It’s going to be an especially bumpy six months for religious freedom issues in New South Wales..
Legalised Euthanasia will be rolled out in just a few weeks. But what about faith based aged care institutions, where organizations and staff are conscientious objectors to euthanasia?
Then there’s the Law Reform Commission inquiry into religious schooling and whether the religious exemptions to anti discrimination law should be removed.
And the debate over conversion therapy will come to a head in the parliament.
Monica Doumit is Director of Public Affairs and Engagement for the Catholic Church in Sydney… and was one of the presenters at the Freedom for Faith Conference in Sydney.
Mike Southon is executive director of Freedom for Faith
http://www.thepastorsheart.net/podcast/euthanasia-discrimination-conversion
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Become a regular financial supporter of The Pastor's Heart via Patreon.
It’s going to be an especially bumpy six months for religious freedom issues in New South Wales..
Legalised Euthanasia will be rolled out in just a few weeks. But what about faith based aged care institutions, where organizations and staff are conscientious objectors to euthanasia?
Then there’s the Law Reform Commission inquiry into religious schooling and whether the religious exemptions to anti discrimination law should be removed.
And the debate over conversion therapy will come to a head in the parliament.
Monica Doumit is Director of Public Affairs and Engagement for the Catholic Church in Sydney… and was one of the presenters at the Freedom for Faith Conference in Sydney.
Mike Southon is executive director of Freedom for Faith
http://www.thepastorsheart.net/podcast/euthanasia-discrimination-conversion
--
Become a regular financial supporter of The Pastor's Heart via Patreon.
It is the Pastor's Heart Heart and Dominic Steele and a Freedom for Faith update on the sea changes in euthanasia, equality, conversion therapy and religious freedom. Monica Dumit and Mike Southon are our guests. The next six months are going to be bumpy for religious freedom issues here in New South Wales, australia. There's a rollout of euthanasia in our state starting in just a few weeks time, on the 28th of November, and then the proposed ban on conversion and suppression and an independent Alex Greenwich's Omnibus Equality Bill, plus a finalisation of the Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into religious schooling and particularly whether or not religious exemptions to anti-discrimination war should be removed or not. Monica Dumit is Director of Public Affairs and Engagement for the Catholic Church in Sydney and was one of the presenters at the Freedom for Faith conference today here in Sydney, and Mike Southon is Executive Director of Freedom for Faith. Monica, perhaps we can start with you and you could just kind of give us an introduction to this sea change that has happened over the last five years and continuing to happen and what's going on.
Monica Doumit:Well, if we look back to December 2017, where we had the introduction of same sex marriage, I think all of us thought that that was a big watershed moment in terms of social change here in Australia, but what we've seen in the five to six years since that transpired is a number of different laws changing, all on critical social issues, whether that's abortion, pre-prohibition on so-called conversion practices in some states, limitations of religious freedom.
Monica Doumit:It seems to have happened all in the last five or six years, and so there's certainly been a wave of legislation that's challenging for churches and for Christian ministries. And if we're looking at New South Wales, as you mentioned, we have the implementation of euthanasia beginning later this month, we will have the introduction of the government's proposed ban on conversion practices. We've already got the legislation tabled by the independent member for Sydney, Alex Greenwich, that seeks to amend a whole range of laws in the name of equality and, at a federal level, the Australian Law Reform Commission looking in, so there are a lot of things happening in the next six months. It's a very critical time.
Dominic Steele:You're acknowledging today that one of the things that have been going on is the loss of moral authority of the churches in the community, and particularly the Catholic Church there.
Monica Doumit:Well, I guess what I was saying is that the end of 2017 saw the finalisation of the Royal Commission into institutional responses into child sexual abuse and, for those who remember, that time revealed, obviously, a lot of shocking and terrible details of crimes and cover-ups within institutions. And I think something like, out of the complaints, 60% of those related to religious institutions and, of that, 60% related to the Catholic Church, and so I think, when a lot of these social issues were coming up before Parliament, there was a often a loud suggestion that churches should be quiet, because if they didn't have their own house in order, how dare they be speaking about moral issues anywhere else? So I do think that that contributed to, I guess, the muting or the silencing and sometimes self-censorship of some in church leadership in relation to some of these social issues.
