A Senate Committee examining Labor’s new anti-discrimination laws say exemptions for religious organisations operating health and aged-care services and schools should be axed.

The new laws, which seek to consolidate and simplify five pieces of Australian legislation currently covering anti-discrimination, had sought to preserve the rights of religious organisations to discriminate in providing services. An exception had been made for aged-care facilities, in light of concerns of discrimination against elderly homosexual couples barred from Commonwealth-funded religious aged care facilities.

But the Senate Committee yesterday said all exemptions for religious organisations in service delivery should be axed. Religious organisations will not be able to discriminate against individuals in the provision of services on the basis of age, race, gender and sexual identity. Exemptions for religious organisation employers will remain.

“No organisation should enjoy a blanket exception from anti-discrimination law when they are involved in service delivery to the general community,” the Senate Committee report states.

Christian evangelists may have come off the firing line, however, with the recommendation from the Senate Committee to remove offense provisions, which would have seen discrimination include conduct that “offends, insults or intimidates another person.”

Robert Johnston from Christian Education National says the offense provisions were “just a nonsense”, essentially meaning if it had continued that “you dare not say anything for fear of someone being offended and taking you to court. Courts would have been clogged up until the Lord returns.”

The axing of religious exemptions for service delivery means schools and health and aged care facilities with restrictive entrance requirements based on belief or sexual identify will no longer be automatically excluded from anti-discrimination law. Rather, they will need to seek exemption, which leaves them open to being sued by people who “disagree with church ethos”, as put by The Australian this morning.

Labor Senator Trish Crossin who chaired the Senate Committee told ABC’s AM program that while the recommendations were a change in direction, “it would not preclude, I don’t think, religious organisations from being able to conduct the services they currently do in the way they do.”

However Christian Schools Australia and Christian Educational National both suggest there are significant implications for how their schools will operate, particularly when it comes to who and what they are allowed to teach.

Robert Johnston, operations manager for Christian Education National says while schools with closed enrolment policies are a minority in his own association, there may be hundreds of Christian schools severely affected by the recommendations.

He says schools with closed enrolment policies usually require parents to declare they are a “member of good standing of a church whose statement of faith is consistent with that of the school.” If the Senate Committee’s recommendations are folded into the new anti-discrimination laws, these sorts of policies would most likely be considered discriminatory.

Christian Schools Australia says the Senate Committee’s recommendations are unacceptable, choosing to focus on the broad nature of the recommendations that may well have implications on their employment abilities, given the intrinsic nature of teaching as service delivery.

“What is a faith based school, if it is not staffed by people of the faith? The large and increasing proportion of parents who choose a faith based education for their children do so on the basis that the school will, with integrity, represent the beliefs and values they profess. A school that can’t include religious adherence as a criterion for selection can not fulfil this mandate,” said Christian Schools Australia CEO Stephen O’Doherty.

“The clear intention of Recommendation 11 is to secularise Australia’s successful faith based school systems, to force them to lose their religious character.”

Australian Catholic Bishops Conference general secretary Brian Lucas said the recommendations “tilts the balance the wrong way”, and would “undermine religious freedom”.

“I don’t think any government is seriously wanting to undermine the good work that religious organisations do through their health, welfare and educational institutions. And they can only do that if they have the capacity to run those organisations in accordance with their beliefs,” Lucas told ABC AM.

The Australian Christian Lobby is calling on the Government to reject the recommendations and uphold religious freedom.

“Faith-based schools and hospitals do not discriminate, they provide a particular range of services consistent with their faith, and government must protect their ability to do that to honour its responsibility to protect human rights,” said ACL’s managing director Jim Wallace.