Council tells gays: take it to Tribunal

Monthly meetings of a church group led by gay conversion advocate Toby Neal will continue in the Surry Hills Neighborhood Centre unless a successful claim is made against it under the Anti-Discrimination Act.

Three months after a City of Sydney Council meeting erupted over the use of its premises by the Anglican group, The Lord Mayor Clover Moore has announced no action will be taken unless it is found to be breaking the law.

Ms Moore said it would take a test case in the Administrative Decisions Tribunal to decide the issue, a response labeled “passing the buck” by UTS legal academic Professor Jenni Millbank.

Ms Moore said while she shared the concern of medical and health professionals over the potential harms of gay conversion therapy, it was unclear whether promoting it would breach the Anti-Discrimination Act.

But Professor Millbank said the council had the power “to draw up their own guidelines about who gets to use their space, and whether or not those groups have to comply with… anti-discrimination ideals or goals.”

She was critical of the system in New South Wales of developing discrimination law through test cases.

“It puts the onus on the victimized group to have someone who’s got the time and inclination to bring a complaint, instead of saying ‘this appears to be a general issue and let’s investigate it’”, she said, pointing to countries like Sweden where such investigations are the responsibility of a specialist Ombudsman.

City News spoke to Simon Rice, a judge on the Administrative Decisions Tribunal, who said a claim against the church group would be unlikely to succeed unless the group was vilifying or “refusing to provide a service” to gay people, as religious instruction enjoys a general exemption from the Anti-Discrimination Act.

But, he said, there was nothing to stop the council from “imposing guidelines based on current community standards” when deciding which groups could use the space.

Councillors expressed concerns that evicting the church group could leave the Council open to allegations of discrimination on the grounds of religion.

But Rice said such fears were unfounded as religious conviction is not a legal ground for discrimination in New South Wales.

Guidelines for the use of the Neighbourhood Centre are “completely at the Council’s discretion”, he said.

“If they’re going to allow everything that’s not illegal… Well, that’s a very broad category.”

Prof Millbank said: “I think it’s worth asking whether they would let a white power group use that space—and would it be race discrimination to prevent such a group from using it?”

Mr Neal said he was happy the matter had been “cleared up” with Council and he felt there had been a “misunderstanding”.

He told this reporter in May that he would recommend the services of Liberty Christian Ministries, an Anglican support organization for people with “unwanted same-sex attractions”, to converts suffering confliction between their sexual orientations and his religious teachings.

Neal has since made a number of changes to a key document on his website, removing references to the conflict between Anglican and secular attitudes to homosexuality as a “watershed issue”.

City News has obtained a copy of Neal’s original Church Planting Prospectus. In the document, Neil identified “God’s condemnation of the homosexual lifestyle” as one of the key challenges to recruiting 100 young inner-city dwellers to the congregation of his new church in Surry Hills, which he referred to as “one of the darkest suburbs in Sydney”.

His solution was, through social interaction with locals, to “deconstruct” the contemporary worldview that affirms homosexual identity and promote an alternative identity based upon the gospel teachings.

In a post on his personal blog, Neal summed up his views, writing that Jesus “loves gays more than gays love gays. He loves gays more than gays love being gay.”

After talk arose in May of the council forcing the group’s eviction from the neighbourhood centre, a new version of the Prospectus appeared on Neal’s website.

The section about gay people had been removed and the Surry Hills Community Centre appeared to have been dropped as the venue of choice in favour of “a pub somewhere between the City and Bondi”.

Neal has since uploaded a third version of the document, reinstating the mission of planting a church in Surry Hills but leaving out all references to homosexuality.

“We’re not looking at different locations,” Neil told City News, “But we’re not really a church yet, so we’re just seeing what happens.”

By Dana McCauley