Dominic Steele:Mike, let's talk Euthanasia first. It's going to be messy when it starts here in New South Wales later this month. Yes, it's messy. When we say messy, what do we mean?
Mike Southon:Well, there's a lot of questions about how it's going to be implemented. I haven't seen full guidelines around implementation. One of the real messy bits is going to be in how we can choose not to be involved. Doctors should be able to conscientiously object and not be involved in Euthanasia. But there's a lot of power dynamics. There's a lot of complexity in whether or not at the time they're going to be able to say I don't want to be part of this if they say their boss is saying that they need to be part of this. We've got a lot of complexity or concerns for institutions themselves, like a retirement village. So a Christian retirement village like Anglicare, who doesn't want?
Dominic Steele:to have people and, let's face it, many of the providers of aged care services are provided by the faith care sector?
Mike Southon:Yes, absolutely, and most of them come from Christian traditions who hold that life is sacred and we should not be actively taking life and they don't want that happening on their property. These institutions started as expressions of faith to care for people who were needed they're not just service providers to do whatever the person wants and they wanted to be able to implement their faith and hold to their faith on their property. So at the moment there is no space for conscientious objection for those institutions to say, actually we don't want this on our property. So a Christian retirement village likely is going to have to be storing drugs of death on their property in preparation for somebody who is going to voluntarily die and the institution can't say that that doesn't fit with what we believe.
Dominic Steele:How are you and the Roman Catholic space navigating this Monica?
Monica Doumit:Yeah, well, look, what we're trying to do is hopefully get a united approach, because you have a whole number of different aged care providers. Some are quite large and are open to and care for people of many faith backgrounds, and some are also almost community based, where it's sort of a maybe certain migrant community have their own little small aged care facility, and so they're a very different.
Dominic Steele:Just down the road here for years, there's a Greek Orthodox aged care facility and caring primarily for people of Greek or Greek Orthodox backgrounds.
Monica Doumit:Yeah, exactly right. And so the question for me becomes should those people of the Greek Orthodox community be able to live out their their final days in a place where they can be certain that there aren't going to be there aren't going to be lethal drugs on site? So often this is pitched as sort of the institutional right against the individual patient or resident, but actually it's about whether or not a group of residents can come together and say we want to live in a place where this isn't going to happen, or for families to say we want to entrust our parents or our other loved ones to a place where confident that there's not going to be institutional pressure to go in that direction.
Monica Doumit:Absolutely, and the only way that you can do that is if an institution has complete rights to opt out and not this sort of halfway house that the legislation puts us in, which says, well, you can opt out as an institution, but you have to allow other people to come on site in order to consult or, in euthanasia, to make assessments, to deliver in a minister. Lethal drugs.
Dominic Steele:So what's going to happen 28th of November, when the doors open, when the legislation says, go and yeah?
Monica Doumit:Well, look, I imagine that we'll see in the faith-based institutions what's happened, I think, in other states, which is that it's not taken up by a lot of the residents because they're going in there with a particular perspective.
Monica Doumit:And also, I find what the faith-based facilities have been quite successful doing in other places is, when a resident starts speaking about euthanasia or assisted suicide, they're able to bring in all of those other supports and say, okay, well, what are you actually asking for? Are you asking for euthanasia or assisted suicide, or are you expressing some type of fear, some type of pain that's not actually being managed well and is there, and there are other things that we can do to assist you in that and to give you good, holistic end of life care, give you real dignity in death, not the fake dignity in death that's being sold by other activists. The one thing I will say, though, dominic, is that it's actually not clear how this will play out, because Victoria has had euthanasia and assisted suicide for a number of years, as has WA, but neither of those jurisdictions require faith-based facilities to allow this on site, nor does Tasmania, so New South Wales is actually.
Dominic Steele:New South Wales is worse, tougher, more anti-Christian than Victoria, or how did that happen?
