Will the Religious Discrimination Bill see the light of day?

It seems that the timing of the RDB is either politically astute planning or extremely poor legislative planning – either way this, for the sceptics, would work well for the government as it prevents it from having to commit the Bill to the electorate before the election.

So, if the election day must be a Saturday, it is easy to determine the last possible day on which an election must be called to be held on a certain day.

Historically, a federal election has never been held in January or February so we can safely assume that the Government will avoid a February election which means there are 12 Saturdays between 5 March 2022 and 21 May 2022 on which the election could be held. Not all of these Saturdays are likely to be an election day as the election is unlikely to be on the Easter (16 April 2022) or ANZAC Day long weekends (23 April 2022).

An inspection of the parliamentary sitting calendar indicates that the federal Budget will be on 29 March 2022. Whilst the Government can change the sitting calendar, and there is no guarantee that the Budget will be held on the scheduled day, it only leaves three possible election days (7, 14 and 21 May).

Any 2022 election held before 7 May 2022, would, according to the proposed sitting calendar, only have the Parliament sit during the February sitting weeks (and only the first week for a 19 March election).

This means that any legislation the Government wants to pass in the current term would need to be passed by both Houses by the end of that sitting. An election on 14 or 21 May would potentially allow the March and April sitting periods to also go ahead.

To complicate matters, the South Australian state election is listed for 19 March 2022 and whilst that election can be deferred so as not to clash with a federal election (see section 28 of the South Australian Constitution), the available dates for an election are narrowing.

To further complicate matters, governments try to avoid holding elections during school holidays, and with the need for postal and pre-poll voting, the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Counting, Scrutiny and Operational Efficiencies) Act 2021 in August 2021 reduced the early voting period to no more than 12 days, so only three 2022 dates would include Easter or ANZAC Day in the early voting period (two of which are unlikely election days due to Easter and ANZAC Day).

So, will the Religious Discrimination Bill see the ‘Light of Day’? - not on your nelly. Alea iacta est