Elenie Poulos
Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
These days, the issue of religious freedom regularly makes media headlines in Australia but this wasn’t always the case. While there is evidence of continued religiously motivated abuse and vilification against Australia’s First Peoples and religious minorities including Muslims, Jews, and Sikhs, this is not the focus of public debate. The issue is, rather, the extent of the exemptions from anti-discrimination law granted to religious organisations – that is, against whom and in what circumstances are religious organisations allowed to discriminate based on religious belief?
The ‘problem’ of religious freedom first came to the attention of many Australians when conservative Christian lobbyists, politicians and religious leaders, responding to growing calls for marriage equality, began to cast it as a threat to religious freedom. However, its history stretches back to European invasion. Some limited protection was included in the Constitution in 1901, but because Australia lacks a national comprehensive human rights instrument, there is no general protection for freedom of religion or protection from religious discrimination.[i] Religious freedom is instead addressed through exemptions or exceptions in anti-discrimination law which allow for lawful discrimination by religious organisations in certain circumstances.[ii]
My doctoral research aims to examine the rise of the politics of religious freedom in Australia. One of the key flash points for debate has been marriage equality. To understand how politically sensitive the ‘problem’ of religious freedom has become, one need look no further than the name of the bill that finally granted marriage equality: the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Bill 2017.
In 1961, the Federal Parliament of Australia passed the Commonwealth Marriage Act. It did not include a definition of marriage. In 2004, the conservative government led by Prime Minister John Howard responded to the growing global movement towards the legalisation of same-sex marriage by amending the Marriage Act to define marriage as between a man and a woman. This amendment was supported by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) Opposition but not the minor parties (The Greens and the now defunct Australian Democrats) who picked up the fight for marriage equality. There was no talk of religious freedom in 2004.
Between 2004 and 2016, 23 bills were introduced to legislate same-sex marriage or recognise same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions.[iii] The ALP changed its policy in 2011 to support marriage equality.
Marriage equality was finally legislated in December 2017 after the government ran a postal survey of all Australians. The controversial survey saw well-orchestrated campaigns for and against marriage equality, and returned an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote of 61.6% (7.82 million) while 38.4% (4.87 million) voted ‘no’.[iv]
A close study of the speeches made during the parliamentary debates on same-sex marriage, using a corpus assisted analysis, can trace how the political discourse changed over time to the point at which, in 2017, the discourse of religious freedom came to dominate.
Corpus analysis describes a range of computational methodologies for the analysis of large sets of text. It has some advantages over other forms of discourse analysis including that is generates both quantitative and qualitative data, can help to reduce researcher bias, can expose the incremental effect of discourse and can be used with other methodologies.[v] Corpus analysis software can, in a single text or any number of texts (a corpus) generate word frequency lists (the most basic tool in corpus analysis which can identify potential avenues of further research and show trends and differences between corpora); perform a concordance analysis to show word use in context; analyse texts according to various statistical measures to identify the keywords (‘keyness’ being a measure of salience which results from comparing the word frequencies in one corpus against those in another to determine which words are more frequent in a statistically more significant sense – i.e. not appearing by chance); and also yield the collocates (words that appear near another word, more frequently than we would expect to happen by chance) of any word in a text or across multiple texts.[vi]
In the first instance, I focussed the analysis on the 300 speeches (472,605 words) that included at least one example of any words or references contextualised by the speaker to point to religion, religious belief, practice or ritual including names of religious traditions, institutions, leaders, and lobby groups (the second half of the research will look at all 663 speeches). In order to track the changing discourse over time, the 300 speeches (the corpus) were grouped chronologically into three sub-corpora – 2004, 2010-2016 and 2017.
Given that the speeches were made in the course of debates about bills to change the law to allow for same-sex marriage, many of the most frequent lexical words (‘marriage’, ‘sex’, ‘bill’, ‘couples’ etc.) are unsurprising. More significantly are those words that are frequent in one sub-corpus compared to the others: ‘children’, ‘family/families’ and ‘relationships’ appear only in 2004; ‘equality’ appears frequently and ‘discrimination’ is unique in the 2010-16 speeches; and ‘religious’ and ‘freedom’ appear only in 2017, and even after subtracting the 99 instances of ‘religious’ used when speakers were citing the name of the bill—the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Bill 2017—it remains the fourth most frequent lexical word used. This short and simple list suggests that the discourse dominant in each sub-corpus differs in important ways. This is, of course, partly a function of the intent of the various bills, but it does suggest that the framing of discourses about same-sex marriage changed over time.
The keyword analysis also indicates markedly different debates across the years. In 2004, compared with all the other speeches, the arguments were largely about the proposed ban on intercountry adoptions by gay couples (keywords including ‘overseas’, ‘child’ and ‘children’). The discourse about the sanctity of marriage, the Christian history of marriage and Christianity’s influence in the development of law and democracy is also unique to 2004.
