Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I support the Marriage Amendment (Marriage Equality) Bill 2015. Maya Angelou wrote:

Love recognises no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.

We are full of hope when we say 'I want to walk through life by your side'; when we say 'I want to share the good times and the bad it with you'; when we say, 'I want to grow old with you.' Neither hope nor love are so common or so cheap that we should deny their legitimacy because of gender. As a legislator, I am proud of the fact that the previous parliament changed 85 laws to remove discrimination against LGBTI Australians and same sex couples. That is Labor's legacy. That is behind us. What is before us is a final challenge—to remove this last great inequality from same sex couples.

How can it be fair to deny one group in our community, citizens of Australia, the legal protections and responsibilities that marriage confers? In a few years time the notion that two men who love each other or two women who love each other could be barred from the social and legal status that marriage confers will seem as anachronistic as laws which prevented Aboriginal Australians marrying whom they chose.

No-one can imagine today that Jack Akbar and Lallie Matbar had to fight for years in the 1920s to be allowed to marry because Lallie was Aboriginal and Jack was not. Indeed, Lallie was jailed after she and Jack eloped. Their four children never knew the barriers that their parents had to overcome to marry until after their deaths.

The state being able to deny marriage on racial grounds is obscene to us today; and so it will be in the future for same-sex marriage. This is not a question of tolerance; it is a question of legal equality. This bill makes it clear that no church will be forced to marry any couple but our government and our legal institutions should not discriminate.

In the lead-up to the Irish vote, author Sebastian Barry wrote:

I don't see it as a matter of tolerance, so much as apology. Apology for all the hatred, violence, suspicion, patronisation, ignorance, murder, maiming, hunting, intimidation, terrorising, shaming, diminishment, discrimination, destruction, and yes, intolerance, visited upon a section of humanity for God knows how many hundreds of years, if not millennia.

Sebastian Barry's gay son was just shy of 18 and too young to vote. Barry wrote:

By voting Yes I will be engaging in the simple task of honouring the majesty, radiance and promise of his human soul.

I hope that by making this change we will make it clear to every young man or woman shamed or shy about their sexuality, struggling alone to come to terms with being different from their brothers or sisters or their best friends that it is just fine. It will be fine. We accept you how you are.

We will be saying to the same sex couples who have loved each other tenderly for years or even decades, who have supported each other financially and emotionally, who have nursed one another in sickness and who have woven their families together: 'We see you.' And we will be saying to the many, many kids who have two mums or two dads or two of each: 'We know you are proud of your family, and you have every right to be.' It is time—it is well past time—that this parliament says to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex Australians: we recognise that you love, and that is more important than who you love.

So, to paraphrase William Shakespeare: let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.

I commend the bill to the House.

See this speech in context