On the Road Again — Is Labor Serious About a Secular Alternative to School Chaplains?
There has been some rejoicing at the news that Australian state schools will now be given the option to employ secular “well-being” workers instead of school chaplains. For now, at least, the prospect of a ‘win’ for secularism appears to be all announcement and no substance. We’ve been down this road before.
By Chrys Stevenson
There has been some rejoicing at the news that Australian state schools will now be given the option to employ secular “well-being” workers instead of school chaplains. But close observers of the administration of the (now defunct) National School Chaplaincy Program under both the ALP and the Coalition are more circumspect. For now, at least, the prospect of a ‘win’ for secularism appears to be all announcement and no substance. We’ve been down this road before.
National School Chaplaincy was introduced by the Howard Government in 2006. The initiative was unashamedly ideological. Prime Minister John Howard, introduced religion into state schools as a means of promoting conservative values. He said at the time:
“Yes I am calling them chaplains because that has a particular connotation in our language, and as you know, I am not ever overwhelmed by political correctness. To call a chaplain a counsellor is to bow to political correctness. Chaplain has a particular connotation. People understand it, they know exactly what I am talking about.”
The prospect of a ‘win’ for secularism appears to be all announcement and no substance.
The chaplaincy program was a “captain’s call” by Howard. Prior to its implementation, there was no consultation or research to establish whether chaplains were actually required in schools. And, even if we accept that children may need some kind of “well-being” or mental health support at school, it was never established that chaplaincy was the appropriate response.
Since it was implemented in 2006, school chaplaincy has cost tax-payers over $1 billion. Yet, the program has no mechanism for reporting or measuring results. We don’t know, and will never know, whether that $1 billion was well spent.
During Ron Williams’ 2012 High Court Challenge against the National School Chaplaincy Program, Justice Gummow perused the guidelines produced by the Federal Education Department and grumbled, “This is garbled. This sort of stuff would never get through parliamentary council.”
Gummow was probably right, but, again, we’ll never know. The program’s legitimacy was never vetted by a parliamentary committee, because it was never legislated (a Constitutional requirement for the appropriation of funds from Consolidated Revenue). In a sleight-of-hand that the High Court twice ruled illegal — the astronomical cost of school chaplaincy was quietly slipped into the Education budget as an ‘ongoing expense’.
It was a Labor government which tried to circumvent the High Court’s ruling in 2012, but in 2014, a second challenge from Williams against the Coalition, confirmed the Federal Government could not legally fund the program. In an unprecedented move, six months prior to the case going to court, the Abbott Government paid religious providers 12 months’ in advance instead of the usual six. Despite the High Court ruling the payment illegal, the Coalition refused to recoup the six months’ unspent funding from providers, and negotiated a work-around to fund chaplaincy through the States.
Chaplaincy was the brainchild of a Coalition Government but Labor has had many opportunities to end the program, and not only failed to do so, but expanded it. Labor could easily have dismantled the program when Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007 (with Gillard as Education Minister). Gillard, I’ve been told by an insider, opposed the school chaplaincy program. She could have ended it when she succeeded Rudd. Instead, under pressure from the ALP’s religious right, Gillard substantially boosted funding to a record $222 million, allowing thousands more Christian chaplains to be employed in our country’s multicultural state schools.
In 2011, there was much rejoicing when Education Minister, Peter Garrett, announced that schools would be free to choose an appropriately qualified secular welfare worker, instead of a religious chaplain. But, the devil was in the detail.
By mid-2012, those of us on Williams’ High Court Challenge team began receiving reports that schools were having difficulty employing secular workers. I was tasked with looking into it. I detailed my research and findings in an article for ABC Religion and Ethics, Chaplaincy challenge: Trophy for Williams, but ‘poison chalice’ for the states?
Then, as now, school chaplains were recruited, trained and paid through accredited religious providers such as Scripture Union, GenR8 Ministries and Access Ministries. When the program was opened up to “welfare workers”, secular providers were invited to apply to DEEWR (the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations) for similar accreditation. In due course, DEEWR produced a list of accredited secular providers to be used by schools who wanted a secular alternative to a chaplain. It all seemed fairly simple. What was going wrong?
I spent a frustrating two days calling all the secular providers on DEEWR’s list. Commonly, there was no answer or the phone was disconnected. If someone answered they told me curtly, “No, we don’t supply them.” Occasionally, I was told the organisation had applied but hadn’t heard back from DEEWR. I was not able to find a single provider on DEEWR’s list with the capacity to provide a secular welfare worker to a school. DEEWR, when I called them, was unable to account for this.
What were schools to do? The answer was to turn to existing providers. Online, we found a flurry of advertisements from religious providers seeking to meet the demand from schools for secular welfare workers. Had they set up special secular divisions we wondered?
I checked with one such organisation. Yes, they would supply a secular welfare worker to a school, but they confirmed that anyone applying for such a position would need the same religious credentials as a person applying to be a school chaplain. That is, they would need to provide a reference from their church, attest in writing to their faith, and agree to adhere to the provider’s “values and mission” statement — namely, regular attendance at religious events and “the evangelisation of young people.”
The gap between Garrett’s announcement about the partial secularisation of the program and reality quickly became clear. A school could not employ a secular worker using DEEWR’s list, and the “secular workers” provided through religious organisations were nothing more than rebranded chaplains. Technically, a school’s Parents & Citizens Association (P&C) could set themselves up as an accredited provider, but few wanted the hassle and parents who pursued this as an option routinely found their school’s P&C had been colonised by members of the local evangelical church.
How will Jason Clare’s plan to introduce secular well-being workers into schools differ from Peter Garrett’s? To date, I can find no plans for the kind of infrastructure needed to make this a practical reality. And, even if the Albanese Government is genuine in its commitment to free the program from its religious stranglehold, tacking well-being workers onto an ideological program that addresses no identified need and entails no means of assessing its success is simply throwing good money after bad.
Let’s not rejoice at the introduction of secular well-being workers, but, instead, push for evidence-based policy and programs with clearly defined and measurable benchmarks. School chaplaincy — even when diluted by secular workers — meets neither requirement.
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