The former Tasmanian anti-discrimination commissioner, Robin Banks, has branded the religious discrimination bill “an extraordinary foray in the culture wars” which would license offensive views about women, racial minorities and disabled people.

Banks has joined LGBT advocates and the Greens who have denounced the bill because it overrides federal and state laws by determining that religious speech in good faith cannot amount to unlawful discrimination.

While Labor has so far held fire on the substance of the bill – complaining of insufficient consultation – the Centre Alliance senator Rex Patrick has questioned whether it addresses a real problem.

Religious groups and Coalition conservatives mostly welcomed the laws, but some signalled a desire for further institutional exemptions to federal discrimination laws – the subject of a separate Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry – or a positive right to freedom of religion, which the attorney general, Christian Porter, has already ruled out.

The draft bill overrides all state laws to protect religious speech provided it is not malicious and does not “harass, vilify or incite hatred” and expressly overrides Tasmania’s laws, which prevent speech that offends, insults or humiliates people based on protected characteristics.

Anna Brown, the chief executive of Equality Australia, said the bill “presents a risk to LGBTIQ people, women and other vulnerable groups by overriding every other anti-discrimination law in the country”.

Banks said it was “entirely incoherent in a diverse, pluralistic society that religious speech is protected where other speech isn’t”.

Banks said Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali’s comparison of women to “uncovered meat”, religious views that disability was “the product of sin” or that a particular ethnic group was inferior would all gain “a special cloak of protection” under the proposed law. Read more via the Guardian