In recent media reports, Julia Gillard PM was accused of hypocrisy for allowing religions to be exempt from the Discrimination Act. The idea is, that if a religion opposes, say, homosexuality on theological grounds, they cannot be legally accused of discrimination if they terminate someone’s employment for being gay.

I wondered whether the reverse was true. Whether an employer could fire someone for being religious?

I scanned through the Anti-Discrimination Act (yawn) and lo and behold, there is no section covering religion and employment. You can’t fire someone for race, gender or sexuality – but you can fire them for their religion (apparently)!

Was it really true? I wrote to the attorney general to confirm what I suspected. The pertinent section of their response was :

So there you have it. As long as you don’t fire someone for being a racial-jew, you could fire someone specifically for believing in God if it mattered to you enough. You could advertise for staff and list “Must be an Atheist” or conversely “Must be a Christian” as criteria for the position. This seems like a fairly open ended way to discriminate against people. What’s that? You believe in reincarnation? Pack your things and get out of my office!

I guess this makes the act somewhat fair. Religions have always had exception from certain aspects of the act. On closer inspection however, it appears perfectly valid legally to discriminate against religion in the same way they might discriminate against other minorities.

Fair’s fair?