Tim Wright looks at the history, landscape and potential for gay marriage in Australia.
Rainbow umbrellas sprouted after the first drops of rain, and the several dozen brides and grooms took temporary shelter. Inclement weather would not deter them from tying the knot. In fact, in some cultures, a wet wedding is a sign of good times ahead. But what would the future hold for these committed couples, about to wed ‘illegally’ before 5000 witnesses at Melbourne’s same-sex marriage rally last August?
On stage, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young relayed some sobering news from the Labor Party’s triennial national conference in Sydney. Same-sex unions had been hotly debated that morning, she informed the crowd, but ‘Kevin Rudd has had his way’. The Marriage Act would remain unchanged — for now. This was hardly a surprising announcement, but the protesters made their dissatisfaction known.
Left-wing agitators in the ALP had failed to persuade a majority of delegates that the Howard-era ban on same-sex unions, enacted shortly before the 2004 federal election, should be repealed, with a gender-neutral definition of ‘marriage’ inserted in its place. Senior government minister Anthony Albanese, from Sydney’s progressive Grayndler electorate, only managed to broker a compromise deal with party conservatives to remove some of the more provocative words from the draft national platform.
On the conference floor, he invoked the Rolling Stones in a feeble attempt to placate the blistering LGBTI community:
‘As those great political philosophers Jagger and Richards said, sometimes you can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need.’
Which sums up nicely the party’s policy position: equality for gays and lesbians is an incremental process, and we’ve done enough for you for now.
But the issue would not disappear quite so easily. A Senate inquiry into marriage equality initiated by Senator Hanson-Young a month earlier ensured that it would remain in the spotlight until the end of the year. The inquiry received more than 28,000 public submissions, a record number for the upper house. About 11,000 came from people affected by the discrimination in the Marriage Act, including couples whose overseas same-sex marriages were denied legal recognition. But the majority of submissions were pro-forma letters from members of Australia’s various religious lobby groups.
And in the end it was their arguments — based on the idea of same-sex relationships as inferior to heterosexual ones, and as posing a threat to society — that proved more persuasive. The Labor-chaired Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee, in its report released in November, chose bigotry over equality. It stated its position in one line:
“The committee considers that the current definition (of marriage) is a clear and well-recognised legal term which should be preserved.”
Only two weeks earlier, the Victorian branch of the ALP, in a rare moment of clarity, had called on the federal government to legislate for marriage equality and to allow the Greens-initiated civil ceremonies law in the ACT to stand. Melbourne’s Age newspaper had also applied pressure by publishing a powerful editorial in favour of marriage equality. ‘All marriages should be equal, regardless of gender,’ the headline boldly declared. But Labor and Coalition senators would not be swayed.
Greens leader Bob Brown described the government’s position as a ‘Howardian hangover’. The same-sex marriage ban, he told reporters, is offensive, hurtful and destructive. This sentiment was reflected at the large protests across the country following the tabling of the Senate report. More than 5000 people crowded the streets of six cities. The committee’s rejection of marriage equality had only added fuel to the fire.
Whatever the short-term political setbacks encountered by the movement, campaigners generally agree that progress has been made in recent years. In 2004, when the Howard government hastily legislated to prevent overseas same-sex unions from being recognised in Australia, the public was hardly alarmed. An SBS-commissioned poll at the time revealed that just 38 per cent of people supported the idea of gay marriage. Even the LGBTI community was not particularly committed to it.
But much has changed since then. Same-sex relationships now have greater visibility in the public eye, and ‘rainbow’ families are far more common. For most people, there is no longer anything shocking about the sight of a gay wedding on the television screen: the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Spain, South Africa, Norway and Sweden, as well as several US states, has been well publicised here.
Resistance to same-sex marriage from within the LGBTI community has also dissipated. Formerly many gays and lesbians had seen same-sex weddings as anti-liberationist. Why should we seek to be a part of an oppressive institution, they asked — what are we trying to prove? But the prevailing view now is that the denial of same-sex marriage is a form of oppression itself. In fact, this is what tends to motivate the more progressive members of our movement — not some belief that marriage is of special importance.
As proof of this shift in opinion, last June a Galaxy poll showed that 60 per cent of Australians favour granting same-sex couples equal marriage rights, while only 36 per cent agree with the government’s stance. The results have caused more than a little consternation for Labor number-crunchers. Could the party end up losing votes, and seats, by maintaining its outdated position? In the end, this is most likely what it will come down to — an electoral equation, not principle.
Public support for same-sex marriage will only continue to grow in 2010. Marriage equality groups plan to exert maximum pressure on Labor in the lead-up to the federal election, and Senator Hanson-Young has vowed to continue the fight in the parliament. Slowly we are managing to bring the issue in from the political periphery, and it is only a matter of time before Labor will follow the Greens’ lead on this issue — but not without a struggle.
Tim Wright is a Greens member from Melbourne and a spokesperson for Equal Love, which campaigns nationally for same-sex marriage.