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Middle ages versus middle of the road on same sex unions

By Brian Greig - posted Tuesday, 17 January 2006


The Howard Government has done more to legally recognise same-sex relationships in the past 13 months, than previous Labor governments did in 13 years. Under Howard same-sex couples have limited rights to superannuation death benefits, are recognised in passport application processes and beneficial definitions in anti-terror laws, while those in the military now have equal rights to relocation and accommodation expenses and access to defence force home loan grants.

None of this was forthcoming under Hawke or Keating despite lobbying on some of these issues. Labor moved some modest reforms during its reign of government but it was timid. The ALP lifted the ban on gay and lesbian people serving in the military, but refused to extend partnership benefits to defence force personnel in same-sex relationships. It would take another 13 years and a Coalition Government to move on that.

Labor also created the “interdependency” category in immigration processes to facilitate the recognition of same-sex relationships for residency, however, this category remains problematic and discriminatory.

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And the ALP introduced federal legislation aimed at overriding Tasmania’s anti-sodomy laws on the recommendation of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, while at the same time ignoring the UNHRC’s parallel recommendation to introduce national anti-discrimination laws for all gay and lesbian people.

As a consequence, Australia remains one of the few western countries with no national anti-discrimination laws and no comprehensive partnership rights for same-sex couples. In this regard, we have fallen further behind many Eastern European and Latin America countries.

This could largely be remedied by allowing same-sex marriages, but in 2004 the Howard Government passed legislation to ban gay and lesbian people from marriage and to prevent Australian authorities from recognising gay marriages legally conducted overseas. Labor supported this.

Interestingly, in recent times the high profile civil union between Elton John and his partner David Furnish in Britain has exposed dissent in Liberal ranks prompting five of its MPs to call for civil unions in Australia. This means more than twice the number of Coalition MP’s have called for civil unions than have the number of Labor MP’s.

The prime minister however, is digging in his heels. To corral the votes of the Religious Right he’s opposed to gay marriage and civil unions. When pressed, he said: “I would be opposed to a recognition of civil unions, although I am strongly in favour ... of removing any property and other discrimination that exists against people who have same-sex relationships."

When Opposition Leader Kim Beazley was asked what he thought of civil unions, he didn’t answer the question. Through a spokesperson he told reporters he was opposed to gay marriage. He has been in hiding on the topic of civil unions ever since. No journalist has yet pursued him on this.

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So, does this mean the Coalition is now more tolerant, compassionate and increasingly non-discriminatory as it wants us to believe?

Far from it. What we are witnessing is a situation where community attitudes have advanced much further and much faster than either of the major parties will acknowledge, thereby creating a fault line between old prejudice and new politics.

Many Liberals are slowly and pragmatically reading the mood of the nation and recognise the time has come to move forward.  Labor’s response has been paralysis, unsure of what to say or how to react. Labor is struggling with its immense policy gap between the substantial gay and lesbian law reforms enacted by State Labor Governments and the hollowness of it’s much more conservative federal wing.

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.

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.

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?

In August 2004, the Religious Right in its biggest show of strength yet, held an anti-gay Marriage Forum in Parliament House, Canberra, attended by about 2,000 people.

Keynote speakers variously described gays as “shameful, vile, moral terrorists,” while others claimed that “children raised by homosexual parents … suffered from shame and guilt”, and that same-sex relationships were “unnatural”, “harmful to children”, “highly promiscuous”, “inherently unstable” and much worse.

Despite this, Labor shadow attorney Nicola Roxon addressed the crowd and described the forum as, “Fantastic!”

Spooked by the numbers and fervour of the Religious Right, she suddenly agreed to shut down a current senate inquiry into the gay marriage ban Bill, and instead rush it through parliament in the naïve expectation this would win Labor “Christian” votes in an election year. It didn’t, and in the process Labor alienated many gay voters and their families.

Seemingly, not having learnt from this, Beazley spoke to the Religious Right’s peak body the Australian Christian Lobby www.acl.org.au in November. In his talk he downplayed same-sex law reform by trying to hide it from the audience with an oblique sentence buried in a wide ranging speech (see last sentence on page seven, pdf file 199KB). They weren’t fooled. Beazley won little support from the Christian Right and once again offended and alienated lesbian and gay people by giving credence to an organisation dedicated to an anti-homosexual agenda.

Labor must wake up to the fact that it cannot win the votes of the Religious Right without losing middle Australia and betraying core constituencies. But it doesn’t need to.

Howard is out of touch with his opposition to civil unions. When Liberal MPs from places like Queensland and Western Australia are calling for the recognition of gay relationships in defiance of their leader you know there’s been a seismic shift in the community.

Beazley's political geiger counter must surely detect this. He should now seize the middle ground, leaving John Howard behind in the Middle Ages.

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About the Author

Brian Greig is a former Democrats’ Senator (1999-2005), and long time gay rights campaigner. Today he works in public relations, Perth.

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