Defining relationships

Tasmania’s relationship laws are diminished by the Rudd Government because they cannot easily be removed, but no such impediment exists in the ACT. To appease the hostility of some Christian churches to same-sex relationships, the Federal Government has forced its constitutionally-subordinate ACT equivalent to remove the ceremonial component of its law. Instead, the ACT will allow ceremonies by administrative arrangement.

While we applaud the ACT Government for wresting this concession, the fact remains that Bronze Age prejudices have triumphed over the dual principles of sexual equality and ACT self governance.

To soften the blow of stymieing the ACT, the Federal Government has run a propaganda campaign not unlike its campaign to distort Tasmania’s laws.

But where the Federal Government’s fictional Tasmanian registry has been reduced to simply issuing stat decs to defacto partners, its fictional ACT civil partnership scheme has been spun the other way into a dire threat to the heterosexual definition of marriage.

Last week the Prime Minister even wrongly declared it would “effectively amend the Marriage Act”.

In reality, none of the nations with ceremonial civil union schemes - including the UK or New Zealand - have seen the traditional legal or social definition of marriage altered.

What they have seen is greater acceptance and affirmation of the love between two men or two women, which, of course, is just what the religious right doesn’t want and has somehow found a way to convince the Australian Government to stop.

Once we strip away the Federal Government’s myth-making about state and territory relationship laws what we are left with is this:

The Tasmanian and former ACT schemes have much more in common than the Rudd Government says, making it indefensible to uphold one while damning the other.

The Tasmanian scheme, the soon-to-be-established Victorian registry based on it, and whatever scheme the ACT finally adopts, are all civil union schemes and deserve full and equal recognition in federal law when the Rudd Government moves later this year to recognise same-sex defacto couples.

A third type of relationship law is emerging in Australia that is neither marriage, nor defacto marriage, but something which responds to the diverse needs of contemporary Australia.

The Federal Government can misrepresent and thwart this movement as much as it likes, but it will continue to grow as long as formerly unrecognised relationships demand rights and respect.