For more than 100 years, MPs have started each parliamentary sitting day with the Lord’s Prayer. But in Victoria this could soon change, with the new premier conceding that the tradition does not reflect a changing state.
“We are seeing greater cultural diversity – I think it’s important that we do look at reflecting that in our parliamentary practices,” Jacinta Allan told reporters on Monday.
“I’m just one member of parliament. These are matters that are decided by the parliament itself and we need to be having those broader cross-party discussions.”
Allan made the comments after two Labor MPs last week said they would sit out the prayer – which has been said at the start of each sitting day since 1918 – due to Pope Francis’s comments condemning surrogacy.
But the prayer itself is not Catholic – and it has been scrapped before, according to Luke Beck, a constitutional expert at Monash University, who is also on the board of the Rationalist Society and is a rank-and-file Labor party member.
“This whole debate about prayer in parliament is as old as federation itself,” he tells Guardian Australia.
According to Beck, in the mid-1800s several of Australia’s colonial governments stopped reciting prayers at the beginning of each sitting day as they embraced the concept of the separation of church and state.
“There was this idea that people should be free to do their own religious stuff but it shouldn’t be forced upon them,” he says.
But this shifted in the late 1890s, as the six colonial governments began planning federation.
Beck says church groups began lobbying to include a prayer in the constitution and in the standing orders of the new federal parliament. They failed on the first front but were successful in the second – by June 1901 both the House of Representatives and Senate included a daily prayer.
Still recited in parliament is the Anglican blessing and a Protestant reciting of the Lord’s Prayer, which includes the line: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever.”
Beck says this line is only in the King James Version of the Bible used by Protestants, prompting a complaint at the time from the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne.
Christian prayer in all parliaments except the ACT
All Australian parliaments now feature the Lord’s Prayer – generally read at the start of each sitting day – with the exception of the Australian Capital Territory, which since 1995 has started sittings with an invitation to MPs to “pray or reflect” on their responsibilities as elected representatives.
There have been calls for other parliaments to follow suit – most notably by the Greens in Canberra in 2018 and by former Victorian MP and Reason party leader Fiona Patten in 2021.
Patten managed to secure a commitment from the Labor government to begin “workshopping a replacement model that is purpose-fit for Victoria” if re-elected in 2022. But Patten lost her seat at that election and progress has stalled.
Several MPs in the state’s upper house instead choose to abstain from prayer and enter the chamber before the acknowledgment of country. They include the Labor ministers Harriet Shing and Ingrid Stitt and MPs from the Greens, Legalise Cannabis and the Animal Justice party.
“There’s a long history of MPs waiting outside the chamber to avoid the prayer, it’s been happening for decades,” Beck says. “At the start, they did it because they were not Protestant or because they believed in freedom of religion, and now most MPs do it because they’re not religious, and because not everyone in the community is Christian and they want parliament to be more inclusive.”
Pope’s push leads more MPs to abstain from prayer
Last week two lower house Labor MPs – Frankston’s Paul Edbrooke and Tarneit’s Dylan Wight – joined the ranks of abstaining MPs after Pope Francis called for a global ban on surrogacy.
Edbrooke told the Age: “My personal view is that parliament is a workplace and I don’t see a need for it. A lot of people see the separation of church and state as a good thing.”
Wight, whose brother is adopted, took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to condemn the pope’s “archaic and deplorable” comments. He said the daily prayer did not reflect the diversity of his outer west electorate.
“I have deep respect for those that practice a faith and strongly believe in their right to do so,” he wrote. “I don’t practice a faith, however the vast majority of my electorate that do, do not practice Christianity.
“For these reasons I’ve decided to no longer participate in the prayer.”
According to the latest census, the majority of people in Wight’s seat are Hindu, followed by no religion (16.6%), then Catholic (15.9%) and Muslim (14.6%).
Steady decline in proportion of Christian Australians
Anna Halafoff, an associate professor in sociology at Deakin University, says the 2021 census showed a steady decline in the proportion of Australians who reported an affiliation with Christianity.
Some 44% of respondents said they were of Christian affiliation while 39% said they had no religion. This was followed by Islam (3.2%), Hinduism (2.7%) and Buddhism (2.4%).
“Victoria, in particular, is seeing a lot more religious diversity,” Halafoff says.
“The other thing that’s really important that census data doesn’t really pick up accurately is we’ve got significant numbers, particularly of young Australians, who are identifying as spiritual but not religious.”
Halafoff cites a 2018 national survey of generation Z, which found while a quarter of teens had no belief in God or a higher being (24%); slightly more than a third (37%) believed in God; and just less than a third believed in a higher being or life force instead of God (30%).
“These beliefs inform things like environmental activism and their diet, whether they’re vegetarian or vegan,” she says.
Halafoff says with this in mind, Victoria should adopt the ACT’s moment of prayer or reflection.
“It would mean people of any faith, people who have no faith, people who are spiritual, or people that have a connection with nature, can use that as their moment to reflect on what is important and what’s sacred to them,” she says.
Tim Costello, a Baptist minister and social justice advocate, has urged the Victorian government to think carefully before doing away with the tradition.
“Given 30 years ago there was Christian consensus and now it’s fragmented, it is entirely appropriate to ask whether parliament needs to be more inclusive,” he says. “But I also think secular people often are a little naive.
“They would be surprised to know that Muslims, Jews and Hindus, they’re not offended by the Lord’s Prayer. What offends them is a secular Australia that doesn’t have a belief in transcendence, a belief in a higher power, something beyond us.”
