Howard is now moving to fill this vacuum. While these moves have been at glacial speed, they do represent the Coalition beginning yet another takeover of a policy base and constituency Labor had long regarded as its own.
The problem for the Coalition is that it contains several fundamentalist Christian MP’s, while Labor is top heavy with hard-line Catholics. The over representation of conservative churchgoers and their theocratic influence in both major parties is out of all proportion to the general community, and this has steered both major parties in the direction of wooing the “Christian” vote.
Now, as the major parties stumble to play catch-up with the general community on the question of gay equality, they are struggling to manage the expectations of ordinary Australians and the insatiable demands of the Religious Right.
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On the one hand both Howard and Beazley want to be perceived as fair and tolerant, and on the other they want to corral the votes of right wing Christians in marginal seats. In truth, they cannot do both.
To date Beazley has been unacceptably silent on civil unions. While a growing chorus of Liberals defy their Prime Minister and call for them as a human right, the Opposition Leader is playing small target politics once gain, having learnt nothing from Tampa and children overboard.
It’s time for Beazley to use the C-word in a sentence: “Labor supports civil unions.”
The reasons for this should be obvious. First, there is the national mood for reform and equality. Australians know that several countries including Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and some US states allow full marriage rights for same-sex couples. They are not repulsed by this.
Independent polling of 1,200 people commissioned by SBS in May 2004, showed that 38 per cent of Australians support gay marriage (a figure that is growing), and that less than half of Australians (44 per cent), oppose it. It is not considered the odious reform that reactionary forces would have us believe.
But while there is marginal support in Australia for banning gay marriage, there is overwhelming support for civil unions.
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Labor governments in familiar places, such as France, New Zealand and Britain offer civil unions to same-sex couples in the absence of marriage. Here in Australia, Tasmania already has partnership registration for same-sex couples and the ACT will be implementing civil unions in March 2006, which will be accessible to all Australians.
This means that from April this year hundreds of same-sex couples will flock to Canberra from around Australia for a civil union and to legally register their relationship, thanks to that Territory’s Labor government. Beazley cannot oppose this, but by supporting it he can then hardly mount an argument as to why he wouldn’t implement such reform nationally if he were prime minister.
The second reason Beazley should forsake the fundamentalists, is that Labor surely must have learnt its lesson about playing footsie with the far Right?
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