Monica Doumit:It's extraordinary, isn't it? So I actually don't know how it happened and, if I'm being honest, in some of the private conversations I've had with members of parliament, they didn't even realise that the aged care facilities didn't have these protections in place. Yeah, and so they say, oh no, no, you got your protections. No, we didn't. The amendment was voted down. But that's what happens when legislation like this is getting pushed through and NMPs are there to all hours of the evening on successive days. I think, unfortunately, there is a little bit of a tendency of we just want to get this over with.
Dominic Steele:you know it's going to pass.
Monica Doumit:You reject all the amendments you reject all the amendments, and I think what my answer should be described as a winner takes all approach. So once you realise that you have the number to you have the numbers in parliament to pass the legislation. There doesn't seem to be any willingness to be open to amendments or protections or things like that. That's just a bit of a a win takes all approach.
Dominic Steele:yeah, now, junior doctors are also put in a particularly difficult position here, mike.
Mike Southon:Yeah, and there is. In any kind of work there's power dynamics, but a junior doctor has to do, you know he's constantly doing the sorts of tasks that the senior doctors are telling him to do. The senior doctors have got their career in their hands in many ways. They control their promotion parts, their future training, specialisation, things like that.
Monica Doumit:So don't rock the boat.
Mike Southon:So don't rock the boat. And so a junior doctor can say I'm a conscientious objector and that's fine. And that's fine until the day that the senior doctor says who's under stress, knows he has to go do something, doesn't have time to do it, grabs a junior doctor and says you go into that room and do it, and that's, that's the moment of crisis. What do you do?
Dominic Steele:Okay, next one conversion practice legislation. And there was a significant pre-election promise from the Mins government at the various freedom for faith forums across the state. Give us the picture of what the pre-election promise was. Let's start with you, michael.
Mike Southon:Yeah. So churches around New South Wales, 35 different electorates. They had a candidate forum and in most of those candidate forums there was a Labor candidate. And most of those candidate forums they asked the question if you are going to implement a conversion therapy, will you protect religious freedoms, will you use the Victorian model? And we knew that Alex Greenwich was bringing up his legislation. We're asking will you use Greenwich's model or are you going to do something else?
Mike Southon:And so the Labor candidates were actually all given a script by head office to answer and they committed that they would not use Alex Greenwich's model, they would not use the Victorian model, they would not ban prayer, they would not ban preaching and, most hopefully, they would not ban consensual requests for help. So that was what was built into the script that most candidates stuck to one way or another. Chris Mince himself attended an event in Parramatta and he attended his own candidates forum in Coggera and he made the same sorts of commitments that we would. Let you make your choice and go and ask for help if that's what you want.
Dominic Steele:So where are we now, Monica, in the negotiations with the government on this?
Monica Doumit:So a few months ago the government ran a private consultation, so they didn't put out a consultation paper for public review. They gave it to a handful of I guess interested parties, including the faith communities, I would say including also the LGBT community and others, and that consultation paper outlined a number of questions and a number of proposals to which we were invited to respond. From what I understand, in the preparation of that consultation paper, they weren't given or didn't have access to the promises, the pre-election promises that Mike just referred to.
Dominic Steele:Which does sound astonishing to me.
Mike Southon:It does, I mean, it begs belief really yeah yeah, in that meeting they said we went online to find what promises we were going to be and they found Chris Minns promises but they didn't find the fuller promises that a lot of the young candidates were making, but they they didn't seem to be thoroughly briefed to be. These are all the promises that Labour has made.
Dominic Steele:So at the moment, they've gone back to the drawing board, having been reminded that this was the promise they took to the election. Is that what's happened, or?
Mike Southon:We don't know what they've gone back to. So we've had a lot of meetings, a lot of productive meetings with MPs, ministers, attorney General, premier, explaining what our concerns are, what we're looking for in a balanced legislation. We want to prevent against coercive harm but we want to protect religious freedom. We've had all these conversations, we've been heard, they definitely have heard us, but we don't know what's happening. We haven't seen any legislation. We've heard a statement in the media that legislation is coming in November. Well, it is November and we haven't seen a draft. We haven't had any consultation, so we generally just don't know what's going on.
