The ritual reading of prayers at the start of every sitting day is offensive to many, and may even be a breach of the Constitution.
The creation of a federated Australia was apparently achieved without the help of the Almighty. Meetings of the Constitutional Conventions during the 1890s that drafted the blueprint for our nation were not preceded by prayer. But the founding fathers were under intense pressure from the various churches to give the Christian God a prominent place in the proceedings of our new governing institutions.
That pressure, expressed in a blizzard of petitions, eventually achieved its goal. At the conclusion of the final Convention its president, Edmund Barton, felt the need to note why the words “humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God” had been included in the Preamble to their proposed Constitution. He noted that:
“A concession has been made to the popular opinion that some reverential expression should be embodied in the preamble.”
But, in the same sentence, the man who would soon become our first Prime Minister was also careful to explain the heavy qualifications his colleagues had placed on this single reference to a Higher Being, and what they agreed should be the primacy of true religious freedom in a federated Australia:
“…due care has been taken by the Convention that no reliance upon that provision, and no far-fetched arguments based upon it, shall lead to any infraction of religious liberty under the laws of the Commonwealth which we hope to create.”
Yet the colonial church leaders were not satisfied. Their petitions demanded that the Standing Orders of the new national parliament should contain:
“… a provision that each daily session of the Upper and Lower Houses of the Federal Parliament be opened with a prayer by the President and Speaker.”
And so it came to pass that when our first parliament settled down to the business of making laws in June 1901 one of the earliest motions agreed to by the House of Representatives was “That the Standing Orders should provide that, upon Mr Speaker taking the Chair, he shall read a prayer”. (The Senate didn’t get around to adopting a prayerful commencement until 1903, after being bullied by yet another petition, this time from the Presbyterians.)
These are the suppliant words still spoken by the Speaker and the President at the opening of every sitting day in Canberra:
“Almighty God, we humbly beseech Thee to vouch safe Thy blessing upon this Parliament. Direct and prosper our deliberations to the advancement of Thy glory, and the true welfare of the people of Australia.”
This is followed by a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. But, typical of those sectarian times, the version of that prayer as adopted by parliament in 1901 provoked immediate criticism. Catholics use a slightly different form of words, (omitting the ‘For thine is the kingdom’ line), which led the Archbishop of Melbourne to call the adopted version “distinctly Protestant”.
Like so many of our parliamentary practices the tradition of a Christian prayer came from Britain where they had been beseeching God to smile upon their politicking since 1560. Yet in America, perhaps the world’s most overtly Christian nation, other denominations are invited to provide clerics to open proceedings in Congress with a prayer of their own faith. Congress has even tolerated an Imam, who invoked the blessing of “Almighty God the merciful, the wise, the most high possessor of greatness.” Nobody on Capitol Hill that day believed he was talking about the father of Jesus.
Around 39% of the Australian population were happy to nominate “no religion” at the last census. Fewer than 50% checked the box as “Christians” (whether practicing or not), and that proportion has been in steady decline since the 1950s. Yet meanwhile in our federal parliament the House and Senate continue to pretend the nation is a Protestant monoculture. Why, after more than a century, does this anachronistic late-Victorian piety of prayers-before-lawmaking survive?
The answer is sheer political cowardice. With the exception of the Greens, no party has had the courage to challenge the reading of prayers before every session. There have never been enough members or senators prepared to make a stand for genuine secularism. This timorousness, presumably for fear of an electoral backlash, has only rarely been challenged.
In October 1987 Senator Bob Brown gave notice of a motion to remove the reading of the Preamble and Lord’s Prayer and replace them with “an invitation to senators to pray or reflect on their responsibilities”. The Senate promptly deflected Brown’s motion to the Committee on Procedure. They reported back that those senators who joined in the prayer considered its retention as important, and those who didn’t had no strong view as to its abolition. Brown’s motion was defeated.
Later, as Prime Minister, John Howard said that to cease the practice of saying prayers at the beginning of each sitting day would be “to abandon our Judeo-Christian heritage”. It was revealing that he had no sense of how offensive his confirmation of the religious, and specifically Protestant, nature of this ritual now was to so many Australian citizens.
In 2014 the then leader of the Greens, Richard Di Natale, had another try at abolishing prayers, but again to no avail. Labor – despite the many atheists and non-Christians in their parliamentary ranks – responded by saying they had “no intention of changing the current practice”.
But what if this intrusion of religious faith into the conduct of our lawmaking was itself against the law of the land? The relevant statute is the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, and Section 116 in particular:
“The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.”
“Imposing any religious observance”. Those words can certainly be construed in ways that might convince the High Court that the reading of prayers in Parliament is unconstitutional, and therefore unlawful.
For example, Section 116 would clearly forbid Parliament from passing a law that required school children or government employees to begin their day with a prayer. So, if our lawmakers cannot compel religious observance on anyone else in Australia, why should they be able impose such practices on themselves?
But there’s a catch. Before considering that question the High Court would first need to determine the threshold issue of whether the Standing Orders of our parliaments are truly “laws”.
Mindful of its own separation of powers obligations (Parliament v. Judiciary), the High Court cannot reasonably be expected to countenance making orders dictating to the Federal Parliament the nature or detail of its procedures. The Standing Orders do not have the primary characteristics of a law, nor are they determined by the ordinary mechanics of creating legislation. That is the sticking point on which a constitutional challenge to prayers would probably fail.
Nevertheless, as Parliament makes its own Standing Orders, it can equally unmake them. The only real question for those seeking to do away with this practice of prayers is how to put sufficient public pressure on our elected representatives so that they would have to consider abolition. A petition might be a good start.
David Salter
David Salter has been a journalist, broadcaster and author for more than 50 years. He was a member of the team that founded "This Day Tonight", Australia's first nightly current affairs program. He worked in the Canberra gallery, at the BBC, and for the Nine and Seven networks. Salter was Executive Producer of "Media Watch" for 200 episodes with Stuart Littlemore QC.
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