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Nine years after meeting my boyfriend, we sat on our couch this past week, wished each other a happy anniversary and listened as federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland informed us that Australians in same-sex relationships had been discriminated against “for too long”, and he pledged to fix this situation.
But discrimination wasn’t truly ending in this country, so we weren’t rejoicing. Instead we looked as disinterested as our sleepy Jack Russell-Maltese mutt Oscar, who rolled into a ball and went to sleep. Could it be that our other gay couple friends have married in Canada, or gotten ‘civilised’ in the UK, all with lovely ceremonies?
Don’t get me wrong. Plaudits of course go to the Rudd Government for making good on its election promise this past week: the Howard Government had ignored a Human Rights Commission report that found 58 pieces of federal legislation discriminated against same-sex couples, but Labor dug deep and found 42 more laws in need of, ahem, straightening out.
But Federal Labor won’t visit same-sex marriage any time soon. Yet to ignore the issue all together would leave Australia a western human rights loner.
And what would that do to Kevin Rudd’s stated pledge to progressive values of ‘equity, community and sustainability’? This week, we see the limits of those progressive values when the Federal Government quashed the ACT Government’s attempt to include in the territory’s same-sex civil unions Bill a ceremony as a formal trigger to legally establish a relationship’s existence. The message: keep your ceremony informal and out of the public eye, gay people.
My partner is a New Zealand national, so we’ll probably have to go to that country to have a civil union. Having left Melbourne for Sydney, it seems we as a couple lucked out on the same-sex relationships register about to be established in Victoria. In NSW, the sleepy Iemma Government shows no signs of following the Brumby Government’s lead in recognising gay and lesbian couples. It’s just a pity the Victorian scheme doesn’t allow you to attach an official ceremony to signing your names in unison in a registry.
Perhaps we’ll just wait. It makes little sense as working professionals who move between states to sign on for state-based registries that are inconsistent and not nationally recognised. Besides, same-sex marriage – or at least a separate but equal federal system named ‘civil unions’ or ‘civil partnerships’, so as not to scare the horses of the Christian Right – is inevitable in Australia.
Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa and Spain all have same-sex marriage. The United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, Sweden and nine other countries all have nation-wide civil unions or registered partnerships. In the first year of operation in the UK, more than 18,000 civil partnerships were registered.
On the ABC’s 7.30 Report last week, host Kerry O’Brien repeatedly asked Robert McClelland what logic there was in the discrimination of continuing to deny marriage to same-sex couples. McClelland, who had spent the day telling everyone that fixing 100 laws was about “substance” and that same-sex marriage was mere “form”, kept saying that that quarantining marriage to heterosexual couples was “ALP policy”. Logical indeed.
Then McClelland offered the legalese that same-sex marriage would “create a legal relationship” that “mimics marriage”, as though all gays want to do is ape straights.
The legal right to marry and have a ceremony is not about form, or pretending to be straight. Rather, all we want is the very human potential to fulfil our happiness, and that includes active legal recognition.
Steve Dow is a Sydney-based journalist.
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