Yes, the school chaplaincy program disregards the rights of those unidentified with a religious group. Additionally, it is an irresponsible act, putting untrained persons under the supervision of no particulr authority in touch with children attending state schools.

If the motivation behind this program was altruistic (which I doubt), why not integrate provision of an adult other in schools with fieldwork requirements for postgraduate students in the areas of education, psychology, etc. By the way, that wouldn't cost a cent.

Yes, Labour held onto some of the Howard government's worst policies: Anti-terror, Middle-class and corporate welfare, religious crony-ism and sycophantic actions to big business. This is why they are seen as just another part of the ignorant Right these days. Folks would rather competent criminals to incompetent fools.
We should teach basic civics and philosophy so that kids can do their own comparative religious studies...but that would be giving kids a level playing field which is anathema to religious types.

The only surprise would be that anyone was surprised that Labor is just an echo chamber of the official conservative party in
Australia. We see it in a host of areas, as in the response to the latest deaths of our soldiers in Aghanistan: "stay the course" "finish the mission" blah blah. Labor and Liberal are, to borrow George Galloway's immortal phrase, but "two cheeks of the same arse". Neither will do anything to threaten the status quo.

The school chaplaincy issue is well-raised; and makes me wonder why our legal eagles who dived into our offshore processing laws have been so slow as to act on this issue.

As for anti-terrorism legislation; quite frankly I'm happy with it staying and being expanded to include any pro-theocracy groups in Australia, as quite frankly they ARE extremists and them resenting us for infringing on their rights to conspire against us (let alone conspire to commit a terrorist act) is arguably a good thing, as these things shouldn't be tolerated.

And I should point out that we are witnessing both differing approaches in Europe right now;
France (after decades of extremism) is combating extremism by strictly reigning in on and penalizing 'non-secular' activities and clothing (particularly wahabi), and religious fundamentalists are actually starting to leave the country.
Meanwhile, the UK is probably the leader in terms of accommodating the rights and views of religious extremists- and all they got for it is that the extremists are bolder and more aggressive for it.

It seems that the non-permissive approach is in fact the right one, if we actually DO want to combat extremism.

The only way we would avoid alienating people that weren't hostile to begin with (that being moderates), is to ensure we DO demonstrate that we are treating it as an extremist-vs-secular issue, not a Westerner-vs-Muslim issue; and ensure that any Christian or other religious groups with comparable problems to some banned Islamic group isn't left off the blacklist.
And not even for the sake of political correctness, but simply because it's something we should be doing anyway.