Page 2763 - Week 09 - Thursday, 8 August 2013
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
However, marriage equality is not just a federal issue. We can make a difference right here in the Legislative Assembly, a very important difference, to the lives of real Canberrans who are every day facing real discrimination. We can also make a significant difference to the federal debate. This is how things change. It starts with leaders, often leaders in states and territories.
Fortunately, it has also become clear that, in a legal and constitutional sense, the ACT is empowered to make laws for marriage equality and, in doing so, we are not intruding into the federal jurisdiction. The government has legal advice—and, indeed, Mr Corbell has made this advice public—to support this. The advice was from Stephen Gageler QC, who is, of course, now Justice Gageler of the High Court of Australia.
As I mentioned, the Greens have a long and proud history of standing up for gay and lesbian Australians and advancing the debate on marriage equality. It has been a long and persistent fight. Way back in 1996, 17 years ago, Senator Bob Brown became the first openly gay member of the parliament of Australia.
In the following year, 1997, Christine Milne, as leader of the Tasmanian Greens in minority government, achieved gay law reform—and that was a Liberal minority government, I might add—through her private member’s bill to decriminalise homosexuality. It is hard to believe but it is true that Tasmania criminalised homosexuality until 1997. Then it went from having the worst laws in the commonwealth in relation to the severity of punishment for and discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender people to having the best laws.
In the federal parliament the Greens senators have fought tirelessly for marriage equality throughout their entire time there, not just through Senator Brown. I recall in 2007 and 2008 Senator Kerry Nettle introduced legislation to amend the definition of “marriage” to include same-sex couples. Senator Sarah Hanson-Young continued this in 2009, introducing the Marriage Equality (Amendment) Bill as her very first bill in the parliament. A later version of her bill went to a Senate inquiry, and the amount of submissions received set a record in parliamentary history. It received 79,200 submissions.
That committee strongly supported that the bill should be amended and passed into law. Senator Hanson-Young amended that bill and reintroduced it this year. It now sits there tabled, ready to be passed into law whenever the federal parliament will support it. I should note, as well, that Senator Hanson-Young has also introduced legislation that would recognise foreign marriages for same-sex couples in Australia. Currently an Australian same-sex couple married overseas in one of the many countries that recognise same-sex marriage cannot have that marriage recognised in Australia. Essentially, they must leave their marriage at the customs gate.
This bill was debated in the Senate in June. It failed but, notably, a Liberal senator, Senator Sue Boyce, crossed the floor to vote in favour of the bill. I think that was a very noble move for Senator Boyce to follow her conscience on that issue.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video