something that wouldn't really happen in the United States.
• 19:04
  And those religious institutions then have a freedom of religion doctrine that gets smuggled in, so to speak.
• 19:10
  So the successive governments have tried to do something about this.
• 19:14
  I mean, I'll be interested in your thoughts about how hard they've tried or whether they should have been trying in the way that they did by pairing requirements that religious schools not discriminate against LGBT kids with, for example, religious freedom bills that also guarantee the expression of religious freedom and trying to please both of both sides of that point at the same time.
• 19:35
  But how much of where how much of the problems stem from the fact that we've got this weird system where we outsource essentially public services and in some cases education to religious institutions?
• 19:50
  So from my perspective, you know, I might have lots of thoughts about the outsourcing of a public service to religious bodies.
• 20:00
  That's the context in which that we working.
• 20:02
  So I don't think any government, state or federal and Australia is going to change the fact that we provide money to religious institutions to run schools.
• 20:09
  Right. So we take that as a given in that context, what rights should they be given to mistreat students and staff on the basis of who they are?
• 20:20
  And I think in that context, it's incredibly difficult to come up with a sound rationale for why a school should be able to mistreat a kid just because of who they are.
• 20:30
  So just let's just part can we park trends for a second because that's a whole kettle of fish that I want to talk about as well in terms of in terms of sexuality, not gender identity in terms of being gay, lesbian or bisexual.
• 20:41
  What's the current status quo? What can religious schools do?
• 20:46
  So in your South Wales, pretty much anything. So not just expulsion, which is what opponents of change in this area like to focus on, but it could be suspension.
• 20:56
  It can be other forms of punishment. It can be denied prefects. It can be appointed as a prefect. And that's one of the stories that we're in a quality Australia is denied, I mean, dismissed may have got those words in the wrong order report that they released earlier this year, it can be denied the ability to bring your partner to a formal.
• 21:16
  It can be subjected to all sorts of other conditions. So CD point Christian College tried to come up with an enrollment contract that they wanted parents to sign that said, you know, something along the lines of homosexuality is a threat to society.
• 21:31
  So all of those things are forms of mistreatment that are perfectly lawful at the moment for religious schools to inflict on students in New South Wales, in Western Australia, and in South Australia, potentially. It's a little less clear there. And I'm a Commonwealth law.
• 21:45
  And just to clarify for non-Australian listeners, these religious schools do not operate schools in like a public school catchment zone. There's no chance that a person that a child is going to be sent to that school, like against the family as well.
• 21:58
  In other words, that's not going to be the public school. The public school would be prohibited from from doing all of those things, but if a religious family wants to send their kid to a religious school, then that would be their choice.
• 22:08
  That is their choice. I think we need to acknowledge first that a lot of families send their children to these schools, not because they're religious or because the school is religious, but because the schools have more resources and can deliver.
• 22:21
  Yeah. And they much better value than a secular private school. So there will be private schools that are non-religious private schools that might be cheaper that are religious and then public schools, which are free.
• 22:31
  It may be not as good.
• 22:33
  And we also need to remember that a lot of parents send their children to those schools, not knowing, necessarily what those schools views are on homosexuality, knowing whether they kids gay in advance.
• 22:43
  And that was the point I was getting to. They don't know.
• 22:46
  And in a lot of cases, they probably can't know what their child will be. And that brings me to the kind of core point of why we need to intervene in this area.
• 22:57
  It does not matter where a child is from. They can be from a religious family. They can be from a non-religious family. They can be at a public school. They can be at a private school. They can be at a religious school.
• 23:06
  Any child can be LGBTQ, which means that all students need to be protected and have a safe place to learn and grow your respective of who they are.
• 23:15
  So if you are not really about the taxpayer funding thing, because I mean, one compromise, I mean, even though it's a theoretical compromise, as you say, it's probably not going to happen because we're so wedded to the system as we've currently got it, but at least ideologically and sort of in terms of the morality of this.
• 23:28
  Some people would say, yeah, they shouldn't get taxpayer money if they're going to discriminate, but if like a private community of like Amish people want to create their own religious school, then they should be able to do whatever they want with their own money and their own community.
• 23:44
  No, I'd still disagree with that, because it is about the safety of children. So again, you and I are a certain age. I'm not sure whether you watch the Simpsons when you were younger.
