A two-year Tasmanian parliamentary inquiry has landed its heaviest blow yet on a faith-based school system, finding that Catholic Education Tasmania (CET) discriminated against staff over their sexual orientation and marital status — a finding CET flatly disputes.
The Inquiry into Discrimination and Bullying in Tasmanian Schools began in June 2024, after national data showed Tasmania had the country’s worst schoolyard bullying rates. Two years, 55 findings and 33 recommendations later, its final report — chaired by Labor MP Brian Mitchell — reserves some of its sharpest criticism for the state’s Catholic system, which runs 39 schools across Tasmania.
The committee concluded CET’s hiring practices were in breach of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act 1998. But importantly, this is a parliamentary committee finding, not a court ruling, and the interaction between Tasmania’s legislation and Commonwealth anti-discrimination law has not been judicially determined.
The finding rests partly on testimony from Gerard Gaskin, CET’s former executive director, who told the inquiry back in February 2025 that people whose public lives conflicted with Catholic teaching would not be employed in senior leadership positions. A former deputy principal also told the committee that his marriage breakdown and subsequent de facto relationship led to him being stood down and ultimately told he could no longer work as either a leader or teacher within Catholic Education Tasmania.
CET isn’t backing down. The organisation maintains it operates under, and complies with, the federal Sex Discrimination Act, which contains a specific exemption allowing religious educational institutions to discriminate in certain circumstances where doing so in good faith is necessary to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents. The exemption covers attributes including sexual orientation and marital or relationship status. Current executive director Terry McCarthy says the organisation takes the findings seriously and remains confident its employment practices are lawful.
Here’s the part that should worry every Christian institution in the country, not just Catholic ones: two Liberal members of the committee, Michael Ferguson and Mark Shelton, tried to soften the finding by adding the words “may have”, and were voted down five to two. In their own dissenting statement, the pair warned the report risked trampling “freedoms of belief and family choice” — a warning that deserves a lot more attention than it’s getting.
Because that’s really what’s on the line here. A Catholic school declining to appoint a senior leader who publicly rejects Catholic teaching on marriage isn’t simply an ordinary employment decision — it’s bound up with the entire reason a religious school exists in the first place. If the state can ultimately require CET to treat faithfulness to Catholic doctrine as an unlawful hiring criterion, there’s no principled reason it couldn’t raise the same question for any Christian school, or church-run charity, anywhere in the country.
Independent MP Kristie Johnston, who moved the motion that established the inquiry back in 2024, wasted no time turning the finding into political ammunition, pressing Premier Jeremy Rockliff in parliament over what he intends to do about it. Rockliff didn’t commit to anything beyond the usual line about expecting everyone to follow the law. Equality Tasmania’s Rodney Croome has gone further still, calling for the matter to be pursued rather than leaving the fight solely to individual victims of discrimination.
That should tell you where this is heading. This report isn’t necessarily the end of the story — it could become an invitation for activists and government lawyers to take the dispute further and, potentially, use the courts to settle once and for all how Tasmania’s anti-discrimination laws interact with the protections afforded to religious schools under Commonwealth law.
And Tasmania isn’t acting alone. New South Wales is running its own review of anti-discrimination law, one that includes consideration of the religious exemptions affecting faith-based organisations and schools. The pattern is worth watching: another inquiry, another “review,” another set of recommendations, all potentially affecting the amount of room faith communities have to run their own institutions as they see fit.
The report’s other findings — on bullying rates generally, on First Nations students, on gifted kids falling through the cracks — deserve real attention, and nobody disputes Tasmanian schools have genuine problems to fix. But burying a religious freedom fight inside a bullying report doesn’t make it any less of a religious freedom fight. If a Catholic school can’t require its leaders to actually live like Catholics, what’s left of “Catholic” in Catholic education?