2016-06-21
Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — I would like to thank the speakers who have spoken on the motion before us today and when it was moved back in March. Those speakers are Ms Patten and Mr Jennings in March and Ms Wooldridge and Dr Carling-Jenkins today. I will just briefly respond to some of the points made by those speakers.
In her contribution supporting the motion Ms Patten mentioned that we are now a multicultural community in Victoria — a different community to the one in Victoria when the Parliament was established back in 1856. We are in our 160th year of Parliament in Victoria. Ms Patten also outlined her personal and her party's commitment to the separation of church and state, which is a very common principle throughout the Western world in particular. To a large extent the separation of powers and the separation of church and state occurs in our Westminster system of government. It is only in terms of the daily prayer that religion enters into the proceedings of the Parliament. I thank Ms Patten for the summary of the things she said. She mentioned other things, but they were the main things, and I thank her for her support of the motion and the reasons that she gave for it.
Mr Jennings also spoke on the motion, and as Ms Wooldridge has mentioned today, he did speak about the context of the day. I take that as part of his thinking behind what he was going on to say. He did point to the reforms that the government has made to the standing orders and to the committee system in this Parliament in terms of the numbers of representatives from government and non-government parties on the committees across the Parliament — not just in the upper house but on the joint committees as well — the chairing of those committees and the changes to more family-friendly hours in the lower house. He did mention in his contribution looking towards introducing those in the upper house. He mentioned the changes to question time, the introduction of constituency questions and many reforms. I say, as I have said before, that I think they are all good reforms. I commend the government for making them.
In my time in this Parliament, which is 9.5 years now, I have pushed for reforms to the way we work in the Parliament in terms of the notion to establish the upper house committees way back in 2008 and many other reforms to the standing orders since. I have been on the Standing Orders Committee, now called the Procedure Committee, ever since I was elected to the Parliament. I take a great interest in these issues, how we conduct our days and our weeks, and the mechanisms that we can all use to pursue the issues that are important to us. For example, today, being a day of general business, is a day for non-government members to bring forward issues such as the one we are debating now but also the ones we debated earlier today.
There have certainly been a wide range of issues covered today, as I am sure everyone would agree.
One of the things Mr Jennings did say was that we need to approach this with caution — I am happy to agree with that — and would not want to be premature. I will just take up the idea of being premature. I do not think I can agree that having a discussion about this particular issue of alternatives to the daily prayer is premature. In fact I first raised it in this Parliament on 28 October 2008. By way of a members statement I spoke about the Speaker of the House of Representatives at the time, Mr Harry Jenkins, calling for a public debate about whether the Lord's Prayer, which is read daily at the opening of the federal Parliament, should be rewritten or replaced.
Throughout my contribution I made reference to many places and parliaments in Australia and throughout the world where different arrangements have been put in place to better reflect the communities in which those parliaments are situated and the separation of church and state. In some instances, if you look back at what I said on the day, there are such things as having different faiths and different prayers on different days. I mentioned the different arrangements in some of our local councils. When I was looking at it I found very interesting the different arrangements that local councils across Victoria had in place with regard to the beginning of their proceedings.
I do not think it is premature. I think it is a discussion that we do need to keep having. I thank Ms Wooldridge for her contribution. I do not agree with all of it, but I was very interested in the history. Ms Wooldridge referred to when the prayer was first introduced by a motion 160 years ago. I did not get time to write down who it was, but I think it was probably the Prime Minister she was referring to who said that the prayer was non-partisan. I do not agree that it is non-partisan. I am not sure that 'partisan' is the right word there, but as I said in my contribution back in March it represents a certain denomination of the Christian religion. I do not think anyone could possibly say it is representative of everybody in the community, so I cannot really agree with that description of the Lord's Prayer.
I can agree that it is traditional, but I would say while it is traditional it is not representative any more of the community in which the Parliament of Victoria is located. I do agree that traditions can be added to and enhanced, and I think that is actually what my aim is here. What I am trying to do is add to the tradition and enhance it, and our traditions have changed. Many of our traditions in our standing orders and the way we conduct ourselves in the Parliament have changed. I think Ms Patten referred to the fact that women were not allowed to be elected to Parliament for the first 50 or so years. Certainly it is good that that was changed, and a lot of people used the tradition argument to argue against it. But people realised of course that women make up 50 per cent of the population and should be making up 50 per cent of the Parliament at least. Of course we have not quite got there yet.
Ms Wooldridge also mentioned that many Greens have raised this issue across parliaments and in the federal Parliament, and that is correct. It certainly is a policy of the Greens. It is not so much that it is a Greens policy in itself, but it is a Greens policy because we would like to see parliaments that are more representative of the communities they are located in. We certainly do have a much more multicultural, multifaith community than we did 160 years ago, 100 years ago, 50 years ago or even 25 or 30 years ago. I do not think anyone could argue with that. I thank Ms Wooldridge for her comments with regard to the motion.
I also thank Dr Carling-Jenkins for her comments and for her thanking me for moving the motion. She spoke very emotionally and strongly about values and tradition, how the Lord's Prayer represents different things to different people and the role of religion in doing good works in the community, welfare systems, education, hospitals et cetera, and I acknowledge all of that too. I agree that in that respect the prayer does represent our origins, but, as I said before, it does not represent who the people of Victoria are today in my view and in the views of many other people. Ms Wooldridge actually said people are not clamouring for it, and I would agree. People are not clamouring for it or making demands, but whenever it comes up in conversation with people, as it does from time to time, most people that I have spoken to agree not necessarily on what should happen but that there should be a discussion about an alternative which could be more inclusive.
I do not want to go over everything I said back in March. People can read that for themselves. I think my main points are that the Lord's Prayer may be traditional but it is no longer representative or inclusive. The prayer that we have in our standing orders is the Anglican version of the Lord's Prayer and is not inclusive of everybody in this chamber by any means. I and other members are excluded by it every day, so there are at least seven and sometimes eight — and I think I made the point that it is getting to 20 per cent — of the members of the chamber who do not attend the daily prayer.
As I said, I do not pretend to speak as to why everybody does that. For me it is the reasons I have outlined many times in this chamber: that I do not believe that the daily prayer as it stands is representative of everybody in the community or everybody in the chamber, and it excludes me. I am excluded from the chamber by it. I do not speak for the others, but I say that this is not a good state of affairs for our chamber.
For me it is now six years of not attending the prayer, and I believe this is not a state of affairs that should be allowed to continue. A way forward to include everyone needs to be found, and that is what the motion is designed to do. As I said in my original motion, I directed it towards the Procedure Committee because the Procedure Committee is the custodian of the standing orders under which we operate, and it is the standing orders that direct the saying of the daily prayer every morning.
The main comments that I want to make in summing up the debate on my motion are that it aims to have a discussion about something that could be more inclusive. There are a large number of alternatives that already exist in parliaments around the world and in Australia, and I think we should continue this discussion. I thank Dr Carling-Jenkins for saying that we should continue the discussion through the Procedure Committee, and at some stage the Procedure Committee and the Standing Orders Committee of the Legislative Assembly will meet and perhaps that could be raised during that time and through other avenues of the Parliament.
I thank everybody for the respectful way in which I believe the debate has been carried out on this issue, which I know people have strong feelings about and which I also have strong feelings about. With those words in summation, I commend my motion to the house.
Motion negatived.