40 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com October, 2017A
ustralia is going to
have same sex marriage soon-
er or later.
That’s not a bold activist
statement either: it’s simply a
fact. And sure, it’s about love
and about respect and about
human rights and about re-
fusing to cater to bigotry, but it’s also cold
economic sense.
Too many other countries – including
the ones from which we have the highest
level of immigration and skilled labour, as
well as reciprocal v isa arrangements – rec-
ognise same sex marriage, and thus if we
want to keep getting top level program-
mers, scientists and CEOs of national air-
lines we’re going to need to recognise their
marriages. No-one wants to move their en-
tire life and family to a new country to be
told their spouse is now legally considered
their housemate.
And the United Nations is currently pe-
titioning Australia over recognition of mar-
riages performed overseas, since couples
who wed in other countries (where one is
American and the other Australian, for ex-
ample) can’t currently divorce because Aus-
tralia refuses to recognise their marriage
in order to end it, and this is a violation of
human rights.
And that’s leaving aside the fact that
there’s literally no argument against ex-
tending marriage rights to all citizens,
which is why those groups vehement-
ly fighting against change aren’t arguing
about it: they’re coming up with entirely
different excuses.
It’s political correctness, as former PM
Tony Abbott has explained. It’s an assault
on free speech! It’s a slippery slope to legal
pedophilia and bestiality! It’ll lead to peo-ple marrying their dads! Their sisters! The
Harbour Bridge!
Oddly, none of these horrifyingly silly
outcomes have occurred in the UK, the US,
Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Belgium,
Argentina, South Africa, Iceland, France,
Uruguay, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Fin-
land, Brazil, Luxembourg, or Colombia –
or even the Netherlands, which has recog-
nised marriage equality for 16 years with
no obvious negative consequences. Germa-
ny, Malta and Taiwan are presumably at the
same risk of bridge-marriage and parent-
wedding and yet they’re presently set to rat-
ify their own legislation.
Yet Australia is still pretending that this
is a hot button moral issue rather than a
fairly dull bureaucratic change. So how did
it all come to this? Let’s take a quick stroll
down idiocy lane.
This festival of dumbarsery began in
2004 when the government of John How-
ard decided to change the wording of the
1961 Marriage Act because it didn’t speci-
fy that the people being married could not
be of the same gender. At the time the UK
were legalising same-sex unions, and then-
Attorney General Philip Ruddock wanted
to get the jump on it here before Austra-
lia’s gay folks started getting uppity ideas
about their own civil rights. Thus a line
was added to make marriage “the union
of a man and a woman to the exclusion of
all others, voluntarily entered into for life”.
And thus was an entirely avoidable political
problem created.
In 2010 the Labor government of Julia
Gillard could have passed marriage equal-
ity, when Greens senator Sarah Hanson-
Young introduced a bill amending the Mar-
riage Act. However, it was voted down. The
Gillard government at least acknowledgedthat the parliament was the place to set-
tle the issue – a point made crystal clear in
2012 when the ACT briefly ratified same-
sex marriage only to have the High Court
overturn the legislation on the grounds that
defining marriage was the exclusive pre-
serve of the federal parliament.
But the national hunger to make a small
and easy change to the Marriage Act into
an ideological nightmare didn’t really hit
high gear until 2013 when the Coalition
government of Tony Abbott won power.
During the election campaign Abbott had
insisted that same sex marriage was a mat-
ter for the party room to discuss. And then
his first 18 months were spent ensuring that
the party room didn’t have that discussion.
During that period three private mem-
bers bills were prepared – one by Labor,
one by the Greens, and one by Liberal Dem-
ocrat senator David Leyonhjelm – all of
which were angrily rejected by Abbott on
the grounds that, as he put it at the time,
“if our parliament was to make a big deci-
sion on a matter such as this, it ought to be
owned by the parliament and not one par-
ticular party”.
And so his own backbench took him at
his word. Legislation was co-sponsored by
Queensland Liberal-National MP Warren
Entsch and Labor’s Terri Butler, and sec-
onded by Liberal Teresa Gambaro, Labor’s
Laurie Ferguson, Greens MP Adam Bandt
and independent MPs Cathy McGowan
and Andrew Wilkie.
And then suddenly it wasn’t all about this
decision being owned by the parliament
and not one particular party: it was about
having the decision not made by the par-
liament at all. Suddenly we needed to have
a plebiscite instead: a non-binding, non-
compulsory national vote.MARRIAGE EQUALITY:
A HISTORY OF AVOIDANCE
How did we end up determining civil rights
via a voluntary survey, again?
By Andrew P. Street