MEDIA RELEASE

New contract clauses forcing NSW Police chaplains to name the officers who use their services and hand over private disclosures have triggered mass resignations, leaving the force with no full-time paid chaplains from 21 August.

Family First National Director Lyle Shelton has demanded the Minns Government immediately reverse new NSW Police chaplaincy contract conditions exposed by The Daily Telegraph, describing the changes as a direct breach of religious freedom that has already gutted the service and will strip vulnerable officers of one of their last confidential supports.

The Daily Telegraph revealed there will be no full-time paid NSW Police chaplains from 21 August, when the resignations of the final two paid chaplains take effect, with many of the service’s 80 volunteers also expected to quit over the new conditions.

“This is a straight-out breach of religious freedom,” Mr Shelton said. “Chaplaincy has always depended on the seal of pastoral confidentiality — that’s the whole point. The Minns Government has taken a 50-year-old support service that has married officers, buried their colleagues and sat with them through the worst nights of their careers, and told the chaplains running it they must now dob in the very people who trusted them.”

The new contracts require chaplains to disclose the full names of any officer who has used the service upon request, and to report any psychological distress, workplace conflict, trauma exposure, fitness-for-duty concern, health condition or financial hardship they identify to that officer’s manager.

Yet NSW Police’s own psychologists and Employee Assistance Program counsellors continue to offer officers confidential support — with the Force’s own wellbeing material describing EAP counselling as free and confidential and covering the same territory of trauma, distress and personal hardship chaplains are now compelled to report.

“Police officers can see a psychologist or an EAP counsellor in confidence about the exact same issues — trauma, distress, financial hardship — and that conversation stays private,” Mr Shelton said. “But if an officer instead turns to the chaplain they trust, that chaplain can now be forced to hand the same information straight to their manager. You cannot run a two-tier system where confidentiality applies to everyone except the pastoral carers officers have relied on for half a century.”

One serving officer told the Telegraph chaplains had “married us, buried us, christened our children and been there if we just wanted to talk” for 50 years, asking how that could continue if chaplains were ordered to give up anything officers told them in confidence. The Police Association of NSW says it has been swamped with members complaining about the collapse of the padre service.

“Every one of these resignations is a loss the Minns Government should be ashamed of,” Mr Shelton said. “Family First is calling on the Government to scrap this disclosure regime immediately, restore genuine pastoral confidentiality to the chaplaincy service, and properly fund and expand it so every officer who wants that support can get it — without having to choose between their faith and their privacy.”