Charities to be Silenced?

Charities and not-for-profits play an important role in our democracy.

As organisations that exist solely for the purpose of contributing to the public good, they work at the coalface of many important causes such as welfare, human rights, overseas development assistance and the environment. The expertise they gain through this work makes an important contribution to the public debate, and from this contribution we get better policy outcomes.

Some of the most important social reforms in Australia that are now widely embraced and accepted—such as the NDIS, Medicare and marriage equality—have been achieved largely thanks to the advocacy of charities.

The voice of charities, which is so vital to our democracy and to good policy outcomes, is once again under attack by the Morrison Government. The government has introduced a new regulation which charities say will have a chilling effect on free speech.

The peak community sector body, the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), has described this new regulation as “extreme overreach, and an attack on our democracy.”

The new regulation threatens charities with deregistration if they commit minor or ‘summary’ offences, such as participating in a protest that blocks a footpath or failing to shut a gate to private property. Even the mere act of promoting an event at which a summary offence is committed by just one person could result in deregistration.

The Charities’ Commissioner can even deregister a charity simply because he anticipates a summary offence might be committed.

There is no need for this draconian regulation. Charities can already be deregistered for breaking the law. Contrary to government’s narrative of a charity crime wave gripping the nation, in the past four years only two of Australia’s 59,000 registered charities have lost their registration for unacceptable activist activity.

Even the Coalition members of the bipartisan Senate Committee that evaluates new regulations agree that the rules are anti-democratic and give the Charities’ Commissioner too much power.

Not only will this regulation have a chilling effect on free speech, but it will tie up charities in legal red tape in their efforts to comply. A sector survey estimates the new regulations would cost Australian charities $150 million in the year they’re introduced, and $40 million every year after.

That red tape cost will be paid by all charities, regardless of whether they do public advocacy work or not. Instead of being buried in legal red tape, charities must be able to focus their efforts and resources on the important charitable causes they support.

In a recent survey of charities and not-for-profits conducted by Pro Bono Australia, 15 percent of respondents said that their organisation had done something or omitted to do something, in the past year in the course of their normal work that would have left them open to deregistration under the new regulation. A further 39 percent said they didn’t know whether they had.

If these responses were replicated across the entire sector it means anywhere between 9,000 to 32,000 charities will have to change the way they do business or risk being deregistered.

As far as Scott Morrison and the Liberals are concerned, charities have no place in public debate. Scott Morrison and his government would prefer charities to be running soup kitchens, but not campaigning to overturn the causes of structural inequality. They would prefer charities to be planting trees, but not campaigning for real action on climate change.

Our Prime Minister would like Australian charities to be seen and not heard. Mr Morrison praises the ‘quiet Australians’ but he would rather charities stay silent. This attack on free speech is just another in a long series of assaults in the Liberals’ war on charities.

It is what we have come to expect from a government which tried to scrap the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, appointed a charity critic as Charities’ Commissioner, made several attempts to silence charities through legislation and gag clauses in social services agreements and which for years has dragged its feet on harmonising charity fundraising law.

The Liberals’ war on charities must end.

Catryna Bilyk is a Labor Senator for Tasmania.