Edd Doerr President Americans for Religious Liberty:
Toward the end of the 19th century Australia’s constitutional designers, consciously following the American example, incorporated into their 1901 constitution these words in Section 116:
“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 [borrowing from Article VI of the US Constitution] no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.”
So far so good. But . . .
Some years after World War II, under Australia’s rather different national election system, the Catholic bishops began a push to get government funding for church-run private schools. Using a small religious political party, the bishops were able to get the two major parties to begin diverting public funds to the church schools. Alarmed, the supporters of public schools and church-state separation formed the Council for the Defence of Government Schools (D.O.G.S.) to offset this push but were unsuccessful. Finally, in the early 1970s the D.O.G.S. group, inspired by developments in the US, went to court to use Section 116 to block church school public funding. I might note that Americans Leo Pfeffer, C. Stanley Lowell and I were peripherally involved in the matter.
