Australia is one of the most irreligious countries in the world. At the last census 10 million people said they had no religion, within this decade those of no faith are likely to be the majority.
This is not a bad thing. Wars fought over religion have blighted the globe for centuries, as they do today. As the number of Christians has declined steadily for decades, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and Jews have grown to make up 10% of the population.
Managing the religious diversity that comes with mass migration, is again presenting a political challenge for Australian governments. A secular democracy demands conscientiously even-handed political leadership.
Australia is a country without an official religion for very good reasons. In the colony of NSW it reflected enlightenment principles. God was no longer seen as the indisputable source of knowledge. By the time the constitution was being drafted, it had become a more complex political trade-off between Protestants and Catholics.
On 1 January 1901 a parade through the streets of Sydney marked the beginning of the new nation. There were floats and ceremonial arches, marching bands and hundreds of thousands of people.
But Cardinal Patrick Moran, who had recently overseen the rebuilding of St Mary’s (the steeples took another century) sat it out on the steps of the cathedral.
He had hoped to be at the head of the parade, and to say a prayer at the Centennial Park ceremony. After all he had marshalled the republican Irish Catholic vote for federation, and the political compromise that Australia would have no official religion.
Late on New Year’s Eve he was told that the honour of saying a prayer was reserved for the head of the Church of England.
There was no official religion, but that didn’t mean religion was absent from politics. The cardinal sat on the steps, fuming, surrounded by a choir of Catholic schoolchildren.
Some took this as a good sign. Australia would not be unduly influenced by meddling priests. But Moran and his successors were sectarian warriors who pushed back politically for decades, defeating two conscription referendums, building schools, shaping professions and nurturing a chipped shoulder.
As a student at St Mary’s Cathedral College, Anthony Albanese no doubt heard the stories of Catholic exclusion. The legacy was real. The editor who hired me in the late 1970s carried it close. He declared he was employing women, “Because you girls are the new Irish [Catholics], you’ll work twice as hard for half as much.”
The first Catholic governor general, William Deane, was only appointed in 1996 – decades after two Jewish men had held the post, Isaac Isaacs the first Australian-born governor general and Zelman Cowan, who cleaned up the mess left by John Kerr.
Now this sectarian divide which had once split families and political parties only plays at the edges of public life.
A nation in which faith matters passionately for some, but is irrelevant for many, needs other institutions to robustly engage with its changing nature and convey the values the churches once taught. In my childhood it was “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, other religions express the same ethic in different words.
The heightened tensions that have frayed the social fabric of Australia over the past year, point to an institutional failure to uphold this ethos. It is a failure to recognise that diversity of religion and ethnicity is an asset that needs constitutional change to ensure all citizens have the same rights.
The constitution has not caught up with the fact that nearly half the population have dual citizenship which, without active intervention, prevents them from standing for parliament. In Britain, Canada and New Zealand dual citizenship is not a disqualification.
In 2017 fifteen members of parliament were removed, while others scrambled to ensure that dual citizenship by descent, that some did not even know they had, was revoked.
There had been warnings for decades that section 44 of the constitution, which excludes from elected office anyone “entitled to the rights and privileges of a foreign power” was a trip wire that could make the parliament unworkable. But instead of passing legislation to limit it, or changing the constitution, it lingers as a threat.
It is one reason why we need a robust, permanent Constitutional Commission – to make the constitution truly inclusive.
A robust permanent Constitutional Commission, an institution we need, would surely have recommended that last year’s referendum include two proposals. One to provide meaningful recognition of the First Peoples and another to ensure that all Australian citizens can stand for parliament, irrespective of where they were born.
Together they would have made the constitution truly inclusive for the first time. The absence of such a commission is a sign of institutional failure.
Other institutions have also weakened. The privatisation of social services has left immigrants to find community and connection in churches, mosques, and temples rather than public organisations. Overfunding private schools has become a way for parents to outsource their children’s moral education. It is a transaction that hasn’t translated into continuing belief, millennials and Gen Z are the most irreligious.
The populist media is quicker than ever to blame and torment for the sin of difference as Senator Fatima Payman discovered. Unregulated social media is inflammatory by design.
Pluralism, respect and tolerance can seem like luxuries when the threat feels existential, but they are more important than ever. Especially for the nearly 4% of Australians who are Muslim, or less than 1% who are Jewish.
The Labor operatives incensed by Senator Payman’s decision to follow her conscience and party policy, and vote to recognise Palestine, whispered darkly about testing whether her Afghan citizenship had really been revoked.
They would do well to remember that in 1950, two years after Australian citizenship became a reality, a section 44 case was brought to disqualify a “Roman Catholic” MP was brought. The argument was that his first allegiance was to the Vatican. The high court disagreed, but muddying politics and religion rarely ends well.
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Julianne Schultz AM is the author of The Idea of Australia, and participated in the ABC/Wildbear program Believing in Australia