Monica Doumit:My hope is that, in good faith, they will revisit the proposals in that consultation paper and come closer to the pre-election commitments that were made. I think that, if I'm being frank, I think that I've been quite impressed by the sincerity with which the government has approached this issue and sort of their promises of being faithful to those pre-election commitments. So I'm hopeful that the draft legislation that comes out later this month will reflect those promises.
Dominic Steele:Now, suppression seems to be the word that is causing most angst amongst my Christian friends. Do you want to talk about that?
Monica Doumit:Sure, well, when we talk about conversion practices, that's really changing from one to the other. And so what you? I guess what is sold in the media or described in the media is trying to change somebody's sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual, and we know in the past that that's been linked to some quite abhorrent practices that are against the dignity of the human person. But when we talk about suppression, there is the likelihood that that will actually be seen as really anything that asks for sexual restraint. So anything that says no, you shouldn't act on those sexual desires that you might have or those sexual attractions that you might have, could counter suppression. And this isn't even an issue about homosexuality. This applies just equally to heterosexuality as well.
Dominic Steele:So you're a part of so interesting about the one Corinthians flee from sexual immorality. There's a verse in the Bible that's sexual suppression. So preaching one Corinthians six, just that's going to get us in trouble.
Monica Doumit:It's quite well. It's interesting because at least the consultation paper and some of the language from the government says you're allowed to preach it, but you're just not allowed to tell somebody that they can apply, that they have to apply it to their lives. So you can preach it generally, but you can't tell somebody then that that should influence the way that they behave. So your preaching becomes an academic exercise.
Dominic Steele:So most churches there's education in preaching, there's education in small group discussion and there's education in one-on-onebiblery yeah, and prayer.
Monica Doumit:Yeah. So the one-on-one would definitely be out, and potentially the small group as well. So I'll give you just a very benign example. Say you have a married heterosexual man come to you and say look, I've met another woman, I'm really attracted to her, I'm tempted to cheat on my life and as the pastor, I say resist temptation. That could be seen as suppression and expose you not only to criminal but also civil liability, which is prettya very strange idea.
Dominic Steele:I mean that feels like unintendedI mean it seems just bizarre that that would be put forward.
Monica Doumit:Yeah, I don't think it's unintended. This was brought up in the debates around the Victorian legislation as well. They went ahead knowing full well that this is how the legislation would be interpreted.
Mike Southon:And more than that. They specifically said that's how they want. So, in case you feel like we're catastrophising what this legislation is, this is the legislation that's in Victoria, and the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, vroc, have got a website which says what you can and cannot do, what would be a chain of conversions, of pressure and practice, and what wouldn't, and they specifically say that encouraging somebody to live in chastity because otherwise, apart from having sex within marriage, is a suppression practice and would be unlawful. Specifically said, on their publicly accessible website they give examples of the sorts of prayers that are acceptable. So a prayer that is acceptable is it's acceptable to pray with someone and thank God that they are perfect as they are and accepted by God as they are. It is not acceptable to pray a prayer that indicates in any way that they could be broken, need repentance or changing the way that they live.
Dominic Steele:So it's. Their website is going to run foul of well. The Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Presbyterian, keep going. Fill the list out for me.
Monica Doumit:Muslims, hindus, the Jewish communities as well. This isn't only an issue for Christians. And when it comes to Catholics, I was saying in the presentation and I'll repeat it here this could also affect the Catholic Church saying to their priests you need to be celibate, because that would also be technically a suppression practice.
Dominic Steele:So I mean, that's a big thing.
Monica Doumit:It's a big thing that I would say. What Mike was saying is probably even bigger, because this is the state dictating what you can pray. Is there any greater example of overreach or impingement on religious freedom than telling you what you can and cannot pray, who you cannot you cannot pray for. It's just, it is extraordinary yeah.
Mike Southon:The Virok website goes on. It talks about preaching. So there is an exemption in Victorian legislation that you can preach what you believe unless it's directed towards an individual. And the Virok website says if you are aware of somebody in your congregation who has suffered a struggling with same-sex attraction, your sermon could be considered to be directed at that individual. So even just the fact that you're up in the pulpit saying the Bible calls you to live this way sexually, that actually could well be a suppression practice if you knew there was someone in your congregation struggling with that issue. And that's again public website. That's what they've said, that this is the ruling.
