Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was scheduled to speak on the Marriage Amendment (Marriage Equality) Bill 2015 last night before yesterday's impromptu six-hour meeting of the Liberal Party and the National Party on this question of marriage equality but that coalition party room meeting caused proceedings in the Federation Chamber to be abandoned. My hardworking staff prepared an excellent speech full of evidence and logical argument in favour of marriage equality but this morning I read the comments made by Senator Abetz in the coalition party room last night—comments that gay men did not really want to get married and that somehow Dolce and Gabbana were evidence of this—and I thought forget it. Reading Senator Abetz's comments made me wonder whether he had ever met a gay man. So I am tossing the script and I am talking about a gay man that I knew—my Uncle Derek, a man who my Uncle Ian was never able to call his husband.

I knew Derek through a child's eyes. He was the uncle who did the Christmas planning and made elaborate Christmas wreaths, decorations and wrapping paper. He was the life of the party, the kind of person that people just wanted to be around. He was particularly good with kids. He would have been a great dad—as his partner Ian has since been to my kids. Looking back, I can never even remember wondering why Derek and Ian were both men. It just seemed normal to me as a kid. Unfortunately, it did not seem normal to the adults in my family, at least at first. My grandfather in particular, a man I acknowledged in my first speech as being one of the biggest influences in my life, struggled greatly with this. He was a conservative man, a pillar of the Queensland country town that I grew up in. He was active in his church and a committee man for decades. He was a man who told me that Jo Bjelke-Petersen was the best thing that ever happened to Queensland. Other members of my family counselled my uncle not to come out to my grandfather. Remember, this is the Queensland of the 1980s—a different place to Australia today. But he did come out, and it was not a smooth process. It was not instant acceptance. People did not change their firmly held views overnight. But our family took the same journey that so many other Australians have in recent times—a path to acceptance and then love. Slowly, Derek became part of our family. It was a good thing, too, because the family had some very difficult times. It is a horrific thing to watch someone die from AIDS, and it was particularly horrific in the Queensland of the 1980s and 1990s. If you had AIDS then, you had to deal with not only the horrors of the illness but also the indignities and horrors of the lack of recognition from the society around you. You had to deal with being beaten by hateful thugs in the street while your body was destroying itself from the inside.

My grandfather was not an emotionally expressive man. Like many men in 1950s country Queensland, he showed his love through deeds, not words. So as Derek's body wasted away he showed his love by turning up to their home uninvited to do DIY jobs on things in the house that did not need to be fixed. It was a journey that so many Australians have taken—a journey from ignorance and hate to understanding and love.

Derek planned his own funeral and I hated it, because it was a party—a celebration of his life. I hated it because I did not think that people should have been happy at that occasion. But it was a party that he planned with a political message. Red ribbons were ubiquitous at the event, and I know that, in light of the last 24 hours, he would have wanted me to deliver a political message in the chamber here today. He would have wanted me to say to Senator Abetz: 'Do not claim to understand what gay Australians want. Do not tell them what they do and don't want. Do not use the law to deny them the equal right to choose the same recognition for their relationships as heterosexual couples.' People like Senator Abetz and the Prime Minister are rightly viewed as anachronistic jokes on this issue by the majority of Australians. The absurd references to Dolce and Gabbana in yesterday's coalition party room will reinforce this. Believe it or not, not all gay men are Italian fashion designers. But we should not lose sight of the fact that, while laughable, we are dealing with serious issues of human dignity and legal discrimination in this debate. We should not lose sight of the fact that the LGBTI rights movement in Australia is a serious cause with serious consequences for LGBTI Australians. It is a cause that has experienced some very difficult times in Australia in the past decades and a cause that all in this place should treat very seriously in our representations.