Page 693 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 March 2014
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MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Minister for Workplace Safety and Industrial Relations and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (6.07), in reply: The French philosopher Simone Weil said, “Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.”
It is very easy to talk about equality, but it is very difficult often to achieve it. Invariably, achieving equality means grappling with complex issues and varying views about what it might actually look like. In this case, those issues go to the heart of identity, of recognition, of what it means for an individual to be truly included and valued as an equal member of society.
In March 2011 I asked the ACT Law Reform Advisory Council to inquire into and report on the steps necessary to provide for legal recognition of sex and gender diverse people in the ACT. I did so because I considered it to be unfinished business on the part of this government.
We had since 2001 embarked on a comprehensive law reform program that was designed to achieve equality for people in same-sex relationships, same-sex couples, and all of the legal factors that existed then around those people and how they were treated without equality in our community.
But we had not yet fully addressed and completed that law reform program until we had also dealt with the inequities that existed for sex and gender diverse persons. Of course, one of the ways that we recognise the legal status of individuals in our society is through the registration of key events and social institutions such as births, deaths and, of course, marriages.
In doing so, we define some of the basic societal categories that we use to classify individuals and accord them different forms of legal recognition and rights. The Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act provides the legal framework for such registration. So I particularly asked the Law Reform Advisory Council to consider existing provisions of that act. I also asked them to consider implications for documentation under territory and commonwealth law and mutual recognition.
In making this referral, I was aware of the experiences of sex and gender diverse people who had been confronted by discriminatory and often humiliating responses for what were even the most basic of social transactions, such as applying for documents, whether a licence, a bank account or credit card.
We must also acknowledge the many changes being made both nationally and internationally to achieve greater recognition for sex and gender diverse people. In April last year the High Court handed down its landmark decision in AB v Western Australia in which the court held that the question of whether a person is identified as male or female by reference to the person’s physical characteristics is intended by the Western Australian act to be largely one of social recognition. Such recognition does not require knowledge of a person’s remnant sexual organs.
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