Legal Restrictions on Names of Religious Groups in Australia

Jeremy Patrick is a senior lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland School of Law and Justice.

In Australia, religious groups are largely able to operate with autonomy and with very little government oversight—including over the names they wish to operate under. This is not to say that the government imposes no limitations whatsoever but that any limitations will arise only in very specific contexts, and for the vast majority of religious groups the vast majority of the time, these hypothetical limitations are of no real concern. In this brief post, I canvas the contexts of denominational trademarks, incorporation, charitable registration, marriage ordination, direct legislative protection, and schism. This brief overview shows that, apart from church property disputes after a schism, judicial and legislative restrictions on religious group names are rare and scattered.

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Fair Reflection of Religious Affiliation and the High Court of Australia

Jeremy Patrick is a Lecturer for the University of Southern Queensland School of Law and Justice

In recent decades, the High Court of Australia has come under a steady stream of criticism for failing to reflect the multicultural diversity within Australian society [1]. Although some progress has been made in the area of gender equality and sexual orientation [2], the High Court remains notoriously homogenous in other respects like race, education, and professional background. The situation that Eddy Neumann described in 1973 has changed, but not as much one might hope:

[The] typical High Court Justice is a male white Protestant raised in Sydney or Melbourne (or much less frequently, Brisbane) and of British ethnic origins. He is from upper middle rather than upper class background, though perhaps more than his American counterparts from lower middle class environment. He usually goes to a high status high school (usually private) and then to Sydney or Melbourne university where he has a brilliant academic record. If from a moneyed family he immediately goes to the Bar [3].

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