Monica Doumit:And I think one of these, I think there's a great misunderstanding of what religion and what faith is supposed to do. It calls all of us to conversion. I mean that's the message repent and believe in the gospel, like that's what we're called to. And so this idea that conversion is somehow some awful practice that goes on? No, we're all called to conversion. We're all called to conversion daily to conform our lives closer to Christ. And so this idea that somehow this is some barbaric practice? It speaks really to an ignorance of religion and the importance of religion in people's lives, I think by those suggesting these laws.
Mike Southon:And again, not unintended consequences, because we've had one MP who's pushing this very hard on an activist and has said publicly that he wants to not only ban conversion practices but the beliefs that underlie them. So this is an intentional attempt to silence people who disagree with a specific worldview on sexuality.
Dominic Steele:What about the issues of gender identity, Michael?
Mike Southon:In gender identity gets even more complicated because it's a medically contested space as well as being a theologically contested one. But in the current proposal that we saw from the Department of Communities and Justice, it does not separate between gender identity and sexuality in the legislation. It says it is illegal to embark in this sort of conversion or suppression practice on the basis of sexuality or gender identity. So everything we've said applies with somebody who comes up with you, including a minor, who comes and talks to you and says I'm not sure that I'm the gender that I'm born at. With Any attempt to say even wait, wait and see what's going to happen and the face of the proposal that's come, would be a suppression practice, because the best thing to do for a child who says that they are a different gender is to immediately treat them and immediately give them the puberty blockers and all the treatment that they need. So anything that says wait is a suppression practice.
Dominic Steele:We have had so many kids actually go through phases and agree with this.
Mike Southon:Another group who are really upset about this actually are the LGB groups, so gay and lesbian groups, who are saying a girl who goes through gender confusion will often grow up to be a very happy, healthy, gay lesbian girl, and so they are very concerned about pushing kids in very confused situations through gender transformation. But when we're talking about like the conversion and suppression legislation or what it's saying, it is restricting our ability to even talk about all these realities. We have had an example of a family member in Victoria who wrote to their other family member who was planning to go through gender transformation and wrote I don't think you should do this, I don't think it's a good idea. And the Victorian Equal Opportunity Human Rights Commission wrote to that family member saying what you did was a suppression practice and likely to be unlawful. So we're already having examples of in another state commissions clamping down on people, on just family members, saying maybe you should wait, don't do this, you're concerned. Grandparent, uncle, parent I have those conversations.
Dominic Steele:Kind of what you're saying, Monica.
Monica Doumit:I was just going to say, and one of the important things is that in a number of jurisdictions overseas we're seeing the opposite happen. So in the UK, in Sweden, in Norway, in other places, they're saying we're actually going to outlaw giving children puberty blockers because we consider them to be experimental, we don't know the long-term effects of them, and so on the one hand we've got jurisdictions that are prohibiting pushing children down a gender affirmative path, and here we're about to do the opposite, which is say well, we're going to outlaw anything except a gender affirmative path.
Dominic Steele:Which is extraordinary when we're going to outlaw doing anything except this. And yet one of the Australian medical defence insurance companies is pulling back from ensuring doctors to do that.
Monica Doumit:Yeah, absolutely so. Mda National announced that, as of the 1st of July of this year, they were going to not provide insurance coverage to private practitioners who prescribed cross-sex hormones to kids under 18. I think maybe even puberty blockers as well. So they're going to double check. But they said it's not an ideological issue, it's actually a financial one. We the risk to the children is unquantifiable at this stage and so, simply from a financial point of view, we can't quantify the risk we're undertaking by backing doctors who are prescribing these. So if you have the insurers saying this, if you have jurisdictions in other parts of the world putting the brakes on all of this and saying hold on, we don't know what's going on here, let's slow down. I think it makes it even more egregious that New South Wales is looking to go down this path.
