Family First’s Jane Foreman says the Legal and Social Issues Committee’s “Crossing the Line” report into high control groups, tabled in state parliament on 7 August, risks turning vague and subjective judgments about “coercion” and “harm” into criminal law — handing government the power to decide which beliefs are devotion and which are manipulation.
As hundreds of thousands of Victorians are at worship today, Ms Foreman says many of those people should be concerned about the report, which included 98 findings and 39 recommendations. Its central recommendation calls on the Victorian government to ask the Victorian Law Reform Commission to review legislative options for criminalising “group-based coercion” and legislate in response.
“The Committee says it deliberately avoided defining a ‘cult’ so nobody has to litigate a group’s theology — but you cannot build a criminal offence out of words like ‘coercion’ and ‘harm’ without someone, somewhere, deciding whose beliefs count as manipulation and whose don’t,” said Mrs Foreman. “That decision doesn’t disappear just because it isn’t written into the recommendation. It just gets made later, by a police officer or a prosecutor, after the fact, with someone’s freedom on the line.”
Ms Foreman says Family First isn’t alone in raising the alarm. At an October hearing, Australian Christian Lobby Victorian director Jasmine Yuen told the committee new laws could end up “really coming after the Christian churches or other faith-based group”, citing ordinary discipleship and end-times teaching as practices that could be misread as coercive. Freedom for Faith executive director Mike Southon told the same hearing he “would be concerned when recommendations start reaching into what we teach and what we believe.” The committee chair insisted the focus was behaviour, not belief — but Ms Foreman says the report’s own recommendation to unwind charity protections for small religious groups shows exactly how that line gets crossed in practice.
“Nobody in Family First is defending genuine abuse, and survivors of real coercion deserve to be heard and protected,” said Mrs Foreman. “But when the state starts drawing lines around which beliefs are ‘coercive’ and which are merely devout, we’ve seen this movie before, and it doesn’t end with more freedom. Victorians should be asking whether this inquiry is on track to become a modern-day Spanish Inquisition — minus the robes, but with the same instinct to police what people are allowed to believe and who they’re allowed to say it to”
Family First is calling on the Attorney-General to rule out any new offence built on subjective judgments about belief and persuasion rather than proven conduct and to guarantee any legislative response targets demonstrated coercive conduct only — not doctrine, discipleship or door-knocking. It’s exactly why Victoria needs Family First in the Legislative Council after November — to make sure protecting genuine victims doesn’t become the pretext for policing what Victorians are allowed to believe.
—
