Page 3305 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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horrible thing to be doing, Mr Assistant Speaker. It inserts a new section 26A which provides a power to make a regulation to provide that a relationship under a law in another jurisdiction is a civil union in territory law.
To ensure that relationships that are recognised under this provision are reasonably similar to civil unions, a limit on the regulation-making power is applied. A regulation cannot be made to recognise a relationship as a civil union unless it is between two people; entered into consensually; not entered into by people who are in what is considered under the civil unions act to be a prohibited relationship; or not entered into by people who can either marry each other under the commonwealth Marriage Act or be recognised as being married under the commonwealth Marriage Act. Sounds like pretty radical stuff to me.
Essentially, this is a mechanism that allows for the extension of the civil unions regime to people who have entered into relationships similar to civil unions in other jurisdictions. The government frequently receives requests from same-sex couples in our community who have entered into a civil union or similar scheme in another jurisdiction, whether that is overseas or in another state of Australia. They ask that their civil union or equivalent be recognised as a civil union or equivalent here in the ACT. These provisions provide for that legal recognition to occur, and for those couples to be granted the same rights as the rights that would accrue to a couple who had entered into a civil union under ACT law. What is it about that that the Liberals find so offensive? I would be interested to hear their arguments.
Amendment 2 provides a simplified list of relationships under corresponding laws that will be recognised as civil partnerships for territory law. Under the existing provisions, the legislation uses two different provisions to set out first what corresponding law a relationship from another jurisdiction is made under, and second what the relationship being recognised is called. A number of these provisions are now redundant, as the law is already described in other ways. On this basis, the amendments remove the provisions setting out all the statutes that would be considered corresponding laws.
The amendment introduces two new relationships that will be recognised through the regulation for civil partnerships for territory law. Civil unions under the New Zealand Civil Union Act and registered relationships under the Queensland Relationships Act are relationships that are comparable to the territory’s civil partnerships. This amendment includes these relationships in the regulation of relationships that will be recognised under territory law. The government will continue to consider recognition of other relationships in the regulation as they are requested by the ACT community.
Finally, amendment 3 introduces a limit on the power to make regulations to recognise relationships under corresponding laws from other jurisdictions as civil partnerships. I have outlined the constraints on that regulation-making power already.
I commend these amendments to the Assembly.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (11.26): The Greens will be supporting these amendments. They make certain the minister has the power to issue regulations to list those jurisdictions’ partnerships that will be recognised in the ACT. In his remarks,
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