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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 10 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2983 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

But discrimination against queers continues to be an everyday occurrence. People endure social exclusion, lose job opportunities and suffer rejection by their parents, children, families and religious institutions. People experience isolation, suffer verbal abuse and endure beatings and physical attacks. As a result, they disproportionately suffer emotional trauma, homelessness, drug abuse and suicide.

These are the effects of discrimination, and this is why it is imperative that we as legislators take seriously and urgently the need to ensure that this Assembly and this government take action to prevent discrimination in any form against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders or intersex members of our community.

There should be no second-class citizens in Canberra, and nobody should suffer the indignity of having fewer rights, either legally or socially. Yet here in the ACT we have legislation that still enshrines discrimination against queer Canberrans.

I hope that we, unlike our federal counterparts, will be prepared to use our positions here to further equality in the ACT. It has been a very poor year for queer people at a federal level. The current federal government has attempted to legislate to allow states to discriminate against lesbian women by preventing them from accessing IVF technologies. And we have seen absolutely appalling homophobic attacks by a federal senator against a High Court judge. I would certainly expect the attitude of this Assembly to be very different.

Part of the reason I have called on the government to complete this work is that it is simply beyond the resources of other members of this Assembly to do so. The sheer number and the complexity of the laws involved are huge. On last count, I heard there were something like 70 laws in the ACT that had in them inherent discrimination against Canberra's queer community. We have listed in this place numerous instances previously, but I would like now to touch on a few specific examples.

Our laws prevent same-sex partners from adopting children, even when a lesbian couple has had a child by artificial means. This effectively enshrines in law the concept that two people of the same gender are not capable of raising a child, which I have seen many times to be false. I believe that it is not your gender that makes you a good parent, but it is your capacity to love, cherish, commit and provide a stimulating environment for your child.

Currently, ACT legislation prevents same-sex partners from accessing compensation if their partner dies. But compensation is available for heterosexual de facto couples as well as for their children. In the same vein, there are numerous complications with intestate same-sex partners, especially if one partner was previously married. Same-sex partners may be unable to access each other's medical records in an emergency, and they have no right to participate in decisions about withdrawal of treatment or organ transplantation if their partner is fatally injured.

One of my salient problems is the varying definitions of spouse and de facto spouse. There are at least seven different definitions of these concepts in ACT law that I have been able to find. Some legislation uses them without any definition at all. Many of these laws specifically exclude same-sex couples, while in others it is uncertain whether or not they are included.

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