The Albanese Government has moved to grant special deductible gift recipient (DGR) status to Equality Australia, an explicitly anti-Christian lobby group. It comes after the organisation was rejected four times through bureaucratic processes. The Government has legislated to override those decisions, revealing ideological bias towards a group that campaigns against religious freedom. Equality Australia actively campaigns against religious freedom because they think that a biblical worldview on human sexuality is discriminatory. They have urged the removal of religious exemptions in anti-discrimination laws, arguing that these exemptions protect the discriminators. It is their view that the discriminators are Christians who believe in marriage between a male and a female, and Christian schools who teach this biblical truth. Equality Australia doesn’t just oppose religion, they also campaign for ‘gender affirmation’; a cult-like ideology that leads to bodily mutilation. Many young adults have tried to change their gender and are now living with horrific health complications that will affect them for life.
Thousands of children in Australia are on drugs to ‘block’ puberty because of ‘gender affirmation’. These numbers are not an exaggeration. Queensland and the Northern Territory have already withdrawn puberty blockers from the public health system. Other states must follow suit. Equality Australia supports laws and policies that elevate ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ as pre-eminent protected attributes at the expense of biological sex, the protection of women and children in sport and female-only spaces, as well as freedom of religion and speech. The Government has gone rogue in its support for Equality Australia. When its application failed through the normal channels, the Government simply ignored the rules and granted DGR status anyway. This is how it happened: Equality Australia applied to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) to become a Public Benevolent Institution (PBI), a requirement for DGR status. They were told they did not qualify because they are a political lobby group, not an organisation providing direct charitable relief such as feeding or clothing the homeless.
Equality Australia objected through the ACNC’s internal review process, but the objection was disallowed. It then applied to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Except for one dissenting member, the Tribunal affirmed the ACNC’s original decision. Equality Australia then appealed to the Full Federal Court. The Court ruled unanimously that there was no error of law in the Tribunal’s decision. The next step could have been an appeal to the High Court, but Equality Australia instead chose to appeal to the Minister. We were first alerted to the Albanese Government’s consideration of providing DGR status to Equality Australia after another group identified it hidden in a budget paper more than a year ago. But it could only be fully granted through legislation. Last week a Bill was debated in the Senate to provide final approval for Equality Australia. Thankfully, the Coalition raised concerns, and Senator Claire Chandler exposed the lack of fairness and the cost to taxpayers.
Senator Chandler said: “There is no doubt, Mr Acting Deputy President, that Equality Australia engages in political advocacy. The organisation is heavily involved in campaigning against the sex-based rights of women and in favour of sex ID laws which have further eroded those rights. Let’s be very clear. The debate around these issues is not one where government should be picking a winner by selectively applying a tax advantage to one side and not the other. That is exactly why Australia has a set of principled, well-established DGR categories, so the eligibility for taxpayer support is based on neutral, purpose-driven criteria not political preference or alignment with the government’s ideological agenda. The Government’s proposal in this schedule departs from that very principle. It is asking the Parliament to elevate a specific advocacy organisation above others despite the fact that the regulator and the courts have determined that it does not meet the relevant high standard. It is utterly inappropriate for our DGR framework to reward favoured advocacy groups while excluding others.
For all of these reasons, Mr Acting Deputy President, the Coalition will be moving an amendment in the committee stage to remove Equality Australia from the list of organisations receiving DGR status. Australians expect DGR status to be reserved for organisations that meet the high standards of scrutiny. They expect it to be applied consistently, fairly, and without political favour. And they expect Parliament to protect the integrity of that system, not undermine it by carving out special treatment for an advocacy organisation simply because the Government happens to agree with its platform.” The Government has the numbers to pass the Bill, but its ideological alignment needs to be tested at the ballot box. These issues must become vote changers. The public must be educated about the misuse of government power. The Australian public understands the importance of male and female, and how foundational this is to human dignity. But we need to highlight the full scale of the harms that follow when biology is redefined. We are already seeing the consequences, and it is children who ultimately pay the price.
Source: Australian Christian Lobby
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