Dominic Steele:Let's just jump over to anti-discrimination for a minute. And I was alarmed at something you said in your presentation about the anti-discrimination board potentially in the future being able to initiate investigations without a complaint about something that had been said in a sermon. Go looking, investigating. Tell me about that, monica.
Monica Doumit:Yeah, so amongst the proposals and what we see in the Victorian legislation as well, is the idea that the anti-discrimination board will be given the power to conduct what they call own-emotion investigations.
Monica Doumit:So they haven't received a complaint, but they would think, okay, well, we think there might be a systemic issue of conversion in some institution. We'll, off our own motion, go and start investigating that. And they would have the power to compel witnesses, to subpoena the production of documents and other things like that. And I would think, if they're looking into systemic issues of conversion, then their first targets are going to have to be religious groups, absolutely, and churches, and so I would expect, empowered by this, particularly if they hire more staff in order to do that, they're going to be looking for something and you would have the potential of a letter from the anti-discrimination board saying we would like copies of your sermons that you've preached on this issue or anything like that, so we can judge for ourselves whether or not there is a systemic issue of conversion within your church. And look, I would dare I say there's a pastor who doesn't have a systemic issue of conversion going on here preaching.
Dominic Steele:Everybody is going to be preaching. Turn back to Jesus.
Monica Doumit:Yes.
Dominic Steele:In this area of your life or that area of your life. You're a rebel, you need to repent. I'm a rebel, I need to repent.
Monica Doumit:Yeah, if you're not calling to conversion, if you're not calling to repentance, you're probably not being faithful to the scriptures at all. So yeah, so I think we've got a real systemic issue that's going to keep the anti-discrimination board busy.
Mike Southon:And this proposal was from Alex Grenich's omnibus bill.
Monica Doumit:I think it was also in the consultation paper.
Dominic Steele:Yeah, Right, I mean the Alex Grenich omnibus bill that also included, I think. When you come to gender change and somebody saying I want to change gender, no need for any kind of surgical change, I just declare, and so you could end up, under that proposal, with me not being able to define who gets to search my body at the airport, is that right?
Mike Southon:Or me being able to define who searches my body at the airport. So I define myself as a woman.
Dominic Steele:And then I go through the thing.
Mike Southon:I'm saying I'm a woman. Today I've done the paperwork. I go through, I go beep, I say you need to have a strip search and I say, well, I'm a woman, I want a woman officer to search me.
Dominic Steele:Thank you very much. And then an Islamic woman who's working on border security is put in a very difficult position.
Mike Southon:Absolutely and she's at least under Alex Grenich's proposals. He's got no grounds. She's got no grounds to say no, because that would be discrimination. For her to say, well, as a Muslim woman, I can't, I'm not going to touch a man's body, would be discriminatory, because I'm a woman, I'm not a man. It's the same problem with single sex schools. It is legislating, even at the safest legislation, of saying this can happen at the age of 18, plus. It's heaps of 18 year old kids still doing the HSC. So single sex schools have a massive problem. But then the legislation talks about what? About the conditions? That it can happen at 16 plus or even younger, and it doesn't even require necessarily a parent's support. You can get the court to agree with the child and there you go. They're now a change of agenda.
Monica Doumit:And even at 18 residential colleges at university. I mean we've all seen the reports into what goes on at some of those residential colleges. Do you think anything's going to be better by mixing the sexes in those? Who's going to be safer?
Mike Southon:And you can guarantee there's going to be a couple of guys who are going to try it on?
Dominic Steele:That's just under the Grenich one, or is that under the government one?
Mike Southon:That's under Alex Grenich's omnibus proposal. Sex self ID was not part that. The government proposal we talk about is specifically conversion therapy and it was a proposal from the Department of Communities and Justice. And I do emphasize that point because at the moment we haven't seen a proposal from the Labor Party of New South Wales. We've only seen DCJ's proposal, which was requested by the government, and so there is still space for us to say Labor have not even suggested they're going to be breaking our promises at this point. They've had a proposal putched to them. We are calling on them to reject that proposal wholesale and because if they accept the proposal then they will absolutely have broken every one of their promises. But so I think it's important to draw that distinction. But the sex self ID is one of Alex Grenich's omnibus bill which includes a conversion therapy legislation.
