Prayers in Parliament

Local Government – throughout Australia – has led the change in responsiveness to Australia’s changing religious profile, and changed the way prayers are conducted before governance meetings. This has been proposed for state and federal governments since 2004, in the Religion, Cultural Diversity and Safeguarding Australia report.

Australia’s religious profile has changed markedly since the first paper on Multiculturalism was presented to Parliament by Al Grassby in 1973. The Galbally Review for the 1989 National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia mapped out how an increasingly diverse society can advance and prosper.

Since then, the Christian proportion of the Australian population has declined from 70.9% in 1996 to 43.9% in 2021. Catholics are the largest faith group in Australia, and their numbers have increased by 276,900 in the 25-year period but have fallen very substantially in total Australian population terms from 27.0% to 20.0%. In this period, the Catholic Church has been a major beneficiary in migration terms. This is reflected in its linguistic profile. In 2001, the linguistic profile of the Australian Catholic Church was led by Italian (322,582 speakers) followed by the Filipino languages, Croatian, Arabic, Spanish, Vietnamese, Polish, Maltese, the Chinese languages, German, French, Portuguese, Hungarian, Dutch and the Oceanic and Papuan languages.

In 1996, just over one in 30 Australians identified with a faith other than Christian. Now it is one in ten. Their numbers have more than quadrupled. The leading faith is Muslim with 813,400 followers. The Hindus are now the second largest non-Christian group whose numbers have gone up tenfold since 1996, especially since 2001 as a result of the recent huge Indian-born inflow. The number of Sikhs has tripled since 2011 with 214,400 adherents, also because of the Indian inflow. Buddhists have continued their steady growth to be 615,800 in 2021. The number of Jewish believers was about 100,000 in 2021.

The other major change factor in Australia’s religious profile has been the exponential rise in those who claimed to have no religion from 16.6% of the total population in 1996 to 38.9%. That is a huge increase from 2,949,900 in 1996 to 9,887,000 in 2021. This figure includes those who declared themselves atheists, agnostics, humanists, rationalists, theists and New Age followers. Research suggests that many of these are followers of a vague eco-spirituality. It also includes most of those born in China who have arrived in recent decades and who were raised in overtly Communist, anti-religion times.

In 2004, the use of the exemplary Christian prayer, the Our Father, to commence each parliamentary day was raised though some Christian leaders considered it ought to be acceptable to all faiths since the name of Jesus is never mentioned. The suggestion that the Our Father be replaced by a series of prayers and readings selected by each of the major faith communities on a rotational basis with, perhaps, the Our Father, in deference to the Christian majority, being recited to close each parliamentary day was received by religious leaders as a more preferred and worthwhile compromise. It is suggested that the rotation also include a reading chosen by rationalist or atheist organisations in deference to those whose world view is not embedded in a theistic framework. It is suggested that the rotational system include those faith groups which have at least 0.333 per cent of the total population – in 2021, this would have included the following 16 groups (in order): Catholic, Anglican, Uniting Church, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Jewish, Humanists, Rationalists, Presbyterian, Orthodox, Baptist, Lutheran, Pentecostal, Salvation Army and Church of Christ.

It is noted that local inter-faith groups such as Hume in Melbourne have utilised a similar system successfully. Such a solution would show to the world Australia as a lighthouse of multi-faith co-operation.