In a few years, or perhaps months, Australia is going to look back upon this period in our politics with hushed embarrassment. “Psycho” Scott Morrison’s name will become synonymous with lunacy, the LNP will hunt down and remove any and all of his allies, Newscorp will issue a quiet dictate they he is not to be mentioned, and the Australian public will overlook every mention of him with a roll of the eyes like the distant relative of a deviant cousin.
As Australia wrestles with a once per century pandemic amid other titanic problems, and we approach a fateful federal election, what is our PM preoccupied with? This:
Scott Morrison has warned Coalition MPs the federal election will be lost if they are not a united force, in an 11th-hour clarion call for his team to get behind landmark religious discrimination reforms in the first contentious parliamentary vote of the year.
The Prime Minister’s demand for unity came after a marathon partyroom meeting at which the Coalition endorsed the updated religious discrimination bill and Sex Discrimination Act amendment, despite reservations about potential impacts on gay teachers and transgender children expressed by moderate Liberal MPs including Trent Zimmerman, Katie Allen, Andrew Bragg and Warren Entsch.
Debate on the updated bill and SDA amendment — which prevents students from being expelled from religious schools for being gay but does not offer the same protections for transgender students — began in parliament on Monday night, with a vote expected by Thursday.
What a spectacle. Yesterday, Pastor Morrison was begrudgingly apologising for the rape and pillage of women in our parliament, which has touched no fewer than half of the females in the joint, most of whom were on the wrong end of fiduciary relationships, and for whom Morrison has done next-to-nothing while protecting the guilty.
Having delivered the harlot Eve her just deserts, Pastor Morrison is today doing his level best to entrench institutional persecution of same-sex folks, in some grand act of theocratic distraction, to address no extant problem, but create one for anybody making social choices that diverge from the dictates of sleaze cult dogma.
These two things are related. Religious zeal of this nature preys on the vulnerable to perpetuate itself. To wit:
Scott Morrison made a $4 million grant before the 2019 election to an organisation with deep Pentecostal ties and which has since been forced to overhaul its management after an internal investigation into its past practices.
Crikey’s investigation also reveals conflicting stories about how the grant came about.
The trail, though, leads directly to the prime minister.
The allegations include that young women attending the Esther Foundation in Perth — which offers counselling and rehabilitation services — were pressured to become Christians, were forced to read the Bible aloud as a therapy to improve concentration, and were subjected to all-night prayer and confession sessions led by the foundation’s founder and pastor, Patricia Lavater. A former Indigenous resident also claims she was told she had “Aboriginal demons”.
Other allegations include that treatment for addiction and trauma was based on the faith healing methods of Smith Wigglesworth, a prominent figure in the history of Australian Pentecostalism.
Morrison announced the grant in person during a visit to the foundation’s Perth facility two months before the 2019 election. He also took personal credit for the taxpayer-funded grant, telling staff and residents: “I don’t invest in things that don’t work.”
Crikey has spoken to former staff and residents who paint a different picture of what was occurring behind the scenes.
One former employee told Crikey: “Patricia thinks she knows how to rehabilitate young people because she believes God has told her she knows how to.”
“The organisation was poorly run. There was no accountability or culpability.”
Former residents contacted by Crikey have made several allegations about what happened inside the foundation. They include:
- Young women and girls were expected to read the Bible every day
- Staff were “constantly pushing people to convert”
- There was a lack of staff with professional qualifications
- Residents were told they risked going to hell if they left and did not follow God’s will
- At one point residents were attending five religious meetings a week. The church service commonly went for four to five hours, and involved such things as running up and down the room with imaginary swords for up to an hour to beat the spirit of addiction. This was considered to be a treatment for addiction and it was considered residents should be better off, if not cured
- Residents were told that any same-sex attraction was a lie from the devil, and was sin. Anyone who was LGBTIQ was forced to undergo a form of gay conversion. If a resident was known to have feelings towards another woman, the two were not allowed to talk to each other and would be forced to repent of their thoughts and feelings for each other, often publicly.
The question is not which segment of Australia’s unorthodox communities will be persecuted by this legislation. It is what is medieval lawmaking doing in the parliament at all? Pastor Morrison’s religious persecution bill is a legalese moral abomination looking for a problem, insanely badly timed, that panders to a demonstrably bigoted extremist fringe, and clearly wedges his own party as much as it does Labor.
Having learned nothing from his failures with women, Pastor Morrison is now aiming to turn the Australian Parliament into his own personal sectarian sleaze cult.
He is freakin’ nuts!