• 23:53
  I certainly did. The Helen Lovejoy character, you know, once somebody please think of the children, I find it really interesting these days that people who oppose these law changes, talk about religious freedom, talk about the rights of parents, talk about the rights of schools and institutions, very rarely do they actually talk about the rights of the kid.
• 24:14
  And when they do often, it's actually to cloak themselves in that rhetoric, because then on gender identity, certainly there's a lot of talk about like we have to protect children from having the wrong idea or about going confused about their gender identity.
• 24:27
  So usually when you hear people talking about protecting the children is protecting them from LGBTQ ideas, rather than rather persecution from religious, rather than acknowledging that any child can be LGBTQ. And so
• 24:41
  I think I have to give credit to opponents of reform in this area. They've been really clever to talk about religious freedom and to brand themselves in that banner.
• 24:51
  But what particularly in relation to LGBTQ kids at schools, what they're exercising is religious control. So they're not talking about the freedom of kids to be who they are. They're not talking about the freedom for them to explore this
• 25:04
  sexual orientation or the gender identity or even their faith. So when we, we at the Justice and Equity Center have consistently advocated for change to these provisions federally and in New South Wales for the last six or seven years, there is a compromise that can be made.
• 25:19
  So you acknowledge religious schools are formed for the benefit of communities of faith. And so our enrollment, you would allow discrimination on the basis of the faith of the child or the child's family when they enroll.
• 25:32
  But what's equally important is that you don't allow discrimination on the basis of faith after they enroll, because children should be able to question faith. And as they get older, particularly as they're in their 10 years to actually say, well, I don't necessarily believe the faith generally or I don't believe particular talents of the faith, that's religious freedom. But that's what I mean, that is tremendously threatening to relate religious dogmatists.
• 25:55
  I mean, and I would be in favor of it nonetheless, because I'm against religious dogma, but I think it's a maybe bit of a dodge to say that it's consistent with religious freedom, because the whole conceit of a religion, if you're really, really committed to it, is that it is the cosmological truth, and you don't want, I mean, the people who oppose, for example, comparative religion classes, the most that look at all the different world religions and what they have in common and how they differ.
• 26:22
  are religious people, deeply religious people, because they don't want their kids to learn how arbitrary their own faith is and how many different versions of faith there are they want their child to grow up in that faith doctrine, and to some extent.
• 26:39
  I mean, I'm fully supportive of a small L liberal attitude towards adolescent education, where they have as much of an education as possible about faith and about atheism and about different religions, because I think that instills a good questioning mindset, but I also have to own that that lands as an attack on religious people from the perspective of religious dogmatists.
• 27:01
  It except it's not for two reasons. One, it still allows the school to teach that religion to those children, it just means they can't mistreat, authorate, and with punishment, or get rid of the child from that school environment, just because they might change their faith or just because they might question their faith, so it still allows for the teaching of faith, and two, this is actually how it already operates.
• 27:23
  So in Tasmania, in Queensland, in the ACT, they don't allow discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or students and staff, or students, we can get to staff staff and a bit. So in five jurisdictions, in fact, in Australia, we don't allow discrimination against students. So Tasmania, Victoria, the ACT, Queensland, and Northern Territory, and some of those places, those protections have been in existence for more than two decades, including in Tasmania and Queensland, and while the Tasmania is ahead of us when the homosexual
• 27:53
  equality was like it literally against the law in the late 90s in Tasmania, and they moved almost straight to a system where they would protect students against discrimination on the basis of who they are, and they do adopt this system. They adopt the system of saying, not only are students protected against discrimination on the basis of being LGBTQ, but enrollment is the point where you can discriminate on the basis of faith, and after that point, it's up to the school to teach that faith, but nor can they discriminate against the student on the basis of religious belief.
• 28:23
  And that system works well. Right. So you can be expelled, not just for being gay, but also for being an atheist in a religious school, if they want.
• 28:32
  You can be expelled for any religious belief, other than Judaism or Sikhism, because they for part of the definition of ethno-religious and race.
• 28:42
  Oh, that's interesting. Okay. So you smuggle in the racial discrimination and not to protect too ethnic, too particular religious groups, but any other faith group.
