2016-02-12
Tammy Franks
Filibusters and unnecessary amendments are seemingly the tools of the trade for those MPs who cannot transparently put forward their true intent to entrench current discriminations.
My tears have been tears of anger, as time and again my simple bill to give a small group of parents and their children legal recognition was delayed, derailed and stymied.
Those tears were also tears of frustration and compassion for the families, who watched powerlessly as they were maligned.
Yesterday, however, they were tears of joy, as we finally won. And it was not by a whisker, but by a massive 29 votes to 12 in the Lower House.
The Premier finally gave the Bill the Government debating time it needed to have the false wringing of hands and deceptive speeches of concern for slippery slopes be aired, then ignored.
So they were tears of joy yesterday for a young man who hopes this will become law before he turns 18 this year. And more tears of joy again this morning for a primary school girl who skipped just a little quicker than usual to school to announce proudly to her classmates that both her mums would now be legally recognised on her birth certificate, as is the case for her younger sibling.
They were also tears of joy for Sally and Elise, who, as a result of the passage of the Family Relationships (Parentage Presumptions) Bill, will soon both be on the birth certificate as parents to their much-wanted son Tadhg, conceived through artificial insemination and born on Mother's Day 2013.
Tadhg, in the Speaker's Chair of the SA Parliament on Wednesday night.
Tadhg (pronounced Tige) is a Gaelic word that means poet or philosopher and I distinctly remember initially thinking that pronouncing the infant's name was going to be the hardest part of passing Tadhg's law!
The law removes an archaic rule that only exists in South Australia that to be recognised on a child's birth certificate a same sex couple (in this case both females) who had deliberately and willingly conceived a child together are also required to have lived together for at least three of the prior four years before that child was conceived. It's a glitch in state law that came about well before I was in the State Parliament as a compromise deal required to pass the Domestic Partnerships Act in our state.
Tadhg is now 22 months old and still has no birth certificate due to that unfair glitch. This should have been fixed with the stroke of a pen by the Labor Government that purported to be supportive of rainbow families, but it took a community campaign, then 10 months of parliamentary manoeuvring to get the glitch fixed.
Families like Tadhg's were encouraged by the bureaucracy and the State Government to seek expensive legal remedies to get around the system. Tadhg's mums could have done that, but instead they fought the law and they won – and so did other families around my state of South Australia.
Certainly when Elise and Sally wrote to the SA Labor Attorney-General, John Rau, he offered cold comfort and, despite thousands of voters writing to petition him, he remained opposed to change until the bitter end of the parliamentary debate on Tadhg's law on Wednesday night. He was in the 12 that numbered the failed opposition to the reform and we were on the mighty side of progress – a progress that may be slowed by filibusters and subverted by plebiscites, but ultimately cannot be stopped.
Tammy Franks is a Greens member of the Legislative Council in South Australia.