Labor Minister Brands Biblical Marriage "Backward" — As Government Prepares the Law to Police It
A federal minister stood in Parliament this week and called a teaching held by billions of religious believers “backward.” He was making the case for a bill that hands government regulators the power to decide which views about women and marriage your children are allowed to see online.
A Minister Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
On Wednesday the 9th of September, Education Minister Jason Clare stood at the dispatch box to talk about Australia's latest PISA results. He used the moment to pivot to a very different subject and revealed exactly what this government considers a “backward” view.
“The other research that is terrifying here is this: more young blokes today have backward views about women than blokes my age. Young men are almost three times as likely as older blokes to think a wife should have to obey her husband.”
Clare didn't stop to distinguish between a teenager parroting hateful content from an online forum and a teenager repeating what they hear from the pulpit every Sunday. He didn't carve out an exception for the millions of Australian families whether they be Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Muslim, or Jewish who understand a wife's submission to her husband's leadership as a matter of scripture, not misogyny. He simply declared the belief itself “backward,” and moved straight into announcing what the government intends to do about it:
“It is because of things like this and because of the slop that is force-fed to young men online through algorithms by big tech. We've got to protect our kids from this... that's what the digital duty of care that the Prime Minister and the Minister for Communications announced yesterday is all about.”
The message could not be clearer. The minister used a description of biblical headship as his headline example of the “backward” thinking the government's new internet law is designed to stamp out.
The Bill That Turns "Backward" Into "Banned"
The day before Clare's remarks, the government released the exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026. Buried in Schedule 2 is the clause that gives his comment teeth. Section 25D lists what the bill defines as material “harmful to children” — and sitting alongside pornography and content promoting eating disorders is this:
“material or conduct that encourages or promotes hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality”
Read that again. Not violence. Not threats. Not abuse. Attitudes.
Nowhere in the bill is “hostile attitudes” defined. Nowhere is “gender equality” defined. There is no test, no threshold, no worked example, just a phrase broad enough to be read however the government of the day, or the eSafety Commissioner it appoints, chooses to read it. And a cabinet minister has now told the country, on the record, exactly which belief he reads into that undefined phrase.
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No Definition. No Exemption. No Protection for Faith
Families should not have to guess whether their faith is now a compliance risk for tech platforms, but that is precisely the position this bill puts them in. The new Digital Duty of Care bill contains nothing protecting sermons, scripture teaching, religious education, or an online influencer describing their own beliefs about marriage.
This could mean that quoting scripture verses would be forced to be suppressed by algorithms such as 1 Corinthians 11:3, or Ephesians 5:22-24, “Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: Because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. He is the saviour of his body. Therefore as the church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things.”
Not only scripture, but also statements by the Popes such as Pope Leo XII’s encyclical Arcanum Divinae (1880), Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubii (1930) and Pope John XXIII’s Ad Petri Cathedram (1959). We could also add statements by prominent theologians such as St John Chrysostom, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, and many others.
A Rulebook That Only Runs One Way
Here is the asymmetry families should sit with. The bill writes a specific, named, legally operative harm into the Act for content “hostile” to gender equality. This effectively means that algorithms will only have content which reinforces liberal and progressive views of gender roles, making social media biased towards leftist content.
Families who let their children use the internet should know that a minister has already told Parliament which side of this debate he considers “backward.” The bill he was defending when he said it gives the Labor government the power to make that opinion binding on every platform your children use.