Page 3348 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 12 October 1993
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will have this legislation in its presentation form by November - certainly before the end of this year. It would be my intention, Madam Speaker, to prepare a summary document of the views we got from the community, so that members have the advantage of knowing what that consultative process was about.
Mr Humphries's opening remark, that he was surprised at the lack of community debate on this draft Bill, is something that I must say I echo. I had some concerns - I am frank enough to say that I had some real concerns - that this may go off the rails and be trivialised into a debate about gay relationships and gay marriages; that we were destroying the moral fibre of society by endorsing such things. We can all imagine the rhetoric. I was very pleased that the Canberra community is mature enough not to go down that path. Perhaps we are fortunate that we do not have a tabloid afternoon newspaper or a commercial television current affairs show of the ilk that tends to run at about 7 o'clock in Sydney and Melbourne. The media here certainly reported strongly that we were having this legislation and that it would cover homosexual relationships, but there the matter ended. So the community knows that, but people have not got overly agitated.
I think Mr Humphries expressed a good conservative position on this when he said, "It is not for us to make a moral judgment about the type of relationship; everyone is entitled to basic fairness and equity". That is a position from the Opposition that the Government certainly appreciates. Some cheap political points could have been scored over this, which would have damaged the community generally, and it is pleasing that that is not being done.
There are some people in real need. The Government is probably anticipating that concern. These proposals have floundered in some States where, by and large, de facto legislation covers only the man and the woman living together as man and wife, as the old common law would say, for a period of more than two years. The reason proposals to extend that have floundered has been that people have got obsessed with homosexual relationships. What we sought to do here is take the sex right out of it and not worry about the sexual nature of the relationship but focus on a relationship where people are caring for one another and making financial commitments to one another.
I note Mr Humphries's comments about whether the definition is careful enough. There have been some views from the Law Society and others on that and we will address all of that when we get the final form. The idea of focusing not on a sexual relationship but on a caring relationship enables us to pick up not only the standard de facto, in the narrowly defined sense, but also homosexual relationships and, very importantly, those non-sexual relationships where a person is providing a lot of care for another. The types of examples that the Chief Minister and Ms Ellis referred to in their speeches are examples that, I am sure, are familiar to all of us.
I am sure that all of us would have come across people in our constituency work where exactly that sort of thing has happened. A person has been caring for their elderly father or mother or, conversely, the father or mother has built a granny flat in the backyard. For whatever reason, there has been a big spat and the relationship has fallen down. The sibling was caring for their parent, forsaking their career, forsaking perhaps their own personal relationships, and the assumption probably was that they would get the house at the end of the day.
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