• 28:50
  So a Christian school can expel a student for becoming Muslim, a Christian school can expel a student for being atheist.
• 28:56
  Right. They can, an Anglican school could expel a student for being Catholic, presumably for converting to Sikhism or Judaism as well, because they're not part of the ethnic minority that's protected.
• 29:07
  That would be up to the courts, but that definition of ethno-religious has been found to apply in those couple of circumstances.
• 29:16
  Okay. So just bringing gender identity onto the table then. So part of what was attempted in a very, very clumsy and ham-fisted way by a very clumsy and ham-fisted prime minister, Scott Morrison in 2022, was to change the law federally, right, to basically make a blanket.
• 29:35
  You know, ban on discriminated on religious schools, discriminating, but that fell apart because of an internal conservative party stout over whether gender identity should be included in that. Have I got that right?
• 29:48
  Not especially. So from 2018 onwards, Morrison was promising to protect LGBTQ students in religious schools. It's unclear whether he actually ever wanted to follow through on that promise.
• 30:02
  There was a bill, right? I mean, there were five liberal backbentures who crossed the floor to vote down the bill because they objected to the fact that transgender kids weren't included.
• 30:13
  So there wasn't a bill to protect LGBTQ students. That was an amendment that was put forward to the religious discrimination bill package.
• 30:21
  That's semantic, isn't it? I mean, they were trying to pass the law that would do the...
• 30:24
  But Morrison wanted to do.
• 30:26
  The liberal government wasn't. So the cross-bent and labor opposition were trying to protect LGBTQ students. The government was not.
• 30:36
  What they're trying to protect gay students? I thought that was part of Morrison's bill. He was like, we'll give the religious people a religious freedom bill and we'll give the gay people the gay and lesbian you can't get expelled.
• 30:47
  They floated that, but that was never introduced in the same way that he promised in 2018 to introduce amendments by the end of that year.
• 30:54
  And some amendments were circulated, which were terrible, and would have continued discrimination in a different way and was never introduced.
• 31:00
  So he never introduced anything to protect any part of the community.
• 31:04
  I guess the salient question I have is, if the five moderate liberal back benches hadn't crossed the floor, then wouldn't we have a ban on discriminating against gay?
• 31:15
  No, because he didn't include it. He floated it. And when the community and other groups said, no, you can't do that, he never introduced any amendments.
• 31:25
  Because he knew he wasn't going to get the numbers.
• 31:27
  Also, I'd argue because he didn't care about it. He didn't actually want to reform in this area. And he was quite happy to push forward a religious discrimination bill package that entrenched discrimination against LGBTQ people and women and people of minority faiths and people with disability.
• 31:43
  So I don't think it was a good faith idea.
• 31:46
  Well, we can't read his mind. But so fast forwarding to today, it seems like the current government and the prime minister is working behind the scenes to try to get some.
• 31:55
  You laugh cynically to try to get bipartisan agreement on something before it goes out because the prime minister is now from the opposite party.
• 32:03
  He's a central left leader rather than the conservative one who you were just talking about had a change of government since 2022.
• 32:09
  And, you know, from what I can tell, he seems to be saying, I don't want to turn this into a big cultural war issue. I don't want it to become what's got Morrison made it, which is, you know, you get the kind of anti-trans people all riled up or something.
• 32:20
  I want to find a bipartisan consensus behind the scenes and then bring the bill to the floor. But as I understand it, part of the sticking point is still whether or not you include all expressions of gender identity in the protections.
• 32:35
  So I'm not privy to what's going on behind the scenes at the moment, but I think we do need to go backwards to go forwards here.
• 32:41
  At the same time that Morrison promised to protect LGBTQ students in 2018, the Labor opposition, including Shadow Attorney General Mark Drifers, who's now the Attorney General, promised to protect both LGBTQ students and teachers.
• 32:54
  So that promise has been there since November 2018. They restated that promise in February 2022 in the wake of the religious discrimination bill issue.
• 33:05
  So they saw the previous government withdraw their own religious discrimination bill from consideration because it had been amended to protect LGBTQ students.
• 33:17
  So that's the context in which they said we will get this done. Right. And now they've turned around. So we've had the change of government in May 2022.