Dominic Steele:You're hoping that that will be rejected outright. Sorry.
Monica Doumit:Yeah, look, absolutely. But I think, as I understand it, the Labor government is, even if it doesn't support the sex self ID provisions of the Greenwich Bill, have indicated that they will do their own, that as a party position, that this is something that they support.
Dominic Steele:So it's not that's the self sex ID Of some form. Yes, of some form.
Mike Southon:Chris Mince has said every other state has done it, which is a classic argument for jumping off the Harbour Bridge. But that is a statement that he's made and a commitment that he's made, and of Greenwich's Omnibus Bill. If you split it out, you can split it out saying there's the conversion therapy section. Okay, let's put that over there, because the government have committed to not use his conversion therapy legislation and are writing their own and we know that's going to happen.
Mike Southon:The second set is a whole lot of changes that's made to discrimination law and a lot of them are very broad changes which will make it almost impossible to make distinctions between people, particularly for faith organisations. But the New South Wales government have initiated their own review into discrimination law and have committed that they will not implement any of these changes for the discrimination law until that review's happened. So we can again park that for a little bit, be very concerned because we don't know what this review's going to come up with. But we can. But then the sex self ID is something that Alex Greenwich has written and the government has in theory committed to. It's actually quite a concerning piece of legislation. We don't know when that portion will come up. Alex's bill has not been split up.
Monica Doumit:I believe so there is a separate conversion practices bill.
Mike Southon:Yes, but the rest is still altogether the rest of it is still altogether. So they're not yet in the position to just pass sex self ID, but it would just need splitting the bill and then starting to debate it, and that's plausible to have happened within the November setting.
Monica Doumit:It is plausible. And there are other things in the Greenwich bill that are also concerning. There are things like in relation to prostitution. So prostitution is already decriminalised here in New South Wales, but there are some limits on things like advertising, whether or not you can solicit outside churches or schools or things like that, and what the Greenwich bill seeks to do is to remove even those very minor barriers. So there would be nothing to prevent somebody soliciting for sex work outside, or even inside a church or outside a school or something like that, so to remove even those slight community taboos around prostitution. So that's something that's very strange and very again, I think, concerning out of the bill.
Dominic Steele:You've been promoting a website. Contact your MP.
Mike Southon:Contact your MPorgau.
Dominic Steele:For people to contact their MPs. That's about it.
Mike Southon:Yeah, it's a fairly self-explanatory name, so this is specifically at the moment. The website is specifically about the conversion therapy legislation. It is a website to give you that will help you write, call or meet with your MP. It's not connected necessarily with any one faith or denomination, but it's for everybody to go. You can search for your MP. Postcode search gives you talking points so you can write your letter. It gives you guides and lines about how to do it. You can find your MP's email address on there. If you wanted to go and have a meeting with your MP, it takes you step by step for the whole process, understanding what a meeting would be like. Here's the email to send to the MP asking for the meeting. Here's some talking points. Here's a two-page document that you can walk through with your MP with our concerns and our requests laid out and authorised and approved by 15 major faith organisations. This is a.
Mike Southon:The concern about conversion therapy is a multi-faith concern. As we already said. Muslim communities, hindu communities, jewish communities are all really, really worried that they can't preach what they believe. So this site's been designed to help every community to go and speak up, the reason being that politicians don't know what we're concerned about until we tell them they don't have great polling, and so the only way that they have an idea of what their electorate is is they get a feel of the electorate People who come and talk to them by the letters they get. And we, particularly the Christian church, have really withdrawn from doing that. We're not keen to write letters, we're not keen, and so people think that we don't actually care about this issue. It's not hard to write a letter and it makes a big difference, particularly when 100-odd personally written letters come through an MP's office. They know it's All right, monica.
Dominic Steele:Michael, thanks for coming in. Thank you so much. Thank you, monica Dumit is the Director of Public Affairs and Engagement for the Catholic Church here in Sydney and I was one of the presenters at the Freedom for Faith Conference here in Sydney today, and Mike Southen is Executive Director of Freedom for Faith. My name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.