Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support of the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Bill 2017, which has such significant meaning for our country, for the many LGBTIQ Australians, for their friends and family and for everyone in our community, because this week we vote to make our country a more equal place.

Being a member of parliament is a strange role in many ways. I am acutely aware that some of what we do in this chamber is irrelevant and remote to the lives of the people we represent, such as the argy-bargy that goes on in question time and the foolish debates that don't change a thing for anyone. I don't mind admitting I find that side of politics intensely frustrating. But other days, being a member of parliament couldn't mean any more, and today is one of those days. Today, we make a change that will affect people in a real way. Today, we help define our country in the way Australians have told us and shown us they want it to be defined.

This victory does not belong to me. I have been in parliament for four years. Prior to that, strong activists, people like Senator Penny Wong and others, have done decades of hard yards on this question. I feel like I got to help out in the advocacy for this, which was a really positive experience, where there was a lot of goodwill in the community, but I am well aware that this has been an incredibly long fight, and I know that, at times, it has been gut wrenching, a slog and a battle in the trenches.

I want to pay tribute to some of the groups I think have played a very important role in this. One of those groups is Rainbow Labor. This is a group of extraordinarily committed activists who have joined our party, and they stay in our party because they know that getting this political party on to the government benches is the only way to move this country forward on the issues that they are passionate about. For every one of those Rainbow Labor people who has spent so many years of their lives fighting for issues just like this one, this progress belongs to you, and I am so grateful for your efforts.

I want to say a few words about young people. They can be a maligned group in our country, ever being accused of not caring enough about things that really matter. In their engagement in this discussion, they showed us that that is wrong. I want to salute the young people of this country for standing up and making their voices heard. We know the plebiscite process that was set up was always going to favour older people to participate at higher rates. But I want to point out one thing that really got me on the day that the result was announced. The highest participation of any group of Australians under the age of 50 was 18- to 19-year-old women, 82 per cent of whom voted. Not only was it the first time that most of those young women had voted; it was the first time many of them had ever posted a letter. This makes my heart sing for the future. It makes me believe we are in safe hands. I want those young women to know that I believe passionately in them and their ability to make our country better and stronger.

In the end, it was young people who got us over the line. I think we all knew that was going to be the case. It tells us one of the fundamental truths of social change, and that is that we need young people to speak up loud if we want society to change for the better. In my experience of life and getting older, I see that we're very susceptible as humans to believing that the environment we are in at a particular point in time can't possibly change. But young people see things differently. They see how things can be different. Young people today are doing something that no generation has ever been able to do before. They are standing up in schools—even in primary schools—universities and workplaces and saying for the first time that LGBTIQ people actually deserve full equality in this country. They are working to achieve it and they are succeeding. That is something the generations who went before me have not been able to do and my generation hasn't been able to do. But those young people are doing it for us. I'm so proud of, and grateful for, their efforts.

I want to make a few comments on the plebiscite. It wasn't a good idea. It wasn't a unifying moment. The only people I have heard say this was a unifying moment are straight people. When I think about the experience the plebiscite put my friends through, I am very angry. A lot of people who are in a better position than me can talk about their personal experience of this. But I want to share with you one gut-wrenching moment that I have experienced. A lot of young people congregated around my office to go and talk to families about how they were going to vote on this incredibly important issue. A lot of those people identified as being gay. It was gut-wrenching to go out with those young people and watch them have to knock on doors and have the people at home tell them they would be voting no in the plebiscite and then to see their faces when they came back to me. The Prime Minister needs to understand there is a generation of young people who will never forgive him for making them go through that.

I want to focus, though, on the really big, important aspect of this, and that is that Australians said yes. Some people I spoke with connected very strongly with the idea of this being about the more legalistic arguments about fundamental human rights. But a lot of the people I talked to voted yes as a simple act of generosity. A lot of people said to me, 'This doesn't affect me, but why would I stand in the path of something so important to someone else?' I found that to be a very Australian attitude—the best of the warmth, openness and tolerance of this amazing country that I get to represent in this chamber.

I spent quite a bit of time talking to people who I know voted no in the plebiscite. Every member of parliament takes a different approach to how they represent their community; for me, it's very important to engage with people who have a different point of view. I sat down with a lot of people who I knew would vote no. I had a cup of tea with them and talked to them about their issues. I really wanted to understand why because, to me, it's challenging to see why you would not want this to happen. So I sat down with people and I talked to them about it to try to understand their perspective. One of the top issues that kept coming up was Safe Schools. I heard a lot about people's concerns about the way gender is changing in society.

But when I had these conversations with people, after we'd talked for a while, something would come out towards the end of the conversation that was quite fundamental. That was that some people in this country fundamentally believe that there is something wrong with being gay. That was the honest view that was expressed to me in my office. I say that without judgement, but that was always a place where the conversation kind of reached an impasse, because I have a fundamentally different view. I don't believe there's anything wrong with being gay.

One of the arguments that I disagreed with the 'yes' campaign on was the argument that this change that we're going to make this week in this parliament is a small thing—just a few small words in a piece of legislation. I just don't agree with that. I don't think this is about a small thing; I think this is about a very big thing. This is about our nation reaching out. It's a nation making it clear that LGBTIQ people belong, and that's not a small thing. It matters a great deal. It matters a great deal in particular to young people. Deputy Speaker, I know you'll be very well aware of the statistics. We know that young people who are having questions about their sexuality are about five times as likely to attempt suicide as other young Australians. But, as with most things, statistics tell you one part of the story but it's human experience that fills in the gaps.

I have, of course—like almost everyone in this chamber, surely—gone through the experience of watching my friends come out. It's incredibly hard for them. It really is. It's hard for them to come out in what they see as a society and a country that doesn't respect them as fully equal human beings. I see them go on that journey and then I see that, even after they've come out and even when they're living a life acknowledging the true person that they are, they bear some scars from that experience that they went through. I don't think that anyone should have to go through that experience. No-one in this country who is questioning their sexuality should feel they are any less of a person, that they are less valued or that they are less respected. Today we say that as a parliament. That's why I say this is not a small change; it is a huge change, because this is our country saying, 'We love you, we respect you and we want you to have the full rights and opportunities that we get to enjoy'.

Like so much of what we do in politics, this debate has not been pretty. Politics can be a very ugly business. It's never as clean, clear and perfect as we want it to be. A lot of people hate politics, and we know that a lot of people have diminishing faith in its ability to make any changes. But I want to say something to those people. Just have a look at how our laws have changed and how our society has changed just in my lifetime. I'm 37 years old. In the year I was born in Victoria, gay sex was a crime. I was 17 by the time Tasmania decriminalised being gay. When I joined the Labor Party, I was 16 years old. Marriage equality was never going to happen. It was not even part of the political discussion in any mainstream way, because it was unthinkable. Here I stand before the parliament less than two decades later, and we're about to give LGBTIQ Australians equal rights before the law. Soon a gay wedding is going to be completely unremarkable. Society can change. It does change. This has given me and so many other Australians hope. Our political system isn't pretty, but what matters most is that it can be used to change our society for the better, and I am so deeply privileged to be a part of that change today.

An incident having occurred in the gallery—

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