• 33:25
  They referred it to a law firm commission process federally, which reported at the end of last year, which made some really clear cut recommendations for how it should be done.
• 33:34
  And what were those recommendations, basically?
• 33:37
  Eventually amend the sex discrimination act so that you protect students are meant to say you protect teachers with some further amendments to the Fair Work Act, which would allow religious schools to discriminate on employment of staff on the basis of their religious belief, not whether they LGBTQ or not, where it was reasonable and proportionate to do so.
• 33:56
  So really clear cut recommendations for how it could be implemented. And only then has the government turned around and said, actually, we're not going to introduce anything unless it's bipartisan.
• 34:05
  And that's just a nonsense. It's a fast A, you don't make election commitments and say, oh, sorry, we promise you this, but we're only going to do it if the other side who we defeat says yes.
• 34:16
  But it's even more farcical when we think about the context in which they made that promise in February 2022, which is that the government that they made the government had withdrawn its own package because it protected LGBTQ students.
• 34:30
  So they did not then and they do not now the Commonwealth opposition, the liberal national parties do not support protecting LGBTQ students.
• 34:38
  So if you make bipartisanship a condition of passing anything, then nothing happens.
• 34:43
  Right, right, unless you somehow managed to get the leader of the opposition, the leader of the conservative coalition to ignore his own conservative back benches and come with you on that ride.
• 34:54
  Well, it's too charitable and everything that's happened since March this year when the government said that that was their position suggests not only does the opposition continue to oppose these protections,
• 35:07
  but actually now you see shadow attorney general Michaelia Cash out there campaigning with religious fundamentalist groups saying we don't just want the changes in the Commonwealth six discrimination act to keep rights to discriminate.
• 35:21
  We want to override those states and territories where children are already protected.
• 35:25
  Would that be legal?
• 35:26
  Yes.
• 35:27
  The Commonwealth can override state law on that.
• 35:30
  So we have it's complicated, but we have a system of complementary anti-discrimination laws.
• 35:35
  So states and territories have their anti-discrimination laws and the Commonwealth generally they operate alongside each other because they are framed in the negative.
• 35:44
  So people can't do something.
• 35:45
  Yep.
• 35:46
  And as long as you don't breach that, it's okay.
• 35:48
  And that's why we've got to a situation where over time increasing numbers of states and territories have moved to protect queer kids because the Commonwealth wouldn't.
• 35:59
  But if you framed Commonwealth anti-discrimination exceptions as positive rights, which is what the Australian Christian lobby and others want and are demanding and what Michaelia Cash is publicly supporting, then they've then become inconsistent and Commonwealth law Trump state law.
• 36:18
  So you would see them taking away rights from kids in places where they already protected.
• 36:23
  So just to run a case study or thought experiment there, I'm a gay kid, I'm a gay teenager in Victoria where I'm protected at a religious school from being expelled, but then an understate law.
• 36:36
  But then the national government passes a law that says religious schools or communities have the right to impose, have the right to what express their own religious, D.E. held religious convictions or something.
• 36:50
  They have a positive right to operate their schools according to their religious ethos and tenets and that includes, you know, X1.
• 36:57
  And if I, the gay expelled kid, go to the Supreme Court of Victoria and I win, the school can take me to the high court of Australia, presumably and say, your win actually undermines our right to enforce out.
• 37:10
  Well, often you would find a state court would probably side with the federal national government.
• 37:15
  But not here at it would say this raises incompatibility issue, which is why you do see religious fundamentalists at the moment, like the Australian Christian or Christian schools Australia demanding a positive right because they see this as an opportunity because the government's not acting to introduce protection federally to push forward to strip away existing restrictions.
• 37:37
  And the tragedy of it all is those existing protections are operating well.
• 37:43
  So, like I said before, we've had Tasmania and Queensland and the Northern Territory protect kids for decades.
• 37:50
  The ACT and Victoria have protected them over the last five or six years since this debate was running every time that this law reform becomes an issue.
• 37:59
  You have kind of the penny pennies running around saying schools won't exist. We'll have to threaten to close schools. We will no longer be able to teach our kids.
• 38:09
  So, would you have a national law then that's modeled on one of the state laws that you think is particularly good?