The keywords in the 2010-16 sub-corpus reflect the dominance in the debates about the proposal for a popular vote (‘referendum’ ‘plebiscite’, ‘cost’ and ‘poll’). The word ‘equality’, although the third most frequent lexical term (used 753 times), does not appear as a keyword (that is, its usage is no more frequent in a statistically significant sense in the 2010-16 texts than in the other two sub-corpora taken together).
Unsurprisingly, a number of the most important keywords in the 2017 sub-corpus reference the postal survey but unlike the earlier speeches, this sub-corpus contains a large number of keywords referencing freedoms and protections, including ‘charities’, ‘exemptions’, ‘protections’, ‘conscientious’, ‘schools’, ‘protection’, ‘religious’ and ‘faith’. The keyword analysis invites questions about what or whose freedoms are at stake, what or who is need of protection, and what are the ‘religious’ issues of concern – questions that can be answered with a collocation analysis off the terms ‘freedom/s’, ‘religious’ and ‘protections’.
What counted as a concern in 2004 about religious matters was limited to religious or nonreligious ‘beliefs’ about the nature of marriage and legislating on the basis of (some particular) religious beliefs. In 2010-16 there was a focus on the perceived consequences of same-sex marriage for religious organisations and institutions. In 2017 this became significant with many more collocates reflecting a wider range of issues around those concerns. A prominent discourse about the ‘protection’ of matters ‘religious’ is evident in the 2017 debate, with multiple forms of the word-form ‘protect’ appearing as collocates with ‘religious’.
In marked contrast to the later debates, the object of protection in the 2004 speeches was the institution of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. In the 2010-16 speeches, there were six instances in six of the 109 speeches of ‘religious’ as a collocate with the word-form ‘protect’: four references to the protection of religious freedom, one reference to protecting religious celebrants and another to protecting religious institutions. The discourse of religious freedom protections in relation to same-sex marriage appears to have been in its infancy during these years. With the inevitable legislation of same-sex marriage after the postal survey, the major object of protection in the 2017 speeches was religious freedom.
The collocation analysis for the word ‘freedom’ shows how the discourse around freedom became far more expansive in 2017, with religious freedom being associated with a range of other freedoms – most notably freedom of speech, parental freedoms, freedom of worship, freedom of belief (which the concordance analysis reveals is not always the same as freedom of religion, and often associated with freedom of conscience) and faith, and freedom of conscience.
It is interesting to note that in all the 300 speeches analysed for this part of the research, not one parliamentarian spoke against the idea of religious freedom, asked what was meant by it or how it might be defined, or suggested that it should not be protected in law. Relatively few speeches (30) included statements to the effect that religious freedom was already sufficiently protected, in Australian law and/or in the bill being debated. The idea that religious freedom was a legitimate issue of concern in the context of same-sex marriage was hardly ever questioned. The naturalisation of the discourse of religious freedom in the context of same-sex marriage had become so entrenched that, by 2017, the parliamentary debate was focussed almost entirely on arguments about the extent of the legal protections that should be granted to individuals and organisations opposed, largely on religious grounds, to same-sex marriage.
The corpus assisted analysis of 300 speeches made during the Australian parliamentary debates on same-sex marriage, demonstrates that the parliamentary discourse around marriage equality shifted over time from the institution of marriage to protecting the freedoms of those opposed to marriage equality. The analysis demonstrates that the debates were never primarily about the protection or extension of rights to LGBTIQ people or their freedom to marry. Once public opinion began to shift in favour of same-sex marriage what was claimed to be at stake by those opposed was the extent of the freedom to discriminate against LGBTIQ couples and continue to publicly declare their opposition to same-sex marriage, especially on religious grounds and as a matter of personal conscience (often associated with freedom of religion and/or belief). Which is how, in Australia, when marriage equality was finally legislated, perversely so was the ongoing discrimination against LGBTIQ couples.
[i] Luke Beck (2018) Religious Freedom and the Australian Constitution, London: Routledge.
[ii] Carolyn Evans (2012) Legal Protection of Religious Freedom in Australia, Annandale, NSW: Federation Press
[iii] Deidre McKeown (2018) Chronology of same-sex marriage bills introduced into the federal parliament: a quick guide, available at https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1718/Quick_Guides/SSMarriageBills
[iv] Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey 2017 – National Results’, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/1800.0
[v] Paul Baker (2006) Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis, London: Continuum.
[vi] This analysis used AntConc developed by Laurence Anthony and WordSmith by Mike Scott.
Elenie Poulos – Bio
Elenie Poulos is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University. Her research focus is the politics of religious freedom in Australia. She is a minister in the Uniting Church in Australia and was, for 15 years, the National Director of UnitingJustice Australia, the Church’s national justice policy and advocacy unit.
The first publication out of her current research is ‘Protecting Freedom/Protecting Privilege: Church responses to anti-discrimination law reform in Australia’ (2018), Australian Journal of Human Rights available at https://doi.org/10.1080/1323238X.2018.1455487
ORCiD
Elenie Poulos ID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6804-8068
email: elenie.poulos@hdr.mq.edu.au
Twitter: @EleniePoulos
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/EleniePoulos
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