As most of Australia celebrates a decade of women priests, discrimination is as entrenched as ever in Sydney.
Ten years ago today, the Anglican Church of Australia decided to admit women priests. It had taken 20 years of agonisingly bitter debate, punctuated by court challenges and threats of schism, to reach the final vote.
The move passed by the barest of margins. The Anglican Church's fragile unity in this country was in real danger if the vote failed, with pressure to ordain women at boiling point in Melbourne, the diocese that had pioneered the women's ordination cause since the early 1970s.
Likewise, there was urgency in Canberra, Adelaide and other major centres. A breakaway ordination had already occurred in Perth seven months earlier. The main opposition was from the diocese of Sydney, which was nothing short of fundamentalist on the issue.
Ten years on, the differences over women's ministry are as deeply entrenched as ever. In 1992 some of us had been confident that Sydney would have changed its mind by the turn of the century. But nothing could be further from the truth.
In Melbourne plans are well in hand for a full-scale celebration of the 10th anniversary of the first ordination of women as priests. A service in St Paul's Cathedral on December 14 will be attended by most of the 68 women priests in Melbourne, with the preacher a woman bishop from New Zealand.
In Sydney, by ironic coincidence, the Archbishop has just presided over a vastly different event in St Andrew's Cathedral. He has commissioned a team of six women ministers - not priests - for what can only be described as a subservient, discriminatory role.
At least two of the six women commissioned belong to Equal but Different, an organisation originally established to counter the highly effective lobbying of the Movement for the Ordination of Women during the ordination debate. "Equal but Different" says it all; women, the organisation maintains, are equal to men in their status before God, but different in how they are allowed to function in the church and in the home.
In both those arenas, women must live in "loving submission" to men, who alone can be head of the family and head of the church. This, they claim, is what the Bible, and principally St Paul, teaches. The principal Bible text they use is from 1 Corinthians 14: "Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church." Another text, 1 Timothy 2: 12, says: "I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men."
These passages, and others, were used down the centuries to keep women in total submission in every facet of their lives. Nineteenth and early 20th century church leaders from all denominations used them to try to stop women taking a public stand against slavery or to claim the right to vote or to be an equal partner in marriage, let alone stand for parliament or have any leadership aspirations.
Today, most theologians outside Sydney would claim these passages originally addressed cultural problems in the first-century world where women were non-people.
Conveniently, however, Sydney Anglican theologians use them selectively. They claim it is just in the church and in the home where women must be submissive. They don't extend the same principle to authority in the state or in government, schools, or universities. How else could they accept Elizabeth II as Queen of Australia or a woman governor or university professor?
The newly commissioned women ministers will concentrate on ministering to women and children only. The doctrinaire Sydney Anglican position is that women should not preach to mixed congregations.
Only men may teach gospel truths to men. By the standards of worldwide Anglicanism, where thousands of women are now priests and a handful are also bishops, this is bizarre. In the Western world in the third millennium it is scarcely believable.
In practice, it is not quite as severe as it sounds in Sydney yet. There are 30 Sydney women ordained as deacons (the stage below priest), including three members of the new team. Under the generous dispensation of the former Archbishop of Sydney, Harry Goodhew, women deacons were authorised to preach without restriction.
The present Archbishop, Peter Jensen, has not yet removed that authority. But as they cannot be priests, they cannot be employed as vicars (and therefore "heads") of parishes.
It is significant, though, that there are just 30 women deacons in Sydney, 13 years after the church law permitting their ordination was passed by the Sydney synod. (The synod insisted on careful provisos to prevent the women demanding to be ordained priest at a later stage!) Women make up just 5 per cent of the Sydney clergy.
In Melbourne, by contrast, where there are two women archdeacons and 28 parishes have women vicars, they comprise one-sixth of the total number of clergy.
Even with the celebrations planned for Melbourne and other parts of Australia, women clergy still have a way to go. Nationally, they represent just one in 10 of all priests. Too many of them remain confined to honorary positions. Some have found it extremely difficult trying to work within the "boys' club" of the church institution. And efforts to have women bishops introduced in Australia have a long way to go.
But 10 years on, the Australian Anglican Church is, in most places at least, a far better place for women. There can be no doubt that the historic vote was the right vote.