• 38:15
  So, the Victorian reforms are particularly good. The ACT reforms are particularly good pretty much any of the laws in terms of students are effective.
• 38:25
  But when it comes to staff, probably one of those two are the most comprehensive in terms of their protections.
• 38:31
  And again, religious schools continue to operate there. I don't think any religious school has closed in any jurisdiction and cited we can no longer discriminate on these grounds as the reason for that closure.
• 38:41
  I imagine what the mechanism would be by which you'd have to close a school because you can no longer expel its gay students.
• 38:49
  And I think part of the sticking point that's frankly happening in the Labor Party and the reason why they're not just using the fact that they are in government to pass this because they could they don't have to have bipartisan support is probably the gender conversation the way that it is a cultural war issue at the moment.
• 39:06
  So, you know, the Islamic Schools Association of Australia is obviously against this as well and it is my suspicion correct me if you disagree that were it not for the gender question this would have been taken care of in the first year of the Labor government.
• 39:25
  This would have been taken care of in the sense that there's a significant majority of people certainly on the left who think it's outrageous that you could be expelled for being gay.
• 39:36
  But there are a lot of people who would have sympathy for the Islamic Schools Association when they say in our community for our students boys don't wear dresses.
• 39:46
  So, there's lots of issues you've just raised there. First, I guess I would hesitate to single out any particular faith background as being an issue there.
• 39:55
  So, you mentioned a couple of questions once I threw in the Islamic one because it makes work people a little bit more uncomfortable to criticize Islam than Christianity.
• 40:03
  Sure, but the vast majority of religious schools in Australia are Christian and you look at city point Christian college which again has just settled a discrimination complaint against it.
• 40:12
  Part of its enrollment contact contract was discriminating against people on the basis of their gender identity too.
• 40:18
  So, I think it's a multi-faith religious school opposition to protecting kids on both sexual orientation and gender identity.
• 40:28
  I don't think necessarily that it's about a split between sexual orientation and gender identity.
• 40:33
  I just think it's a government that has been far too cautious and far too slow to move.
• 40:38
  They have explicitly included all of LGBTQ in their promises from 2018 onwards.
• 40:45
  But do you think they did fully cautious if they or for they feared was a backlash from homophobes?
• 40:50
  Not from parents who are confused about why at their progressive in the city school half the class identifies as gender queer or non-binary or something.
• 41:00
  Again, I don't know what's going on in their minds. They don't necessarily appreciate it.
• 41:05
  You know what it takes to get things across the line which is the largest amount of buy-in and the lowest amount of potential backlash.
• 41:15
  I mean, what it takes to get things across the line is to develop good policy, promise it, get elected, implement it any way you can.
• 41:21
  They have the opportunity to do that. They can get it passed now with the support of the Greens and the crossbench.
• 41:26
  Get it done and people will see that this guy doesn't fall.
• 41:30
  So, frankly, I'm not actually even all that interested in their reason for not progressing it.
• 41:35
  They promised it. It's simple. They asked the ALRC to look into how it should be delivered.
• 41:41
  They gave them the straight forward way to do it. There is no reason why they can't do it now.
• 41:46
  They could get it done in weeks if they wanted to.
• 41:48
  Right. But yeah, I mean, then there would so are any at the edges of gender expression, right?
• 41:58
  Is there a conversation to be had about the difference between discriminating against what used to be called transexuals?
• 42:06
  People who from a very, very early age have persistently felt that they were born into the wrong body
• 42:11
  and live their lives, can only live their lives in a flourishing way if they do have their adopt their new gender identity, so to speak,
• 42:21
  versus what where the conversation often falls, which is, here's a 15-year-old who has a beard and like plays rugby,
• 42:30
  but also wants to wear dresses and go by they them.
• 42:33
  And there's some confusion, I suppose, in the community about whether or not that is a gender status that is,
• 42:42
  I don't want to say as deserving, but as crucial to protect as statuses or identities that people feel one has no control over,
• 42:53
  like being gay or being a transexual.
• 42:57
  Sure. You keep on raising lots of definitions.
• 43:00
  That's my job.
• 43:01
  That's my job.
• 43:02
  I know, but there's lots of things to unpack there and I guess the preliminary point I would say is you are.
• 43:07
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• 43:12
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• 43:22
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